I. Introduction
One wag has dubbed the
problem "Terra and the Pirates."
The
pirates, ostensibly, are marauders from another solar system; their
victims include a growing number of troubled human beings who insist
that they've been shanghaied by these otherworldly visitors. An
outlandish scenario - yet through the works of such authors as Budd
Hopkins1 and Whitley
Strieber,2 the "alien abduction" syndrome has seized
the public imagination. Indeed, tales of UFO contact threaten to lapse
into fashionability, even though, as I have elsewhere noted,3
they may still inflict a formidable social price upon the claimant.
Some time ago, I began to
research these claims, concentrating my studies on the social and
political environment surrounding these events. As I studied, the
project grew and its scope widened. Indeed, I began to feel as though
I'd gone digging through familiar terrain only to unearth Gomorrah.
These excavations may have
disgorged a solution.
The Problem
Among ufologists, the term
"abduction" has come to refer to an infinitely confounding experience,
or matrix of experiences, shared by a dizzying number of individuals,
who claim that travellers from the stars have scooped them out of their
beds, or snatched them from their cars, and subjected them to
interrogations, quasi-medical examinations, and "instruction" periods.
Usually, these sessions are said to occur within alien spacecraft;
frequently, the stories include terrifying details reminiscent of the
tortures inflicted in Germany's death camps. The abductees often (though
not always) lose all memory of these events; they find themselves back
in their cars or beds, unable to account for hours of "missing time."
Hypnosis, or some other trigger, can bring back these haunted hours in
an explosion of recollection - and as the smoke clears, an abductee will
often spot a trail of similar experiences, stretching all the way back
to childhood.
Perhaps the oddest fact of
these odd tales: Many abductees, for all their vividly-recollected
agonies, claim to love their alien tormentors. That's the word I've
heard repeatedly: love.
Within the community of
"scientific ufologists" - those lonely, all too little-heard advocates
of reasonable and open-minded debate on matters saucerological - these
claims have elicited cautious interest and a commendable restraint from
conclusion-hopping. Outside the higher realms of scientific ufology, the
situation is, alas, quite different. In the popular press, in both the
"straight" and sensationalist media, within that journalistic realm
where issues are defined and public opinion solidified (despite a
frequently superficial approach to matters of evidence and
investigation) abduction scenarios have elicited two basic reactions:
that of the Believer and the Skeptic.
The Believers - and here
we should note that "Believers" and "abductees" are two groups whose
memberships overlap but are in no way congruent - accept such stories at
face value. They accept, despite the seeming absurdity of these tales,
the internal contradictions, the askew logic of narrative construction,
the severe discontinuity of emotional response to the actions described.
The Believers believe, despite reports that their beloved "space
brothers" use vile and inhuman tactics of medical examination -
senseless procedures most of us (and certainly the vanguard of an
advanced race) would be ashamed to inflict on an animal. The Believers
believe, despite the difficulty of reconciling these unsettling tales
with their own deliriums of benevolent off-worlders.
Occasionally, the rough
notes of a rationalization are offered: "The aliens don't know what they
are doing," we hear; or "Some aliens are bad." Yet the Believers
confound their own reasoning when they insist on ascribing the wisdom of
the ages and the beneficence of the angels to their beloved visitors.
The aliens allegedly know enough about our society to go about their
business undetected by the local authorities and the general public;
they communicate with the abductees in human tongue; they concern
themselves with details of the percipients' innermost lives - yet they
remain so ignorant of our culture as to be unaware of the basic moral
precepts concerning the dignity of the individual and the right to
self-determination. Such dichotomies don't bother the Believers; they
are the faithful, and faith is assumed to have its mysteries.
Sancta Simplicitas
Conversely, the Skeptics
dismiss these stories out of hand. They dismiss, despite the intriguing
confirmatory details: the multiple witness events, the physical traces
left by the ufonauts, the scars and implants left on the abductees. The
skeptics scoff, though the abductees tell stories similar in detail -
even certain tiny details, not known to the general public.
Philip Klass is a debunker
who, through his appearances on such television programs as NOVA and
NIGHTLINE, has been in a position to affect much of the public debate on
UFOs. In his interesting but poorly-documented work on abductions,4
Klass claims that "abduction" is a psychological disease, spread by
those who write about it. This argument exactly resembles the
professional press-basher's frequent assertion that terrorism
metastasizes through media exposure. Yet for all the millions of words
expectorated by newsfolk on the subject of terrorism, terrorist actions
remain quite rare, as any statistician (though few politicians) will
admit, and verifiable linkage between crimes and their coverage remains
to be found. For that matter, there have been books - bestsellers, even
- on unicorns and gnomes. People who claim to see those creatures are
few. Abductees are plentiful.
Both Believer and Skeptic,
in my opinion, miss the real story. Both make the same mistake: They
connect the abduction phenomenon to the forty-year history of UFO
sightings, and they apply their prejudices about the latter to the
controversy about the former.
At first sight, the link
seems natural. Shouldn't our thoughts about UFOs color our thoughts
about UFO abductions?
No.
They may well be separate
issues. Or, rather, they are connected only in this: The myth of the UFO
has provided an effective cover story for an entirely different sort of
mystery. Remove yourself from the Believer/Skeptic dialectic, and you
will see the third alternative.
As we examine this
alternative, we will, of necessity, stray far from the saucers. We must
turn our face from the paranormal and concentrate on the occult - if, by
"occult," we mean secret.
I posit that the abductees
have been abducted. Yet they are also spewing fantasy - or, more
precisely, they have been given a set of lies to repeat and believe. If
my hypothesis proves true, then we must accept the following: The
kidnapping is real. The fear is real. The pain is real. The instruction
is real. But the little grey men from Zeti Reticuli are not real;
they are constructs, Halloween masks meant to disguise the real faces of
the controllers. The abductors may not be visitors from Beyond; rather,
they may be a symptom of the carcinoma which blackens our body politic.
The fault lies not in our
stars, but in ourselves.
The Hypothesis
Substantial evidence
exists linking members of this country's intelligence community
(including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Advanvced
Research Projects Agency, and the Office of Naval Intelligence) with the
esoteric technology of mind control. For decades,
"spy-chiatrists" working behind the scenes - on college campuses, in
CIA-sponsored institutes, and (most heinously) in prisons - have
experimented with the erasure of memory, hypnotic resistance to torture,
truth serums, post-hypnotic suggestion, rapid induction of hypnosis,
electronic stimulation of the brain, non-ionizing radiation, microwave
induction of intracerebral "voices," and a host of even more disturbing
technologies. Some of the projects exploring these areas were
ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, PANDORA, MKDELTA,
MKSEARCH and the infamous MKULTRA.
I have read nearly every
available book on these projects, as well as the relevant congressional
testimony5. I have also spent much time in university
libraries researching relevant articles, contacting other researchers
(who have graciously allowed me access to their files), and conducting
interviews. Moreover, I traveled to Washington, DC to review the files
John Marks compiled when he wrote THE SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN
CANDIDATE."6 These files include some 20,000 pages of
CIA and Defense Department documents, interviews, scientific articles,
letters, etc. The views presented here are the result of extensive and
ongoing research.
As a result of this
research, I have come to the following conclusions:
-
Although misleading
(and occasionally perjured) testimony before Congress indicated that
the CIA's "brainwashing" efforts met with little success,7
striking advances were, in fact, made in this field. As CIA veteran
Miles Copeland once admitted to a reporter, "The congressional
subcommittee which went into this sort of thing got only the barest
glimpse." 8
-
Clandestine research
into thought manipulation has NOT stopped, despite CIA protestations
that it no longer sponsors such studies. Victor Marchetti, 14-year
veteran of the CIA and author of the renown expose, THE CIA AND THE
CULT OF INTELLIGENCE, confirmed in a 1977 interview that the mind
control research continues, and that CIA claims to the contrary are
a "cover story." 9
-
The Central
Intelligence Agency was not the only government agency involved in
this research.10 Indeed, many branches of our
government took part in these studies - including NASA, the Atomic
Energy Commission, as well as all branches of the Defense
Department.
To these conclusions I
would append the following - not as firmly established historical
fact, but as a working hypothesis and grounds for investigation:
-
The "UFO abduction"
phenomenon might be a continuation of clandestine mind
control operations.
I recognize the
difficulties this thesis might present to those readers emotionally
wedded to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, or to those whose political
WELTANSHAUUNG disallows any such suspicions. Still, the openminded
student of abductions should consider the possibilities. Certainly, we
are not being narrow-minded if we ask researchers to exhaust ALL
terrestrial explanations before looking heavenward.
Granted, this particular
explanation may, at first, seem as bizarre as the phenomenon itself. But
I invite the skeptical reader to examine the work of George Estabrooks,
a seminal theorist on the use of hypnosis in warfare, and a veteran of
Project MKULTRA. Estabrooks once amused himself during a party by
covertly hypnotizing two friends, who were led to believe that the Prime
Minister of England had just arrived; Estabrooks' victims spent an hour
conversing with, and even serving drinks to, the esteemed visitor.11
For ufologists, this incident raises an inescapable question: If the
Mesmeric arts can successfully evoke a non-existent Prime Minister, why
can't a representative from the Pleiades be similarly induced?
But there is much more to
the present day technology of mind control than mere hypnosis - and many
good reasons to suspect that UFO abduction accounts are an artifact of
continuing brainwashing/behavior modification experiments. Moreover, I
intend to demonstrate that, by using UFO mythology as a cover story, the
experimenters may have solved the major problem with the work conducted
in the 1950s - "the disposal problem," i.e., the question of "What do we
do with the victims?"
If, in these pages, I seem
to stray from the subject of the saucers, I plead for patience. Before I
attempt to link UFO abductions with mind control experiments, I must
first show that this technology exists. Much of the forthcoming
is an introduction to the topic of mind control - what it is, and how it
works.
II. The Technology
A Brief Overview
In the early days of World
War II, George Estabrooks, of Colgate University, wrote to the
Department of War, describing in breathless terms the possible uses of
hypnosis in warfare.12 The Army was intrigued;
Estabrooks had a job. The true history of Estabrooks' wartime
collaboration with the CID, FBI.13 and other agencies
may never be told: After the war, he burned his diary pages covering the
years 1940-45, and thereafter avoided discussing his continuing
government work with anyone, even close members of the family.14
Occasionally, he strongly intimated that his work involved the creation
of hypno-programmed couriers and hypnotically-induced split
personalities, but whether he succeeded in these areas remains a
controversial point. Nevertheless, the eccentric and flamboyant
Estabrooks remains a pivotal figure in the early history of clandestine
behavioral research.
Which is not to say that
he worked alone. World War II was the first conflict in which the human
brain became a field of battle, where invading forces were led by the
most notable names in psychology and pharmacology. On both sides, the
war spurred furious efforts to create a "truth drug" for use in
interrogating prisoners. General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, director
of the OSS, tasked his crack team - including Dr. Winifred Overhulser,
Dr. Edward Strecker, Harry J. Anslinger and George White - to modify
human perception and behavior through chemical means; their "medicine
cabinet" included scopolamine, peyote, barbiturates, mescaline, and
marijuana. (This research had its amusing side: Donovan's "psychic
warriors" conducted many extensive and expensive trials before deciding
that the best method of administering tetrahydrocannibinol, the active
ingredient in marijuana, was via the cigarette. Any jazz musician could
have told them as much.15)
Simultaneously, the
notorious Nazi doctors at Dachau experimented with mescaline as a means
of eliminating the victim's will to resist. Jews, slavs, gypsies, and
other "Untermenschen" in the camp were surreptitiously slipped the drug;
later, mescaline was combined with hypnosis.16 The
results of these tests were made available to the United States after
the War.
In 1947, the Navy
conducted the first known post-war mind control program, Project
CHAPTER, which continued the drug experiments. Decades later,
journalists and investigators still haven't uncovered much information
about this project - or, indeed, about any of the military's other
excursions into this field. We know that the Army eventually founded
operations THIRD CHANCE and DERBY HAT; other project names
remain mysterious, though the existence of these programs is
unquestionable.
The newly-formed CIA
plunged into this cesspool in 1950, with Project BLUEBIRD,
rechristened ARTICHOKE in 1951. To establish a "cover story" for
this research, the CIA funded a propaganda effort designed to convince
the world that the Communist Bloc had devised insidious new methods of
re-shaping the human will; the CIA's own efforts could therefore, if
exposed, be explained as an attempt to "catch up" with Soviet and
Chinese work. The primary promoter of this "line" was one Edward Hunter,
a CIA contract employee operating undercover as a journalist, and,
later, a prominent member of the John Birch society. (Hunter was an OSS
veteran of the China theatre - the same spawning grounds which produced
Richard Helms, Howard Hunt, Mitch WerBell, Fred Chrisman, Paul Helliwell
and a host of other noteworthies who came to dominate that strange land
where the worlds of intelligence and right-wing extremism meet.17)
Hunter offered
"brainwashing" as the explanation for the numerous confessions signed by
American prisoners of war during the Korean War and (generally)
UN-recanted upon the prisoners' repatriation. These confessions alleged
that the United States used germ warfare in the Korean conflict, a claim
which the American public of the time found impossible to accept. Many
years later, however, investigative reporters discovered that Japan's
germ warfare specialists (who had wreaked incalculable terror on the
conquered Chinese during WWII) had been mustered into the American
national security apparat - and that the knowledge gleaned from Japan's
horrifying germ warfare experiments probably WAS used in Korea, just as
the "brainwashed" soldiers had indicated.18 Thus, we
now know that the entire brainwashing scare of the 1950s constituted a
CIA hoax perpetrated upon the American public: CIA deputy director
Richard Helms admitted as much when, in 1963, he told the Warren
Commission that Soviet mind control research consistently lagged years
behind American efforts.19
When the CIA's mind
control program was transferred from the Office of Security to the
Technical Services Staff (TSS) in 1953, the name changed again - to
MKULTRA.20 Many consider this wide-ranging
"octopus" project - whose tentacles twined through the corridors of
numerous universities and around the necks of an army of scientists -
the most ominous operation in CIA's catalogue of atrocity. Through
MKULTRA, the Agency created an umbrella program of a positively
Joycean scope, designed to ferret out all possible means of invading
what George Orwell once called "the space between our ears" (Later
still, in 1962, mind control research was transferred to the Office of
Research and Development; project cryptonyms remain unrevealed.21)
What was studied?
Everything - including hypnosis, conditioning, sensory deprivation,
drugs, religious cults, microwaves, psychosurgery, brain implants, and
even ESP. When MKULTRA "leaked" to the public during the great
CIA investigations of the 1970s, public attention focused most heavily
on drug experimentation and the work with ESP.22
Mystery still shrouds another area of study, the area which seems to
have most interested ORD: psychoelectronics. This research may prove key
to our understanding of the UFO abduction phenomenon.
Implants
Perhaps the most
interesting pieces of evidence surrounding the abduction phenomenon are
the intracerebral implants allegedly visible in the X-rays and MRI scans
of many abductees.23 Indeed, abductees often describe
operations in which needles are inserted into the brain; more frequently
still, they report implantation of foreign objects through the sinus
cavities. Many abduction specialists assume that these intracranial
incursions must be the handiwork of scientists from the stars.
Unfortunately, these researchers have failed to familiarize themselves
with certain little-heralded advances in terrestrial technology.
The abductees' implants
strongly suggest a technological lineage which can be traced to a device
known as a "stimoceiver," invented in the late '50s-early '60s by a
neuroscientist named Jose Delgado. The stimoceiver is a miniature depth
electrode which can receive and transmit electronic signals over FM
radio waves. By stimulating a correctly-positioned stimoceiver, an
outside operator can wield a surprising degree of control over the
subject's responses.
The most famous example of
the stimoceiver in action occurred in a Madrid bull ring. Delgado
"wired" the bull before stepping into the ring, entirely unprotected.
Furious for gore, the bull charged toward the doctor - then stopped,
just before reaching him. The technician-turned-toreador had halted the
animal by simply pushing a button on a black box, held in the hand.24
Delgado's PHYSICAL CONTROL
OF THE MIND: TOWARD A PSYCHOCIVILISED SOCIETY25
remains the sole, full-length, popularly-written work on intracerebral
implants and electronic stimulation of the brain (ESB). (The book's
ominous title and unconvincing philosophical rationales for mass mind
control prompted an unfavorable public reaction - which may have
deterred other researchers from publishing on this theme for a general
audience.) While subsequent work has long since superceded the
techniques described in this book, Delgado's achievements were seminal.
His animal and human experiments clearly demonstrate that the
experimenter can electronically induce emotions and behavior: Under
certain conditions, the extremes of temperament - rage, lust, fatigue,
etc. - can be elicited by an outside operator as easily as an organist
might call forth a C-major chord.
Delgado writes: "Radio
stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the
four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant
sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super
relaxation, colored visions, and other responses."26
The evocative phrase "colored vision" clearly indicates remotely-induced
hallucination; we will detail later how these hallucinations may be
"controlled" by an outside operator.
Speaking in 1966 - and
reflecting research undertaken years previous - Delgado asserted that
his experiments "support the distasteful conclusion that motion,
emotion, and behavior can be directed by electrical forces and that
humans can be controlled like robots by push buttons."27
He even prophesied a day when brain control could be turned over to
non-human operators, by establishing two-way radio communication between
the implanted brain and a computer.28
Of one experimental
subject, Delgado notes that "the patient expressed the successive
sensations of fainting, fright and floating around. These 'floating'
feelings were repeatedly evoked on different days by stimulation of the
same point..."29 Ufologists may recognize the
similarity of this sequence of events to abductee reports of the opening
minutes of their experiences.30 Under subsequent
hypnosis, the abductee could be instructed to misremember the cause of
this floating sensation.
In a fascinating series of
experiments, Delgado attached the stimoceiver to the tympanic membrane,
thereby transforming the ear into a sort of microphone. An assistant
would whisper "How are you?" into the ear of a suitably "fixed" cat, and
Delgado could hear the words over a loudspeaker in the next room. The
application of this technology to the spy trade should be readily
apparent. According to Victor Marchetti, The Agency once attempted a
highly-sophisticated extension of this basic idea, in which radio
implants were attached to a cat's cochlea, to facilitate the pinpointing
of specific conversations, freed from extraneous surrounding noises.31
Such "advances" exacerbate the already-imposing level of
Twentieth-Century paranoia: Not only can our phones be tapped and mail
checked, but even tabby may be spying on us!
Yet the ramifications of
this technology may go even deeper than Marchetti indicates. I presume
that if a suitably-wired subject's inner ear can be made into a
microphone, it can also be made into a loudspeaker - one possible
explanation for the "voices" heard by abductees.32
Indeed, I have personally viewed a strange, opalescent implant within
the ear canal of an abductee. I see no reason to ascribe this device to
alien intrusion - more than likely, the "intruders" in this case were
the technological inheritors of the Delgado legacy. Indeed, not many
years after Delgado's experiments with the cat, Ralph Schwitzgebel
devised a "bug-in-the-ear" via which the therapist - odd term, under the
circumstances - can communicate with his subject.33
Other researchers have
made notable contributions to this field.
Robert G. Heath, of Tulane
University, who has implanted as many as 125 electrodes in his subjects,
achieved his greatest notoriety by attempting to "cure" homosexuality
through ESB. In his experiments, he discovered that he could control his
patients' memory, (a feat which, applied in the ufological context, may
account for the phenomenon of "missing time"); he could also induce
sexual arousal, fear, pleasure, and hallucinations.34
Heath and another
researcher, James Olds,35 have independently
illustrated that areas of the brain in and near the hypothalamus have,
when electronically stimulated, what has been described as "rewarding"
and "aversive" effects. Both animals and men, when given the means to
induce their own ESB of the brain's pleasure centers, will stimulate
themselves at a tremendous rate, ignoring such basic drives as hunger
and thirst.36 (Using fixed electrodes of his own
invention, John C. Lilly had accomplished similar effects in the early
1950s.37) Anyone who has studied the abduction
phenomenon will find himself on familiar territory here, for the
abductee accounts are replete with stories of bewildering and
inappropriate sexual response countered by extremely painful stimuli -
operant conditioning, at its most extreme, and most insidious, for here
we see a form of conditioning in which the manipulator renders himself
invisible. Indeed, B.F. Skinner-esque aversive therapy, remotely
appiled, was Heath's prescription for "healing" homosexuality.38
Ralph Schwitzgebel and his
brother Robert have produced a panoply of devices for tracking
individuals over long ranges; they may be considered the creators of the
"electronic house arrest" devices recently approved by the courts.39
Schwitzgebel devices could be used for tracking all the physical and
neurological signs of a "patient" within a quarter of a mile,40
thereby lifting the distance limitations which restricted Delgado.
In Ralph Schwitzgebel's
initial work, application of this technology to ESB seems to have been
limited to cumbersome brain implants with protruding wires. But the
technology was soon miniaturized, and a scheme was proposed whereby
radio receivers would be mounted on utility poles throughout a given
city, thereby providing 24-hour-a-day monitoring capability[41]. Like
Heath, Schwitzgebel was much exercised about homosexuality and the use
of intracranial devices to combat sexual deviation. But he has also
spoken ominously about applying his devices to "socially troublesome
persons"... which, of course, could mean anyone.42
Bryan Robinson, of the
Yerkes primate laboratory has conducted fascinating simian research on
the use of remote ESB in a social context. He could cause mothers to
ignore their offspring, despite the babies' cries. He could turn
submission into dominance, and vice-versa.43
Perhaps the most
disturbing wanderer into this mind-field is Joseph A. Meyer, of the
National Security Agency, the most formidable and secretive component of
America's national security complex. Meyer has proposed implanting
roughly half of all Americans arrested - not necessarily convicted - of
any crime; the numbers of "subscribers" (his euphemism) would run into
the tens of millions. "Subscribers" could be monitored continually by
computer wherever they went. Meyer, who has carefully worked out the
economics of his mass-implantation system, asserts that taxpayer
liability should be reduced by forcing subscribers to "rent" the implant
from the State. Implants are cheaper and more efficient than police,
Meyer suggests, since the call to crime is relentless for the poor
"urban dweller" - who, this spook-scientist admits in a surprisingly
candid aside, is fundamentally unnecessary to a post-industrial economy.
"Urban dweller" may be another of Meyer's euphemisms: He uses New York's
Harlem as his model community in working out the details of his
mind-management system.44
Abductee Implants
If we are to take
seriously abductee accounts of brain implants, we must consider the
possibility that the implanters, properly perceived, DON'T look much
like the "greys" pictured on Strieber's dustjackets. Instead, the
visitors may resemble Dr. Meyer and his brethren. We would thus have an
explanation for both the reports of abductee brain implants and, as we
shall see, the "scoop marks" and other scars visible on other parts of
the abductees' bodies. We would also have an explanation for the reports
of individuals suffering personality change after contact with the UFO
phenomenon.
Skeptics might counter
that the time factor of UFO abductions disallows this possibility. If
estimates of "missing time" are correct, the abductions rarely take
longer than one-to-three hours. Wouldn't a brain surgeon, operating
under less-than-ideal conditions (perhaps in a mobile unit) need more
time?
No - not if we
accept the claims of a Florida doctor named Daniel Man. He recently
proposed a draconian solution to the overblown "missing children
problem," by suggesting a program wherein America's youngsters would be
implanted with tiny transmitters in order to track the children
continuously. Man brags that the operation can be done right in the
office - and would take less than 20 minutes.45
Conceivably, it might take
a tad longer in the field.
A Question of Timing
The history of brain
implantation, as gleaned from the open literature, is certainly
disquieting. Yet this history has almost certainly been censored, and
the dates manipulated in a nigh-Orwellian fashion. When dealing with
research funded by the engines of national security, one can never know
the true origin date of any individual scientific advance. However, if
we listen carefully to the scientists who have pioneered this research,
we may hear whispers, faint but unmistakable, hinting that
remotely-applied ESB originated earlier than published studies would
indicate.
In his autobiography THE
SCIENTIST John C. Lilly (who would later achieve a cultish reknown for
his work with dolphins, drugs and sensory deprivation) records a
conversation he had with the director of the National Institute of
Mental Health - in 1953. The director asked Lilly to brief the CIA, FBI,
NSA and the various military intelligence services on his work using
electrodes to stimulate directly the pleasure and pain centers of the
brain. Lilly refused, noting, in his reply:
Dr. Antoine Remond,
using our techniques in Paris, has demonstrated that this method of
stimulation of the brain can be applied to the human without the
help of the neurosurgeon; he is doing it in his office in Paris
without neurosurgical supervision. This means that anybody with the
proper apparatus can carry this out on a person covertly, with no
external signs that electrodes have been used on that person. I feel
that if this technique got into the hands of a secret agency, they
would have total control over a human being and be able to change
his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving little evidence of what they
had done.46
Lilly's assertion of the
moral high ground here is interesting. Despite his avowed phobia against
secrecy, a careful reading of THE SCIENTIST reveals that he continued to
do work useful to this country's national security apparatus. His
sensory deprivation experiments expanded upon the work of ARTICHOKE's
Maitland Baldwin, and even his dolphin research has - perhaps
inadvertently proved useful in naval warfare.47 One
should note that Lilly's work on monkeys carried a "secret"
classification, and that NIMH was a common CIA funding conduit.48
But the most important
aspect of Lilly's statement is its date. 1953? How far back does
radio-controlled ESB go? Alas, I have not yet seen Remond's work - if it
is available in the open literature. In the documents made available to
Marks, the earliest reference to remotely-applied ESB is a 1959
financial document pertaining to MKULTRA subproject 94. The
general subproject descriptions sent to the CIA's financial department
rarely contain much information, and rarely change from year to year,
leaving us little idea as to when this subproject began.
Unfortunately, even the
Freedom of Information Act couldn't pry loose much information on
electronic mind control techniques, though we know a great deal of study
was done in these areas. We have, for example, only four pages on
subproject 94 - by comparison, a veritable flood of documents were
released on the use of drugs in mind control. (Whenever an author tells
us that MKULTRA met with little success, the reference is to drug
testing.) On this point, I must criticize John Marks: His book never
mentions that roughly 20-25 percent of the subprojects are "dark" -
i.e., little or no information was ever made available, despite lawyers
and FOIA requests. Marks seems to feel that the only information worth
having is the information he received. We know, however, that research
into psychoelectronics was extensive indeed, statements of project goals
dating from ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD days clearly identify
this area as a high priority. Marks' anonymous informant, jocularly
named "Deep Trance," even told a previous interviewer that, beginning in
1963, CIA and the military's mind control efforts strongly emphasized
electronics.49 I therefore assume - not rashly, I hope
- that the "dark" MKULTRA subprojects concerned matters such as
brain implants, microwaves, ESB, and related technologies.
I make an issue of the
timing and secrecy involved in this research to underscore three points:
-
We can never know
with certainty the true origin dates of the various brainwashing
methods - often, we discover that techniques which seem impossibly
futuristic actually originated in the 19th century. (Pioneering ESB
research was conducted in 1898, by J.R. Ewald, professor of
physiology at Straussbourg.50)
-
The open literature
almost certainly gives a bowdlerized view of the actual research.
-
Lavishly-funded
clandestine researchers - unrestrained by peer review or the need
for strict controls - can achieve far more rapid progress than
scientists "on the outside."
Potential critics should
keep these points in mind should they attempt to invalidate the "mind
control" thesis of UFO abductions by citing an abduction account which
antedates Delgado.
The Quandary
We have amply
demonstrated, then, that as far back as the 1960s - and possibly earlier
still - scientists have had the capability to create implants similar to
those now purportedly visible in abductee MRI scans. Indeed, we have no
notion just how advanced this technology has become, since the popular
press stopped reporting on brain implantation in the 1970s. The research
has no doubt continued, albeit in a less public fashion. In fact,
scientists such as Delgado have cast their eye far beyond the implants;
ESB effects can now be elicited with microwaves and other forms of
electromagnetic radiation, used with and without electrodes.
So why - if we take UFO
abduction accounts at face value - are the "advanced aliens" using an
old technology, Earth technology, a technology which may soon be
rendered obsolescent, if it hasn't been so rendered already? I am
reminded of the charming anachronisms in the old Flash Gordon serials,
where swords and spaceships clashed continually.
Do they also watch
black-and-white television on Zeta Reticuli?
Remote Hypnosis
Hypnosis provides the
(highly controversial) key which opens the door to many abduction
accounts.51 And obviously, if my thesis is correct,
hypnosis plays a large part in the abduction itself. One thing we know
with certainty: Since the earliest days of project BLUEBIRD, the
CIA's spy-chiatrists spent enormous sums mastering Mesmer's art.
I cannot here give even a
brief summary of hypnosis, nor even of the CIA's studies in this area.
(Fortunately, FOIA requests were rather more successful in shaking loose
information on this topic than in the area of psycho-electronics.) Here,
we will concentrate on a particularly intriguing allegation - one heard
faintly, but persistently, for the past twenty years by those who would
investigate the shadow side of politics.
If this allegation proves
true, hypnosis is not necessarily a person-to-person affair.
The abductee - or the mind
control victim - need not have physical contact with a hypnotist for
hypnotic suggestion to take effect; trance could be induced, and
suggestions made, via the intracerebral transmitters described above.
The concept sounds like something out of Huxley's or Orwell's most
masochistic fantasies. Yet remote hypnosis was first reported - using
allegedly parapsychological means - in the early 1930s, by L.L. Vasilev,
Professor of Physiology in the University of Leningrad.52
Later, other scientists attempted to accomplish the same goal, using
less mystic means.
Over the years, certain
journalists have asserted that the CIA has mastered a technology call
RHIC-EDOM. RHIC means "Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control." EDOM
stands for "Electronic Dissolution of Memory." Together, these
techniques can - allegedly - remotely induce hypnotic trance, deliver
suggestions to the subject, and erase all memory for both the
instruction period and the act which the subject is asked to perform.
RHIC uses the stimoceiver,
or a microminiaturized offspring of that technology to induce a hypnotic
state. Interestingly, this technique is also reputed to involve the use
of intramuscular implants, a detail strikingly reminiscent of the
"scars" mentioned in Budd Hopkins' MISSING TIME. Apparently, these
implants are stimulated to induce a post-hypnotic suggestion.
EDOM is nothing more than
missing time itself - the erasure of memory from consciousness through
the blockage of synaptic transmission in certain areas of the brain. By
jamming the brain's synapses through a surfeit of acetocholine, neural
transmission along selected pathways can be effectively stilled.
According to the proponents of RHIC-EDOM, acetocholine production can be
affected by electromagnetic means. (Modern research in the
psycho-physiological effects of microwaves confirm this proposition.)
Does RHIC-EDOM exist? In
our discussion of Delgado's work, I have already cited a strange little
book (published in 1969) titled WERE WE CONTROLLED?, written by one
Lincoln Lawrence, a former FBI agent turned journalist. (The name is a
pseudonym; I know his real identity.) This work deals at length with
RHIC-EDOM; a careful comparison of Lawrence's work with MKULTRA
files declassified ten years later indicates a strong possibility that
the writer did indeed have "inside" sources.
Here is how Lawrence
describes RHIC in action:
It is the
ultra-sophisticated application of post-hypnotic suggestion
triggered at will [italics in original] by radio transmission.
It is a recurring hypnotic state, re-induced automatically at
intervals by the same radio control. An individual is brought under
hypnosis. This can be done either with his knowledge - or without it
by use of narco-hypnosis, which can be brought into play under many
guises. He is then programmed to perform certain actions and
maintain certain attitudes upon radio signal.53
Other authors have
mentioned this technique - specifically Walter Bowart (in his book
OPERATION MIND CONTROL) and journalist James Moore, who, in a 1975 issue
of a periodical called MODERN PEOPLE, claimed to have secured a 350-page
manual, prepared in 1963, on RHIC-EDOM.54 He received
the manual from CIA sources, although - interestingly - the technique is
said to have originated in the military.
The following quote by
Moore on RHIC should prove especially intriguing to abduction
researchers who have confronted odd "personality shifts" in abductees:
Medically, these radio
signals are directed to certain parts of the brain. When a part of
your brain receives a tiny electrical impulse from outside sources,
such as vision, hearing, etc.,an emotion is produced - anger at the
sight of a gang of boys beating an old woman, for example. The same
emotion of anger can be created by artificial radio signals sent to
your brain by a controller. You could instantly feel the same
white-hot anger without any apparent reason.55
Lawrence's sources
imparted an even more tantalizing - and frightening - revelation:
...there is already in
use a small EDOM generator-transmitter which can be concealed on the
body of a person. Contact with this person - a casual handshake or
even just a touch - transmits a tiny electronic charge plus an
ultra-sonic signal tone which for a short while will disturb the
time orientation of the person affected.56
If RHIC-EDOM exists, it
goes a long way toward providing an earthbound rationale for alien
abductions - or, at least, certain aspects of them. The phenomenon of
"missing time" is no longer mysterious. Abductee implants, both
intracerebral and otherwise, are explained. And note the reference to
"recurring hypnotic state, reinduced automatically by the same radio
command." This situation may account for "repeater" abductees who, after
their initial encounter, have regular sessions of "missing time" and
abduction - even while a bed-mate sleeps undisturbed.
At present, I cannot claim
conclusively that RHIC-EDOM is real. To my knowledge, the only official
questioning of a CIA representive concerning these techniques occurred
in 1977, during Senate hearings on CIA drug testing. Senator Richard
Schweicker had the following interchange with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, an
important MKULTRA administrator: SCHWEICKER: Some of the projects
under MKULTRA involved hypnosis, is that correct?
GOTTLIEB: Yes.
SCHWEICKER: Did any of these projects involve something called radio
hypnotic intracerebral control, which is a combination, as I understand
it, in layman's terms, of radio transmissions and hypnosis.
GOTTLIEB: My answer is "No."
SCHWEICKER: None whatsoever?
GOTTLIEB: Well, I am trying to be responsive to the terms you used. As I
remember it, there was a current interest, running interest, all the
time in what effects people's standing in the field of radio energy
have, and it could easily have been that somewhere in many projects,
someone was trying to see if you could hypnotize someone easier if he
was standing in a radio beam. That would seem like a reasonable piece of
research to do.
Schweicker went on to
mention that he had heard testimony that radar (i.e., microwaves) had
been used to wipe out memory in animals; Gottlieb responded, "I can
believe that, Senator."57
Gottlieb's blandishments
do not comfort much. For one thing, the good doctor did not always
provide thoroughly candid testimony. (During the same hearing he averred
that 99 percent on the CIA's research had been openly published; if so,
why are so many MKULTRA subprojects still "dark," and why does
the Agency still go to great lengths to protect the identities of its
scientists?58)
We should also recognize
that the CIA's operations are compartmentalized on a "need-to-know"
basis; Gottlieb may not have had access to the information requested by
Schweicker. Note that the MKULTRA rubric circumscribed Gottlieb's
statement: RHIC-EDOM might have been the focus of another program.
(There were several others: MKNAOMI, MKACTION, MKSEARCH,
etc.) Also keep in mind the revelation by "Deep Trance" that the CIA
concentrated on psychoelectronics after the termination of
MKULTRA in 1963. Most significantly: RHIC-EDOM is described by both
Lawrence and Moore as a product of MILITARY research; Gottlieb spoke
only of matters pertaining to CIA. He may thus have spoken truthfully -
at least in a strictly technical sense - while still misleading the
Congressional interlocutors.
Personally, I believe that
the RHIC-EDOM story deserves a great deal of further research. I find it
significant that when Dr. Petter Lindstrom examined X-rays of Robert
Naesland, a Swedish victim of brain-implantation, the doctor
authoritatively cited WERE WE CONTROLLED? in his letter of response.59
This is the same Dr. Lindstrom noted for his pioneering use of
ultrasonics in neurosurgery.60 Lincoln Lawrence's book
has received a strong endorsement indeed.
Bowart's OPERATION MIND
CONTROL contains a significant interview with an intelligence agent
knowledgeable in these areas. Granted, the reader has every right to
adopt a skeptical attitude toward information culled from anonymous
sources; still, one should note that this operative's statements
confirm, in pertinent part, Lawrence's thesis.61
Most importantly: The open
literature on brain-wave entrainment and the behavioral effects of
electromagnetic radiation substantiates much of the RHIC-EDOM story - as
we shall see.
That's Entrainment
Robert Anton Wilson, an
author with a devoted cult following, recently has taken to promoting a
new generation of "mind machines" designed to promote creativity,
stimulate learning, and alter consciousness - i.e., provide a drug-less
high. Interestingly, these machines can also induce "Out-of-Body
Experiences," in which the percipient mentally "travels" to another
location while his body remains at rest.62 This
rapidly-developing technology has spawned a technological equivalent to
the drug culture; indeed, the aficionados of the electronic buzz even
have their own magazine, REALITY HACKERS. I strongly suspect that we
will hear much of these machines in the future.
One such device is called
the "hemi-synch." This headphone-like invention produces slightly
different frequences in each ear; the brain calculates the difference
between these frequencies, resulting in a rhythm known as the "binaural
beat." The brain "entrains" itself to this beat - that is, the subject's
EEG slows down or speeds up to keep pace with its electronic running
partner.63
The brain has a "beat" of
its own.
This rhythm was first
discovered in 1924 by the German psychiatrist Hans Berger, who recorded
cerebral voltages as part of a telepathy study.64 He
noted two distinct frequencies: alpha (8-13 cycles per second),
associated with a relaxed, alert state, and beta (14-30 cycles per
second), produced during states of agitation and intense mental
concentration. Later, other rhythms were noted, which are particularly
important for our present purposes: theta (4-7 cycles per second), a
hypnogogic state, and delta (.5 to 3.5 cycles per second), generally
found in sleeping subjects.65
The hemi-synch - and
related mind-machines - can produce alpha or theta waves, on demand,
according to the operator's wishes. A suitably-entrained brain is much
more responsive to suggestion, and is even likely to experience vivid
hallucinations.
I have spoken to several
UFO abductees who describe a "stereophonic sound" effect - exactly
similar to that produced by the hemi-sync - preceding many
"encounters." Of course, one usually administers the hemi-synch via
headphones, but I see no reason why the effect cannot be transmitted via
the above described stimoceiver. Again, I remind the reader of the
abductee with an implant just inside her ear canal.
There's more than one way
to entrain a brain. Michael Hutchison's excellent book MEGA BRAIN
details the author's personal experiences with many such devices - the
Alpha-stim, TENS, the Synchro-energizer, Tranquilite, etc. He recounts
dazzling, Dali-esque hallucinations, as a result of using this
mind-expanding technology; moreover, he offers a seductive argument that
these devices may represent a true breakthrough in
consciousness-control, thereby fulfilling the dashed dream of the
hallucinogenic '60s.
I wish to avoid a
knee-jerk Luddite response to these fascinating wonderboxes. At the same
time, I recognize the dangers involved. What about the possibility of an
outside operator literally "changing our minds" by altering our
brainwaves without our knowledge or permission? If these machines can
induce a hypnotic state, what's to stop a skilled hypnotist from making
use of this state?
Granted, most of these
devices require some physical interaction with the subject. But a tool
called the Bio-Pacer can, according to its manufacturer, produce a
number of mood altering frequencies - WITHOUT attachment to the subject.
Indeed, the Bio-Pacer III (a high-powered version) can affect an entire
room. This device costs $275, according to the most recent price sheet
available.66 What sort of machine might $27,500 buy?
Or $275,000? What effects, what ranges might a million-dollar machine be
capable of?
The military certainly has
that sort of money.
And they're certainly
interested in this sort of technology, according to Michael Hutchison.
His interview with an informant named Joseph Light elicited some
particularly provocative revelations. According to Light:
There are important
elements in the scientific community, powerful people, who are very
much interested in these areas... but they have to keep most of
their work secret. Because as soon as they start to publish some of
these sensitive things, they have problems in their lives. You see,
they work on research grants, and if you follow the research being
done, you find that as soon as these scientists publish something
about this, their research funds are cut off. There are areas in
bioelectric research where very simple techniques and devices can
have mind-boggling effects. Conceivably, if you have a crazed person
with a bit of a technical background, he can do a lot of damage.67
This last statement is
particularly evocative. In 1984, a violent neo-Nazi group called The
Order (responsible for the murder of talk-show host Alan Berg)
established contact with two government scientists engaged in
clandestine research to project chemical imbalances and render targeted
individuals docile via certain frequencies of electronic waves. For
$100,000 the scientists were willing to deliver this information.68
Thus, at least one group
of crazed individuals almost got the goods.
Wave Your Brain Goodbye
Every Senator and
Congressional representative has a "wavie" file. So do many state
representatives. Wavies have even pled their case to private
institutions such as the Christic Institute.69
And who are the wavies?
They claim to be victims
of clandestine bombardment with non-ionizing radiation - or microwaves.
They report sudden changes in psychological states, alteration of sleep
patterns, intracerebral voices and other sounds, and physiological
effects. Most people never realize how many wavies there are in this
country. I've spoken to a number of wavies myself.
Are these troubled
individuals seeking an exterior rationale for their mental problems?
Maybe. Indeed, I'm sure that such is the case in many instances. But the
fact is that the literature on the behavioral effects of microwaves,
extra-low-frequencies (ELF) and ultra-sonics is such that we cannot
blithely dismiss all such claims.
For decades, American
science and industry tried to convince the population that microwaves
could have no adverse effects on human beings at sub-thermal levels - in
other words, the attitude was, "If it can't burn you, it can't hurt
you." This approach became increasingly difficult to defend as reports
mounted of microwave-induced physiological effects. Technicians
described "hearing" certain radar installations; users of radar
telescopes began developing cataracts at an appallingly high rate.70
The Soviets had long recognized the strange and sometimes subtle effects
of these radio frequencies, which is why their exposure standards have
always been much stricter.
Soviet microwave
bombardment of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow prompted the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency's Project PANDORA (later renamed), whose
ostensible goal was to determine whether these pulsations (reportedly 10
cycles per second, which puts them in the alpha range) could be used for
the purposes of mind control. I suspect that the "war on Tchaikovsky
Street," as I call it,71 was used, at least in part,
as a cover story for DARPA mind control research, and that the stories
floated in the news (via, for example, Jack Anderson's column) about
Soviet remote brainwashing served the same propaganda purposes as did
the bleatings of Edward Hunter during the 1950s.72
What can low-level
microwaves do to the mind?
According to a DIA report
released under the Freedom of Information Act,73
microwaves can induce metabolic changes, alter brain functions, and
disrupt behavior patterns. PANDORA discovered that pulsed
microwaves can create leaks in the blood/brain barrier, induce heart
seizures, and create behavioral disorganization.74 In
1970, a RAND Corporation scientist reported that microwaves could be
used to promote insomnia, fatigue, irritability, memory loss, and
hallucinations.75
Perhaps the most
significant work in this area has been produced by Dr. W. Ross Adey at
the University of Southern California. He determined that behavior and
emotional states can be altered without electrodes - simply by placing
the subject in an electromagnetic field. By directing a carrier
frequency to stimulate the brain and using amplitude modulation to
"shape" the wave into a mimicry of a desired EEG frequency, he was able
to impose a 4.5 cps theta rhythm on his subjects - a frequency which he
previously measured in the hippocampus during avoidance learning. Thus,
he could externally condition the mind towards an aversive reaction.76
(Adey has also done extensive work on the use of electrodes in animals.77)
According to another
prominent microwave scientist, Allen Frey, other frequencies could - in
animal studies - induce docility.78 The controversial
researcher Andrijah Puharich asserts that "a weak (1mW) 4 Hz magnetic
sine wave will modify human brain waves in 6 to 10 seconds. The
psychological effects of a 4 Hz sine magnetic wave are negative -
causing dizzyness, nausea, headache, and can lead to vomiting."
Conversely, an 8 Hz magnetic sine wave has beneficial effects.79
Though some writers question Puharich's integrity (perhaps correctly,
considering his involvement in the confused tale of Uri Geller), his
claims here seem in line with the findings of less-flamboyant
experimenters.
As investigative
journalist Anne Keeler writes:
Specific frequencies
at low intensities can predictably influence sensory processes...
pleasantness-unpleasantness, strain-relaxation, and
excitement-quiescence can be created with the fields. Negative
feelings and avoidance are strong biological phenomena and relate to
survival. Feelings are the true basis of much "decision-making" and
often occur as subthreshold impressions.... Ideas including names
[my italics] can be synchronized with the feelings that the fields
induce.80
Adey and compatriots have
compiled an entire library of frequencies and pulsation rates which can
affect the mind and nervous system. Some of these effects can be
extremely bizarre. For example, engineer Tom Jarski, in an attempt to
replicate the seminal work of F. Cazzamali, found that a particular
frequency caused a ringing sensation in the ears of his subjects - who
felt strangely compelled to BITE the experimenters!81
On the other hand, the diet-conscious may be intrigued by the finding
that rats exposed to ELF waves failed to gain weight normally.82
For our present purposes,
the most significant electromagnetic research findings concern microwave
signals modulated by hypnoidal EEG frequencies. Microwaves can act much
like the "hemi-synch" device previously described - that is, they can
entrain the brain to theta rhythms.83 I need not
emphasize the implications of remotely synchronizing the brain to
resonate at a frequency conducive to sleep, or to hypnosis.
Trance may be remotely
induced - but can it be directed? Yes. Recall the intracerebral voices
mentioned earlier in our discussion of Delgado. The same effect can be
produced by "the wave." Frey demonstrated in the early 1960s that
microwaves could produce booming, hissing, buzzing, and other
intra-cerebral static (this phenomenon is now called "the Frey effect");
in 1973, Dr. Joseph Sharp, of the Walter Reed Army Institute of
Research, expanded on Frey's work in an experiment where the subject -
in this case, Sharp himself - "heard" and understood spoken words
delivered via a pulsed-microwave analog of the speaker's sound
vibrations.84
Dr. Robert Becker comments
that "Such a device has obvious applications in covert operations
designed to drive a target crazy with 'voices' or deliver undetectable
instructions to a programmed assassin."85 In other
words, we now have, at the push of a button, the technology
either to inflict an electronic gaslight - or to create a true
Manchurian Candidate. Indeed, the former capability could
effectively disguise the latter. Who will listen to the victims, when
electronically-induced hallucinations they recount exactly parallel the
classical signals of paranoid schizophrenia and/or temporal lobe
epilepsy?
Perhaps the most ominous
revelations, however, concern the mysterious work of J.F. Schapitz, who
in 1974 filed a plan to explore the interaction of radio frequencies and
hypnosis. He proposed the following:
In this investigation
it will be shown that the spoken word of the hypnotist may be
conveyed by modulated electro-magnetic energy directly into the
subconscious parts of the human brain [my italics] - i.e.,
without employing any technical devices for receiving or transcoding
the messages and without the person exposed to such influence having
a chance to control the information input consciously.
He outlined an experiment,
innocent in its immediate effects yet chilling in its implications,
whereby subjects would be implanted with the subconscious suggestion to
leave the lab and buy a particular item; this action would be triggered
by a certain cue word or action. Schapitz felt certain that the subjects
would rationalize the behavior - in other words, the subject would seize
upon any excuse, however thin, to chalk up his actions to the working of
free will.86 His instincts on this latter point
coalesce perfectly with findings of professional hypnotists.87
Schapitz's work was funded
by the Department of Defense. Despite FOIA requests, the results have
never been publicly revealed.88
Final Thoughts on "The
Wave"
I must again offer a
caveat about possible disparities between the "official" record of
electromagnetism's psychological effects and the hidden history. Once
more, we face a question of timing. How long ago did this research
REALLY begin?
In the eary years of this
century, Nikola Tesla seems to have stumbled upon certain of the
behavioral effects of electromagnetic exposure.89
Cazamalli, mentioned earlier, conducted his studies in the 1930s. In
1934, E.L. Chaffe and R.U. Light published a paper on "A Method for the
Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System."90
From the very beginning of their work with microwaves, the Soviets
explored the more subtle physiological effects of electromagnetism - and
despite the bleatings of certain right-wing alarmists91
that an "electromagnetic gap" separates us from Soviet advances, East
European literature in this area has been closely monitored for decades
by the West. ARTICHOKE/BLUEBIRD project outlines, dating from the
early 1950s, prominently mention the need to explore all possible uses
of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Another point worth
mentioning concerns the combination of EMR and miniature brain
electrodes. The father of the stimoceiver, Dr. J.M.R. Delgado, has
recently conducted experiments in which monkeys are exposed to
electromagnetic fields, thereby eliciting a wide range of behavioral
effects - one monkey might fly into a volcanic rage while, just a few
feet away, his simian partner begins to nod off. Fascinatingly, when
monkeys with brain implants felt "the wave," the effects were greatly
intensified. Apparently, these tiny electrodes can act as amplifiers
of the electromagnetic effect.92
This last point is
important to our "alien abduction" thesis. Critics might counter that
any burst of microwave energy powerful enough to have truly remote
effects would probably also create a thermal reaction. That is, if a
clandestine operator propagated a "wave" from outside an abductee's
bedroom (say, from a low-flying helicopter, or from a truck travelling
alongside the subject's car), the power necessary to do the job might be
such that the microwave would cook the target before it got a chance to
launder his thoughts. Our abductee would end up like the victim of the
microwave "hit" in the finale of Jerzy Kozinsky's COCKPIT.
It's a fair criticism. But
Delgado's work may give us our solution. Once an abductee has been
implanted - and if we are to trust hypnotic regression accounts of
abductees at all, the first implanting session may occur in childhood -
the chip-in-the-brain would act an an intensifier of the signal. Such an
individual could have any number of "UFO" experiences while his or her
bed partner dozes comfortably.
Furthermore, recent
reports indicate that a "waver" can achieve pinpoint accuracy without
the use of Delgado-style implants. In 1985, volunteers at the Midwest
Research Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, were exposed to microwave
beams as part of an experiment sponsored by the Department of Energy and
the New York State Department of Health. As THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC93
described the experiment, "A matched control group sat in the same
room without being bombarded by non-ionizing radiation." [My
italics.] Apparently, one can focus "the wave" quite narrowly - a fact
which has wide implications for abductees.
III. Applications
So we now have some idea
of the tools available to the "spy-chiatrists." How have these tools
been used?
This question necessarily
involves some detective work. The Central Intelligence Agency, under
duress, provided some, though not enough, documentation of its efforts
to commandeer "the space between our ears." We know that these efforts
were extensive, long-term, and at least partially successful. We know
also that these experiments used human subjects. But who? When?
One paradox of this line
of inquiry is that, for many readers, the victims elicit sympathy only
insofar as they remain anonymous. Intellectually, we realize that
MKULTRA and its allied projects must have affected hundreds,
probably thousands, of individuals. Yet we react with deep suspicion
whenever one of these individuals steps forward and identifies himself,
or whenever an independent investigator argues that mind control has
directed some newsworthy person's otherwise inexplicable actions. Where,
the skeptic may rightfully ask, is the documentation supporting such
accusations? Most of the MKULTRA "paper trail" was (allegedly)
burnt at Richard Helms' order; what's left has been censored, leaving
black ink smudges wherever the names originally appeared. Claimed mind
control victims can, for the most part, only give us testimony - and how
reliable can such testimony be, especially in light of the fact that one
purpose of MKULTRA was to induce insanity? Anyone asserting that
he was victimized by the program might well be seeking an extrinsic
excuse for his own psychopathology. If you say that you are a
manufactured madman, you were probably mad to begin with: Catch 22.
When John Marks wrote THE
SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE." he received numerous letters from
people insisting that they had been drugged, "waved," or otherwise
abused by the CIA or the military. Most of these communications went
directly into his crank file. Perhaps many deserved that destination; I
know of at least one that did not.94
Marks did, however, devote
much attention to Val Orlikov, a former "patient" of perhaps the most
notorious figure in the annals of American medical crime: Dr. Ewen
Cameron, a CIA-funded scientist heading the Allan Memorial Institute at
McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Cameron, a highly-respected mental
health researcher,95 experimented with a technique he
called "psychic driving," a brainwashing program which involved
inflicting upon a subject an endless tape loop blaring selected
messages, 16-to-24 hours a day, combined with massive electroshock and
LSD. The project's "guinea pigs" were patients who had come to Allan
Memorial with relatively minor psychological complaints. Cameron's
experiments failed and his theories were discredited, which may explain
why the CIA and its apologists now feel relatively comfortable
discussing the Frankensteinian efforts at Allan Memorial, as opposed to
more successful work elsewhere.
Orlikov's testimony has
received much respectful attention from those writers who have examined
MKULTRA, and correctly so. When I studied the files at the
National Security Archives, I was particularly keen to read her original
letters to John Marks, for these pages had led to the unmasking of an
especially heinous CIA project. The letters, interestingly enough,
proved just as vague, disjointed, and bizarre as similar correspondence
which researchers routinely dismiss. Orlikov can't be blamed for the
hazy nature of her recollections; a certain amount of fog is to be
expected, given the nature of the crime perpetrated against her. The
important point is that her story, ultimately, was found to be true. All
of which leads me to wonder: Why did HER claims prompt investigation
when those of others prompt only dismissal? Perhaps the answer lies in
the fact that Orlikov's husband became a Canadian Member of Parliament.
Any victims of CIA experimentation who wish to be taken seriously ought,
perhaps, first make sure to marry well.
Of course, we can easily
forgive previous writers and readers whose researches into MKULTRA
have been biased in favor of complacency.96 But we
can't let this natural prejudice cripple our present investigation. Let
us examine, then, a few of the "horror stories" from the mind control
literature and highlight possible correlations to abductee testimony.
Palle Hardrup's "Guardian
Angel"
As mentioned previously, I
have not delved much into the subject of hypnosis in this paper -
primarily because of space and time limitations, but also because
discussions of the possibilities of hypnosis per se tend to cloud
the issue of its use in conjunction with the above-mentioned electronic
techniques. Obviously, however, hypnosis is a major weapon in the mind
controller's armament; in a forthcoming full-length work, I intend to
deal with this subject at much greater length.
Needless to say, one of
the primary objectives of MKULTRA and related projects was to
determine whether one could hypnotically induce someone to commit an
anti-social act. This possibility remains one of the most hotly debated
issues in hypnosis, for conventional wisdom asserts that no individual
can be hypnotized to commit an action which violates his interior moral
code. Martin Orne, editor of the presitigious INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS agrees with this axiom,97
and he is in a position to codify much of the established view on this
topic. Orne, however, is a veteran of MKULTRA, and furthermore
seems to have lied - at least in his original communications - to author
John Marks about his witting involvement in subproject 94.98
While I respect much of Orne's ground-breaking work, his pronouncements
do not hold, for this layman, an Olympian unassailability.
To be sure, many other
hypnosis experts, untainted by Company connections, also discount the
possibility that anti-social actions can be induced. But a number of
highly-experienced professionals - including Milton Kline, William
Kroger, George Estabrooks, John Watkins, and Herbert Spiegel - have
argued that such actions can, at least to some degree, be elicited by an
outside manipulator.
Occasionally, claims of
hypnotically-induced anti-social behavior find their way into the
courtroom; one such case, which led to the incarceration of the
hypnotist, was the Palle Hardrup affair. This incident occurred in
Denmark in 1951.99 Palle Hardrup robbed a bank,
killing a guard in the process, and later claimed that he had been
instructed to do so by the hypnotist Bjorn Nielsen. Nielsen eventually
confessed to having engineered the crime as a test of his hypnotic
abilities.
The most significant
aspect of this incident concerns the "pose" Nielsen adopted to work his
malicious designs. During the hypnosis sessions, Nielsen hypnotically
suggested that he was Hardrup's "guardian angel," represented by the
letter X. Hardrup testified that "There is another room next door where
Nielsen and I go and talk on our own. It is there that my guardian
spirit usually comes and talks to me. Nielsen says that X has a task for
me."
One of these tasks was
arranging for Hardrup's girlfriend to have sex with the hypnotist. The
other tasks, he mentioned, included robbery and murder. Nielsen
convinced his victim that "X" wanted the robbery funds to be used for
worthwhile political goals. The end, Hardrup was told, justified the
means.
Compare this scenario to
that encountered in the typical contactee case, in which alien
"guardians" convince their victims/subjects that the encounter will
eventually serve some unspecified "higher purpose." Indeed, in my
interviews with abductees who have established a "long-term"
relationship with their visitors, I have found that some of them
originally believed themselves in contact with Hardrup-like angelic
guardians. Only in recent years was the "angel" pose discarded and the
true "alien" form revealed.
Thus we have one possible
means of overcoming the proposition that hypnosis cannot induce
anti-social behavior. If a hypnotist lacks scruples, and has access to a
particularly susceptible subject, he can induce a misperceived
reality. Actions which we would abhor in an everyday context become
acceptable in specialized circumstances: A citizen who could never
commit murder on a surburban street might, if drafted into an army, kill
on the field of battle. In hypnosis, the mind becomes that battlefield.
In the words of Dr. John Watkins,
We behave on the basis
of our perceptions. If our perceptions of a situation can be altered
so as to cause us to misconstrue it, or to develop a false belief,
then our behavior in relation to it will be drastically altered. It
is precisely in the area of changing perceptions that the hypnotic
modality demonstrates its most powerful effects. Hallucinations both
under hypnosis, and posthypnotic, can easily be induced in the
suggestible subject. He can be made to ignore painful stimuli, be
apparently unable to hear loud sounds, and "see" individuals who
are not present [my italics]. Moreover, attitudes and beliefs
can be initiated in him which are quite abnormal and often contrary
to those which he previously held.100
If traditional hypnosis,
unaided, can achieve such changes in perception, one can only imagine
the possibilities inherent in the combination of hypnotic techniques
with the psychoelectronic research previously described.
Scientists such as Orne
and Milton Erickson101 have taken issue with Watkins'
assertions. But the Hardrup case would appear to bear Watkins out. If
someone can be convinced that he, like Jeanne D'Arc, acts under the
influence of a supernatural higher power, then previously unthinkable
capabilitites may be evinced and "impossible" actions carried forth.
Indeed, when we consider the extreme personality changes - and
occasionally, the heinous actions, elicited by leaders of certain cults,
and occult groups,102 we understand the desirability
of installing a hypnotic "cover story" within a supernatural matrix.
People will do for God - or the Devil, or the Space Brothers - what they
would not do otherwise.
The date of the Hardrup
affair corresponds to the institution of BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE; it
doesn't require much imagination to see how this case could have served
as a model to the scientists researching those and subsequent projects.
Screen Memory
According to declassified
documents in the Marks files, a major difficulty faced by the MKULTRA
researchers concerned the "disposal problem." What to do with the
victims of CIA-sponsored electroshock, hypnosis, and drug
experimentation? The Company resorted to distressing, but
characteristic, tactics: They disposed of their human guinea pigs by
incarcerating them in insane asylums, by performing icepick lobotomies,
and by ordering "executive actions."103
A more sophisticated
solution had to be found. One of the goals of the CIA's mind control
efforts was the erasure of memory via hypnosis (and drugs, electronics,
lobotomies, etc.); not only would this hide what occurred during the
experimental indoctrination/programming sessions, it would prove useful
in the field. "Amnesia was a big goal," confirms Victor Marchetti, who
points out its usefulness in dealing with contract agents: "After you've
done it, the agent doesn't even know what he's done... you send him in,
he does the job. When he comes out, you clean his head out."104
The big problem: Despite
hypnotically-induced amnesia, there would be memory leaks - snippets of
the repressed material would arise spontaneously, in dreams, as
flashbacks, etc. A proposed solution: Give the subject a "screen
memory," a false story; thus, even if he starts to recall the material,
he will recall it incorrectly.
Even the conservative Dr.
Orne notes that:
A S [subject] who is
able to develop good posthypnotic amnesia will also respond to
suggestions to remember events which did not actually occur. On
awakening, he will fail to recall the real events of the trance and
will instead recall the suggested events. If anything, this
phenomenon is easier to produce than total amnesia, perhaps because
it eliminates the subjective feeling of an empty space in memory.105
Not only would the screen
memories fill in the uncomfortable blanks in the subjects' recollection,
they would protect against revelation. One fear of the MKULTRA
scientists was that a hypno-programmed individual used as, say, a
courier, could be un-programmed by another hypnotist, perhaps working
for the enemy. Thus, the MKULTRA scientists decided to instill
multiple personalities - multiple cover stories, if you will - to
confuse any "unauthorized" hypnotist.106
One case using this
technique centered on an assassin named Luis Castillo, who, after his
capture in the Philippines, was extensively de-briefed and studied by
experts in the employ of the National Bureau of Investigation, that
country's equivalent to our FBI. Castillo was discovered to have had at
least four separate personalities hypnotically instilled; each
personality could be triggered by a specific cue. In one state, he
claimed to be Sgt. Manuel Angel Ramirez, of the Strategic Air Tactical
Command in South Vietnam; supposedly, "Ramirez" was the illegitimate son
of a certain pipe-smoking, highly-placed CIA official whose initials
were A.D.107 Another personality claimed to be one of
John F. Kennedy's assassins.
The main hypnotist
involved with this case labelled these hypnotic alter-egos "Zombie
states." The report on the case stated that "The Zombie phenomenon
referred to here is a somnambulistic behavior displayed by the subject
in a conditioned response to a series of words, phrases, and statements,
apparently unknown to the subject during his normal waking state."
Upon Castillo's
repatriation to the United States, the FBI claimed that he had
fabricated the story. In his book OPERATION MIND CONTROL, Walter Bowart
makes a convincing case against the FBI's claims. Certainly, many
aspects of the Castillo affair argue for his sincerity - including his
hypnotically-induced insensitivity to pain,108 his
maintenance of the story (or stories) even when severly inebriated, and
his apparently programmed suicide attempts.
If Castillo told the
truth, as I believe he did, then he manifested both hypnotically-induced
multiple personality and pseudomemory. The former remains controversial;
the latter has been repeatedly replicated in experimental situations.109
This point is vitally
important for students of the abduction phenomenon. We CANNOT assume the
accuracy of abduction descriptions given during subsequent hypnotic
regression. Moreover, we cannot even assume the accuracy of
spontaneously-arising recollections (i.e., abduction memories not
elicited through hypnotic regression). Indeed, responsible skeptics have
argued that hypnotic regression may prove inadvertently harmful, in that
it may lock in place a false remembrance. (Note, however, that other
psychiatric professionals consider hypnotic regression the best
technique, however flawed, in unlocking amnesia.110
For my part, I maintain an ambivalent and cautious attitude toward the
use of hypnosis in abductee work.)
Granted, it is all too
easy for the debunkers to cry "confabulation" to dismiss hypnotic
testimony which does not conform to our preconceptions about the
possible; I do not intend to make this same error. Whenever skeptics
offer the phenomenon of pseudomemory to rationalize abduction claims,
they cite experimental situations in which pseudomemory was
originally created by a hypnotist 111 These
experiments can not be cited as proof that an individual abductee
spontaneously conjured up a fantasy (which just happens to correspond to
the details of hundreds of similar "fantasies"). Rather, laboratory
studies of pseudomemory creation prove my point: Pseudomemory can
be induced by previous hypnosis.112
In other words, an
abductee may talk of aliens - when the reality was something else
entirely.
In correspondence with me,
a noted abduction researcher wrote of an instance in which an abductee
recounted seeing a helicopter during his experience; as the abductee
testimony progressed, the helicopter turned into a UFO. During one of
the (quite few) regression sessions I attended, I heard an exactly
similar narrative. Hopkins would argue that the helicopter was a "screen
memory" hiding the awful reality of the UFO encounter. But does Occam's
razor really cut that way? Shouldn't we also consider the possibility
that the object in question really WAS a helicopter - which the abductee
was instructed to recall as a UFO?
The Super Spy
Among the released
BLUEBIRD/ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA papers was the following handwritten
memorandum, unsigned and undated:
I have developed a
technic which is safe and secure (free from international
censorship). It has to do with the conditioning of our own people. I
can accomplish this as a one-man job.
The method is the
production of hypnosis by means of simple oral medication. Then
(with NO further medication) the hypnosis is re-enforced daily
during the following three or four days.
Each individual is
conditioned against revealing any information to an enemy, even
though subjected to hypnosis or drugging. If preferable, he may be
conditioned to give FALSE information rather than NO information.
In the margin of this
document, one of Marks' assistants wrote, "Is this Wendt?" The reference
here is to G. Richard Wendt, a professor employed by Project CHATTER
who, in 1951, led both his Naval employers and the CIA on a mind control
merry goose chase, when an experiment similar to that described above
failed to produce results.113 Even if the above
memorandum does describe an operational failure (and the tactics
described in this memo do not seem very feasible to me), we should not
rest complacent. We now know that, in at least ONE case, more
sophisticated techniques made the above scenario a reality.
I refer to the case of
Candy Jones.
Her story has filled at
least one book 114 and ought, one day, to give rise
to another. Obviously, I cannot here give all the details of this
fascinating and frightening narrative. But a precis is mandatory.
Ms. Jones (born Jessica
Wilcox) achieved star status as a model during World War II, and later
established her own modelling agency. An FBI man requested her to allow
her place of business to be used as a "mail drop" for the Bureau and
"another government agency" (presumably, the CIA); Candy, deeply
patriotic, accepted the proposition gladly. Toiling on the fringes of
the clandestine world, Candy eventually came into contact with a "Dr.
Gilbert Jensen," who worked, in turn, with a "Dr. Marshall Burger."
(Both names are pseudonyms.) Unknown to her, these doctors had been
employed as "spy-chiatrists" by the CIA. Using a job interview as a
cover, Jensen induced hypnosis, found Candy to be a particularly
responsive subject - and proceeded to use her as other scientists would
use a rhesus monkey. She became a test subject for the CIA's mind
control program.
Her job - insofar as it is
known - was to provide a clandestine courier service.115
Estabrooks had outlined the basic idea years earlier: Induce hypnosis
via a disguised technique, give the messenger information to memorize,
hypnotically "erase" the message from conscious memory, and install a
post-hypnotic suggestion that the message (now buried within the
sub-conscious) will be brought forth only upon a specific cue. If the
hypnotist can create such a courier, ultra-security can be guaranteed;
even torture won't cause the messenger to tell what he knows - because
he doesn't know that he knows it.116 According to the
highly respected Dr. Milton Kline, "Evidence really does exist that has
not been published" proving that Estabrooks' perfect secret agent could
be successfully evoked.117
Candy was one such success
story. Success, in this context, means that she could be - and was -
brutally tortured and abused while running assignments for the CIA. All
the MKULTRA toys were brought into play: hypnosis, drugs,
conditioning - and electronics. Using these devices, Jensen and Burger
managed to:
-
install a "duplicate
personality,"
-
create amnesia of
both the programming sessions and the field assignments,
-
turn Candy into a
vicious, hate-mongering bigot, the better to isolate her from the
rest of humanity (previously, her associates considered her
noteworthy for her racial tolerance; her modelling agency was one of
the first to break the color barrier), and
-
program her to commit
suicide at the end of her usefulness to the Agency.
The programming techniques
used on her were flawed. She breached security when she married famed
New York radio personality John Nebel,118 who, using
hypnotic regression, elicited the long-repressed truth. Eventually, the
"Other Candy" was bade farewell, and the programming broken.
Skeptics might find
Candy's story as incredible as the abduction accounts - after all, an
amateur had conducted her hypnotic regression, and the possibility of
confabulation always lurks. Nevertheless, I feel that the veracity of
her narrative has been established beyond reasonable doubt. In her
hypnotic regression sessions, she recalled being programmed at a
government-connected institute in northern California - which, as John
Marks' investigators later proved, was indeed heavily involved with
government-funded brainwashing research.119 Marks
himself believes Candy's story - not least, because the details of the
programming methods used on her were substantiated by documents released
AFTER her book was published.120 Interviews with
Milton Kline, Dr. Frances Jakes, John Watkins and others provided the
testimony that the programming of Candy Jones was feasible - and Deep
Trance substantiated the story.121
Recently, the case has
received important "indirect" confirmation: Investigators interested in
follow-up research have filed FOIA requests with the CIA for all papers
relating to Candy Jones. The agency admits that it has a substantial
file on her, but refuses to release any part of it. If her tale is
false, then why would the CIA be so reluctant to deliver the
information? Indeed, why would they have a file in the first place?122
The final confirmation of
Candy's tale requires a revelation - one which I make with some
trepidation, even though the individual named is dead.
"Marshall Burger" was
really Dr. William Kroger.123
Kroger, long associated
with the espionage establishment, had written the following in 1963:
...a good subject can
be hypnotized to deliver secret information. The memory of this
message could be covered by an artificially induced amnesia. In the
event that he should be captured, he naturally could not remember
that he had ever been given the message... however, since he had
been given a post-hypnotic suggestion, the message would be subject
to recall through a specific cue.124
If Candy confabulated her
story, why did she name this particualr scientist, who, writing
theoretically in 1963, predicted the subsequent events in her life?[125]
After l'affair Jones,
Kroger transferred his base of operations to UCLA - specifically, to the
Neuropsychiatric Institute run by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, an MKULTRA
veteran. There he wrote HYPNOSIS AND BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION,126
with a preface by Martin Orne (another MKULTRA veteran) and H.J.
Eysenck (still another MKULTRA veteran). The finale of this opus
contains chilling hints of the possibilites inherent in combining
hypnosis with ESB, implants, and conditioning - though Kroger is careful
to point out that "we are not concerned that man might be conditioned by
rewards and punishments through electronic brain stimulation to be
controlled like robots."127 HE may not be concerned -
but perhaps WE ought to be.
The control of Candy Jones
gives us much information useful to our "alien abduction" hypothesis.
-
Her torture sessions
- inflicted during her programming by her CIA masters, and on
missions by as-yet mysterious persons - seem strikingly like the
otherwise senselessly painful "examinations" allegedly conducted
aboard alien spacecraft.
-
Her personality
shifts roughly parallel those experienced by certain UFO abductees.
-
Despite her
brutalization, she remained "loyal" to Drs. Jensen and Burger. This
bewildering behavior reminds me of my first abductee interviews,
during which I heard ghastly descriptions of UFO torture sessions -
followed by protestations of limitless love for the alien
pain-mongers.
-
Like many abductees,
Candy had to attend regular "conditioning" sessions. Repeated
exposure to the programming is necessary to effect continuous
control.
-
To maintain their
hammerlock on her mind, Candy's handlers programmed her to remain
isolated. Specifically, they instilled a deep paranoia toward other
human beings; "outsiders" were probable enemies, out to use or abuse
her. I have seen this pattern consistently in my own work with
abductees.128 Skeptics would argue that
unreasonable abductee fears probably indicate paranoid schizophrenia
- one symptom of which can, indeed, be hallucinatory experiences.
But most abductees are easily hypnotized, while paranoid
schizophrenics are extremely difficult to "put under," according to
Dr. Edward Simpson- Kallas, a psychiatrist with wide experience in
the area of forensic hypnosis.129 If, however,
those unreasonable fears had been hypnotically induced, the
contradiction is resolved.
-
Candy was the product
of an unhappy childhood, hence her propensity toward multiple
personality.130 Many of the "repeater" abductees
I have interviewed had similarly depressing family histories.131
-
The story of Candy
Jones also has what we might call a "negative relevance" to the
abduction accounts. Because the Controllers did not establish a
hypnotic cover story, or pseudomemory, the true facts of the case
managed to percolate into her conscious mind. No matter how thorough
the posthypnotic amnesia, leaks will occur - hence the need for a
false memory, to fill the gap of recollection. The CIA learns from
its mistakes. Candy's hypno-programming broke down in early 1973 -
the year the "alien disguise" became (if my hypothesis proves
correct) standard operating procedure.132 (Milton
Kline accepted the Candy Jones story, but considered the job
amateurish and inconsistent with the best work done at that time.133
Perhaps the major fault was the lack of a pseudomemory cover story?)
Bases of Suspicion
"Underground base" rumors
are as hot as jalapenos in the UFO field right now, and several of these
stories involve abductions.
For example, a sideshow of
the famous Bentwaters UFO case involves the abduction of an airman named
Larry Warren to an underground cavity beneath the military base. There,
while in what he later described as "a bit of a drugged state," he saw
aliens and human beings - military figures - working side-by-side.134
I have spoken to another
abductee, Nancy Wright, who was allegedly taken to an underground
chamber ten miles north of Edwards AFB, California. As this was a
multiple-witness event, and Ms. Wright has not attempted to capitalize
on the story for financial gain, I tend to credit her story.135
According to abduction
researcher Miranda Parks, an elderly couple living in the vicinity was
also abducted in an exactly similar fashion.136
In 1979, Paul Bennewitz
and Leo Sprinkle researched a particularly controversial abduction
involving a young woman (name unrevealed) who was apparently taken to a
facility where aliens processed fluids and body parts from a cattle
mutilation. This investigation seems to have led to the government
harassment of Bennewitz, in which some form of mind control (or, as I
have previously referred to it, "electronic GASLIGHT") may have played a
part.137
How do we account for
these tales of alleged alien skullduggery carried out in conjunction
with the military? I, for one, cannot credit the generally
unsubstantiated tales of "cosmic conspiracy" now promulgated by
ex-intelligence agents such as John Lear and William Cooper. While I
cannot assert insincerity on the part of these men, I often wonder if
they have been used as conduits - witting or unwitting - in a
sophisticated disinformation scheme.
A simpler, though no less
chilling, explanation for the "base" abductions may be found in the
story of Dr. Louis Jolyon West, now notorious for his participation in
MKULTRA experiments with LSD.138 Inspired by
VIOLENCE AND THE BRAIN (a book by Drs. Frank Ervin and Vernon H. Mark
which ascribed inner city turmoil to a "genetic defect" within
rebellious blacks), West proposed, in 1973, a Center for the Study and
Reduction of Violence, where potentially violent individuals could be
dealt with prophylactically.
And who were these
individuals? According to West's proposal, the noteworthy factors
indicating a violent predisposition were "sex (male), age (youthful),
ethnicity (black) and urbanicity." How to deal with them? "...by
implanting tiny electrodes deep within the brain, electrical activity
can be followed in areas that cannot be measured from the surface of the
scalp... it is even possible to record bioelectrical changes in the
brains of freely-moving subjects, through the use of remote monitoring
techniques..." By monitoring the subjects' EEGs remotely, potentially
violent episodes could be identified.
For our purposes, the most
significant aspect of this proposal had to do with location. In a secret
communication to Dr. J.M. Stubblebine, director of the California State
Department of Health (fortunately, this missive was "leaked" to the
public), West disclosed that he intended to house his Center in an
abandoned Nike missile base, whose location was accessible yet
relatively remote. "The site is securely fenced," West wrote.
"Comparative studies could be carried out there, in an isolated but
convenient location, of experimental model programs, for the alteration
of undesirable behavior."139
Public outcry stopped
these plans. But was this scheme truly eliminated? Or was it merely
modified, stripped (temporarily) of its overtly racial overtones and
relocated to some less-accessible spot?
One thing is certain: A
CIA "spy-chiatrist" favored secret behavior control experimentation in a
remote military installation. Perhaps someone within the espionage
establishment's mind-modification divisions still thinks highly of the
idea. If so, the disposal problem would once again rear its ugly head,
should "visitors" to these installations ever reappear in outside
society. Again, a hypno-programmed cover story - the less believable,
the better - would prove invaluable.
The Scandinavian
Connection
Many books have been
written about abductees, yet few exist about the victims of mind
control. I cannot understand this situation; the reality of UFOs is
still controversial, yet the existence of mind control was verified in
two (heavily compromised) congressional investigations and in thousands
of FOIA documents. Nevertheless, the abductees find many a sympathetic
ear, while those few who dare to proclaim themselves the victims of
known government programs rarely find anyone to hear them out. Our
prejudices on this score are regrettable, for if we listened to the
"controllees" we would hear many details strikingly similar to those
mentioned by UFO abductees.
Two cases in point: Martti
Koski and Robert Naeslund.
Koski, a Finnish citizen,
claims to have been a victim of mind control experimentation while
visiting Canada. Shortly after his experience began, he attempted to
broadcast his situation to the world and draw attention to his plight.
Few listened. Many of his details were bizarre, and not being a native
speaker of English, he could not express himself convincingly to those
he approached for help. Yet many aspects of his story correspond closely
to known details of MKULTRA and related programs.
Naeslund, a Swedish
citizen, tells a similar story. Moreover, his claims were backed by
special evidence: X-rays revealed an implant in his brain. Naeslund
actually went to the extreme of having his implant tested by electronic
technicians employed by Hewlett-Packard. A Greek surgeon performed the
necessary trepanation to remove the device.
Many aspects of the Koski
and Naeslund stories correspond to my hypothesis. Koski, for example,
was at one point told that the doctors afflicting him were actually
"aliens from Sirius." At another point, he was led to believe that he
was under direction of "the Lord." (As I previously indicated,
manipulation of religious imagery could help induce anti-social
behavior; the subject's super-ego can be nullified if he believes that
he follows commands from on high. Such manipulation may explain the more
bizarre aspects of Betty Andreasson Luca's abduction.140)
Naeslund's implant was
originally placed through his nasal cavity. He first realized that
something terrible had happened to him after an experience of missing
time, followed by an inexplicable nosebleed.
This detail will be
instantly familiar to anyone who has studied abductions; I have
encountered it in my own conversations with abductees. For an excellent
example in the UFO literature, I refer the reader to the case of Susan
Ransted, as detailed in Kevin D. Randle's THE UFO CASEBOOK;141
the background of alleged contactee Diane Tessman is also noteworthy in
this regard.142 Intriguingly, I have located a
reference in the open literature to the use, in animal study, of
nasally-implanted electrodes for the measurement of electro-magnetic
radiation effects.143
There are other claimed
mind control victims bearing evidence of implants; note, especially, the
fascinating case of James Petit, a CIA-connected pilot and alleged
brainwashing alumnus; X-rays of his cranium have revealed abductee-style
implants - fitting, perhaps, since his body bears abductee-style scars.144
Conversely, certain abductees will, if allowed a thorough and
sympathetic hearing, deliver testimony strongly agreeing with Koski's
narrative.
Helicopters and Disks
The bizarre story of Rex
Niles and his sister (not named in news accounts) may shed interesting
light on a variety of abductee cases, particularly that of Betty and
Barney Hill.145 Niles, the high-rolling owner of a
Woodland Hills defense subcontracting firm (Rex Rep) was fingered by
authorities investigating defense industry kickbacks. He became an
extraordinarily cooperative witness in the investigation - until he was
targeted by his enemies, who allegedly used psychoelectronics as
harassment.
The following excerpt from
the LOS ANGELES TIMES article on Niles is particularly compelling:
He [Niles] produced
testimony from his sister, a Simi Valley woman who swears that
helicopters have repeatedly circled her home. An engineer measured
250 watts of microwaves in the atmosphere outside Niles' house and
found a radioactive disk underneath the dash of his car. [my
italics]
A former high school
friend, Lyn Silverman, claimed that her home computer went haywire
when Niles stepped close to it.
No aliens in this story -
yet how similar it is to tales of alien abduction! The low-flying
helicopters, of course, are frequently reported by abduction victims -
the Betty Andreasson Luca case provides the best known example.146
The haywire electronics equipment is also frequently encountered in
putative abduction cases; I have spoken (independently) to three women
who claimed to have been able to disturb or shut off televisions and
stereos simply by walking past the devices; one woman even claimed she
had switched off her TV simply by pointing at it.
But the radioactive disk
is especially intriguing. As former FBI agent Ted Gunderson recently
explained to my associate Alexander Constantine, magnetic radioactive
disks have long been used by the clandestine services as cancer-inducing
"silent killers" - i.e., as tools of assassination. Not only that. The
disc calls to mind one little-remembered detail of the Hill case - the
dozen-or-so circular "shiny spots," each the size of a silver dollar,
found on the trunk of her car directly after the abduction. A compass
needle reacted wildly when placed near these spots. Could they have
marked the location where an electromagnetic or radioactive device,
similar to that found by Niles, was placed on the car? (Such a device
might have been held to the spot magnetically, hence the circular
impressions.) If so, then the disorienting EMR could have helped induce
the Hills' "UFO sighting."
The Military and Mind
Control
Some time ago, I attended
hypnotic regression sessions in which the subject - a claimed UFO
abductee - recalled undergoing a mysterious "brain operation" at a
veteran's hospital in California. The operation was performed by human
beings, not aliens. Interestingly, this same hospital was mentioned in
two other cases I encountered. These other claims were not made by
abductees, but by people alleged to have been victims of mind control
experimentation.
One of these claimants, a
former Navy SEAL who undertook numerous dangerous missions in Vietnam,
favorably impressed me with the wealth of detail in his story.147
This individual - I've taken to calling him "the trained SEAL"- had
received specialized combat training at a military base in California;
he claims that at one point during this training he was drugged,
hypnotized, possibly placed under some form of electronic control, and
subjected to the extremes of pain/pleasure operant conditioning. One
peculiar detail of his story concerns the "reward" aspect of the
conditioning: When properly acquiescent, he was given unlimited sexual
access to a woman who, the SEAL avers, was herself the victim of
brainwashing.
Unbelievable as this last
claim may seem, I found it oddly resonant when I later interviewed a
prominent abductee in the Southern California area, who bravely offered
me details on a puzzling, albeit quite delicate, incident in her past.
Still an attractive woman, she recalled for me - indeed, seemed
strangely compelled to describe - an early love affair with a young
soldier training at a military base near her home. She cannot recall the
soldier's name. All she remembers is that one day he started living
at her family's house; she has no memory of how the arrangement
began, and her parents have never felt comfortable discussing the
matter. Although unattracted to this soldier, she felt compelled to
become intimate with him, adopting a pliant, obeisant attitude that was
quite out of character for her. Later, the soldier went on to covert
missions in Vietnam.
Of course, a young
person's psycho-sexual development is never smooth, and the incident
related above may merely have represented one peculiarly upsetting bump
in that notoriously rough road. Still, some of the details of this story
- particularly the parents' attitude, the woman's personality shift, and
her subsequent memory lapses - are striking, and I treat with respect
the abduc- tee's intuition that this minor enigma in her personal
history could, if properly understood, shed light on her later "missing
time" experiences.
Could the "trained SEAL"
have been right? Was there, is there, a coterie of
hypno-programmed soldiers conducting particularly hazardous missions?
And do the programmers have at their disposal a "ladies' auxiliary," so
to speak, of hypnotized camp followers?
If the SEAL's story stood
alone, skeptics could easily dismiss it (provided they did not sit, as I
did, face-to-face with the story's teller, listening to all the grisly
and unsettling details). But other veterans have added their voices to
this grim tale. Daniel Sheehan, of the Christic Institute, claims that
his organization has spoken to half-a-dozen individuals with narratives
similar to my SEAL informant. All had received "processing," so to
speak, within the context of standard military training; after
programming and specialized combat instruction by mercenaries, the
recruits were placed "on hold," to be used as situations arose - and
some of those situations occurred within the United States.148
Walter Bowart began his
own researches into mind control by placing an ad in
SOLDIER-OF-FORTUNE-style publications, asking for correspondence from
veterans who experienced inexplicable lapses in memory or strange
behavior modification techniques while serving in Vietnam; he received
over 100 replies. Bowart devoted an entire chapter to one of these
respondents - an Air Force veteran named David, who ended his four-year
tour of duty recalling only that he had spent the time, "having fun,
skin diving, laying on the beach, collecting shells.... It never dawned
on me until later that I must have DONE something while I was in the
service." (An obvious example of screen memory.) He was also "assigned"
a girlfriend whose name he cannot now recall, despite the length and
deep intimacy of the affair.149 The parallels to the
SEAL's story and the abductee's account should be obvious.
We even have a confession,
of sorts, from a scientist who specialized in one aspect of this sort of
training. Lt. Commander Thomas Narut, of the U.S. Naval Hospital at the
NATO headquarters in Naples, Florida, [Ed: ???] admitted during a
lecture in Oslo that recruits in Naples underwent CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style
behavior modification sessions. Trainees would be strapped into chairs
with their eyelids clamped open while watching films of industrial
accidents and African circumcision ceremonies - films frequently used by
psychologists as a means of inducing stress in experimental situations.
Unlike the protagonist in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, who learned revulsion at
the sight of violence, Narut's soldiers were taught to accept and enjoy
bloodshed, to view it with equanimity. Similar techniques were used to
dehumanize potential enemies. Graduates of this program became, in
Narut's words, "hit men and assassins," to be placed in American
embassies throughout the world.
When questioned by
reporters about these claims, the American government denied the story;
Narut - after a long incommunicado period and apparent coercion - later
explained to journalists that he had merely spoken theoretically. If so,
why did he originally describe the behavior modification procedure as an
ongoing program?150
And while it may seem
frivolous to return to the subject of abductions after examining such
grim data, I should remind the reader of the many abduction accounts in
which abductees recall being forced to watch certain stress inducing
motion pictures. The aliens, it seems, have learned a few lessons from
Dr. Narut.
Narut, of course,
concentrated on selective programming of individual American soldiers;
on the other side of the mind control spectrum, Defense Department
specialists have also concentrated on methods to render entire enemy
battalions "combat ineffective." Electromagnetic weaponry, intended to
wipe out the aggression of the enemy, is the province of DARPA, under
the direction of Dr. Jack Verona. These projects remain fairly
mysterious; we do know, however, that one operation, SLEEPING BEAUTY,
employed the services of Dr. Michael Persinger, a scientist who has
expressed interesting views regarding UFOs.
Persinger discovered a
method of using ELF waves to induce the brain's MAST cells to release
histamine; should a battlefield commander wish to subject his enemy to
mass bouts of vomiting, Persinger's trick could do the job even faster
than a Tobe Hooper movie. The method works on animals. "The question,"
writes mind control researcher Larry Collins, "is how to get from point
A to point B without violating one of the most rigorous commandments of
Government ethics - thou shalt not conduct experiments like that on
human beings."151
If Collins had studied the
record a little more carefully, he might realize that the government
hasn't always regarded this commandment as something graven in stone. As
Milton Kline put it:
Ethical factors
involved in most research would preclude having positive results.
Those ethical factors don't always hold with government research.
The research which has given really positive results has not been
limited by ethical constraints.152 [my
italics]
The Ultimate Motive for
Mind Control
Hypnosis hard-liners of
the Orne school would almost certainly dismiss the foregoing veterans'
accounts of the use of hypnosis, drugs and behavioral conditioning on
American fighting men. Why, the skeptics would ask, would anyone attempt
to create a "Manchurian Candidate" when the military services, using
entirely conventional means, can create a "Rambo"? There have always
been recruits for even the most hazardous duties; what need of hypnosis?
The need, in fact, is
absolute.
The modern battlefield has
little place for the traditional soldier. Advanced weaponry requires an
increasing level of technical sophistication, which in turn requires a
cool-headed operator. But the all-too-human combatant - though capable
of extraordinary acts of courage under the most stressful conditions
imaginable - does not possess inexhaustible reserves of sang-froid.
Eventually, breakdowns will occur. Per-capita psychiatric casualties
have increased dramatically in each successive American conflict. As
Richard Gabriel, the excellent historian of the role of psychiatry in
warfare, writes:
Modern warfare has
become so lethal and so intense that only the already insane can
endure it.... Modern war requiring continuous combat will increase
the degree of fatigue on the soldier to heretofore unknown levels.
Physical fatigue - especially the lack of sleep - will increase the
rate of psychiatric casualties enormously. Other factors - high
rates of indirect fire, night fighting, lack of food, constant
stress, large numbers of casualties - will ensure that the number of
psychiatric casualties will reach disastrous proportions. And the
number of casualties will overburden the medical structure to the
point of collapse.
The ability to treat
psychiatric casualties will all but disappear. There will be no safe
forward areas in which to treat soldiers debilitated by mental
collapse. The technology of modern war has made such locations
functionally obsolete...153
According to Gabriel, the
military intends to meet this challenge by creating "the chemical
soldier," a designer-drugged zombie in fighting man's uniform:
On the battlefields of
the future we will witness a true clash of ignorant armies, armies
ignorant of their own emotions and even of the reasons for which
they fight. Soldiers on all sides will be reduced to fearless
chemical automatons who fight simply because they can do nothing
else.... Once the chemical genie is out of the bottle, the full
range of human mental and physical actions become targets for
chemical control.... Today it is already possible by chemical or
electrical stimulation to increase the aggression levels of the
human being by stimulating the amygdala, a section of the brain
known to control aggression and rage. Such "human potential
engineering" is already a partial reality and the necessary
technical knowledge increases every day.154
While this passage speaks
of drugs and electronics, we can safely assume that the planners of
battle would not refrain from using any other promising technique.
Gabriel writes primarily
of large-scale battle scenarios, but based on his information, we can
fairly deduce that the mind-controlled soldier will also play a role in
the surgical strike, the covert operation, the infiltration behind enemy
lines by units of the Special Forces. On such missions, United States
personnel have increasingly relied on torture as a means of
interrogation and intimidation,155 and as such
barbarism becomes standard procedure the American fighting man of the
future will need to find within himself unprecedented reserves of
brutality. Will the average recruit, culled from the nation's suburbs
and reared on traditional ideals, possess such reserves?
Vietnam proved that the
soldier, despite a barrage of propaganda intended to cloud his
discernment, will sense the difference between fighting for legitimate
defense interests and fighting to protect political hegemony. To
forestall this realization, or to render it irrelevant, military
planners must withdraw the human combatant and replace him with a new
species of warrior. The soldier of the future will not discern; he will
merely do. He will not be a butcher; he will be the butcher's knife
- a tool among tools, thoughtless and effective.
And it is my contention
that to create this soldier of the future, the controllers will need a
continuing program, one designed to test each new method and combination
of methods for conquering the human mind.
One primary goal of this
program must include expanding the human capacity for stress and
violence. Subjects enrolled in such experimental procedures will
experience pain, and will learn to accept the pain. Eventually, they
will learn to inflict it, without remorse or even remembrance. The
nation who first creates this new soldier will possess a decisive
advantage on the "conventional" battlefield - as will the nation which
first develops a means of using mass mind control techniques to disable
entire enemy platoons. This paramount military necessity is the reason
why I will never believe any unconvincing reassurances that our nation's
clandestine scientists have foregone or will forego research into
behavior modification. This research will never be mere history. What's
past is present, and today's covert experimentation will become
tomorrow's basic training.
A prototype of the future
warrior may already be with us. The Navy SEAL I interviewed spoke in
horrifying detail of dismemberment without emotion, of rape as routine,
of killing without affect. And then forgetting that he has killed.
Even years later, he could not recall the stories behind many of the
wounds on his own body. He claims that whenever he would need the
services of the veteran's hospital, doctors would re-hypnotize him
shortly after his admission, while a physician specifically cleared for
such work would examine his medical history, which was highly classified
and kept under lock and key.
According to the SEAL's
testimony, his memory block cracked little by little, as a result of
events too complex to recount here. Finally, years after Vietnam, he was
able to remember what he did.
Amnesia was a blessing.
IV. Abductions
Press and public now
regard abductees as tony curiosities, yet science, for the most part,
still banishes their tales to the domain of the damned, as Charles Fort
defined damnation. So too with claimed victims of mind control. The
Voice of Authority tells us that MKULTRA belongs to history; like
Hasdrubal and Hitler, it threatened once, but no more. Anyone insisting
otherwise must be silenced by glib rationalization and selective
inattention.
Yet these two topics - UFO
abductions and mind control - have more in common than their mutual
ostracization. The data overlap. If we could chart these phenomena on a
Venn diagram, we would see a surprisingly large intersection between the
two circles of information. It is this overlap I seek to address.
Note, however, that I can
NOT address all the other interesting and important issues raised by the
UFO abduction experience. For example, I have written, admittedly rather
vaguely, of nasal implants reported by abductees - the sort of detail
which might place an account in the "high strangeness" category, and of
course, a detail central to my thesis. But what percentage of the
percipients speak of such implants? A truly scientific analysis would
provide a figure. Unfortunately, I haven't the resources to compile a
sufficiently large abductee sample from which one could draw statistics.
Nor can I make an over-arching qualitative analysis, measuring the value
of "high strangeness" reports against other abductee claims. All I can
do is note the available literature, and leave the reader to wonder, as
I do, whether the compilers of that literature concentrated on
exceptional cases or were biased in favor of the less fantastic abductee
accounts. I have supplemented readings of the abduction literature with
my own interviews with percipients - which, since abductees tend to know
other abductees, can give a surprisingly wide view of the phenomenon.
This view has been broadened still further by my talks and
correspondence with other members of the UFO community.
Of course, we must
recognize the difference between testimony and proof. No one can state
definitively that abduction reports have a basis in objective reality
(however misperceived). Ultimately, all we have are stories. Some of
these stories may be of questionable veracity; others may be
contaminated by investigator bias; many are insufficiently detailed. No
one research paper can resolve all abduction controversies, and many
necessary battles must be fought on other fields.
Still, the testimony won't
go away - and we certainly have enough to allow for comparisons. I
maintain that an unprejudiced overview of abduction reports in the
popular press and the less-familiar material on mind control will
demonstrate a striking correlation. Once other abduction researchers
have been educated in the ways of MKULTRA (and this paper is
intended as an introductory text) they may note a similar pattern. If
so, we can then begin to write a revisionist history of the phenomenon.
The abduction enigma
contains within it sub-mysteries that slide into the mind control
scenario with surprising ease, even elegance - mysteries which fit the
E.T. hypothesis as uncomfortably as a size 10 foot fits into a size 8
shoe. As we have seen, the MKULTRA thesis explains the reports of
abductee intracerebral implants (particularly reports involving
nosebleeds), unusual scars, "telepathic" communication (i.e., externally
induced intracerebral voices) concurrent with or following the abduction
encounter, allegations that some abductees hear unusual sound effects
(similar to those created by the hemi-synch and cognate devices),
haywire electronic devices in abductee homes, personality shifts,
"training films," manipulation of religious imagery, and missing time.
Needless to say, the thesis of clandestine government experimentation
readily accounts for abductee claims of human beings "working" with the
aliens, and for the government harassment that plays so prominent a role
in certain abductee reports.
Let's look at some more
correlations.
The Hill Case and the
"Advanced" Aliens
Earlier, I asked, "Do the
aliens also watch black-and-white television?" in reference to their
alleged use of old-fashioned, Terra-style brain implantation devices.
Abduction accounts abound in other examples of alien "retro-technology."
The most striking example can be found in the Betty and Barney Hill
incident, the details of which are too well-known to recount here.156
As we have already glimpsed during our discussion of the Rex Niles
affair, the Hills' "interrupted journey" abounds in data which, taken
together, permits the construction of an alternative explanation.
At one point during the
alleged UFO abduction, the "examiners" inserted a needle in Betty Hill's
navel, telling her that this practice constituted a test for pregnancy.157
Some ufologists158 rashly assume that Betty Hill's
"pregnancy test" is evidence of advanced extraterrestrial technology,
since her 1961 account pre-dates the official announcement of
amniocentesis, which does indeed make use of a needle inserted into the
navel. But we now have much less invasive means of testing for pregnancy
than amniocentesis. True, amniocentesis is still sometimes used to
gather information about the fetus, but the wielders of a highly evolved
technology would certainly use other methods of determining the
existence of pregnancy in the first place.
Betty Hill's testimony
reminds us of certain other abduction accounts, which contain
descriptions of "healings" surprisingly similar to the procedures
associated with still-experimental electromagnetic therapy techniques,
such as those described in Robert O. Becker's THE BODY ELECTRIC. For
example, abductee Deanna Dube described for me an abduction-related
"regeneration" of her long-damaged heart; had she been familiar with
Becker's work,159 she might have been a bit less
rapid to ascribe her healing to otherworldly influences.
Medical breakthroughs
often undergo years of testing before their official "discovery." For
some of these tests, finding volunteers present a major obstacle. If we
accept the proposition that the Hill incident originated in an external
and objective stimulus, we must then ask ourselves which scenario is
more likely: Did Betty Hill encounter human beings using a technique ten
years ahead of its time? Or did she encounter aliens (reputedly a
"billion years ahead of us") using science from eons before their
time?
One must also ask why
Betty Hill's aliens seemed to have no grasp of basic human concepts
(such as how we measure time) - yet they knew enough about us to speak
English fluently and had even mastered our slang. Were these real
aliens, or humans engaging in theatricals (and occasionally muffing
their lines)? For that matter, why did Betty Hill originally recall her
abductors as humanoid, only later describing them as aliens?
The Hill case provided a
particularly controversial piece of evidence - the celebrated "star map"
recalled by Betty Hill under hypnosis. In later years, an Ohio
schoolteacher named Marjorie Fish made an ingenious and laudable attempt
to discover a match for this map by constructing an elaborate
three-dimensional model of nearby star systems; whether she succeeded
remains a matter for keen debate.160 For now, I
prefer to avoid taking sides in this dispute and will confine myself to
insisting that pro-ET ufologists answer (without resorting to
glib ripostes) a point first raised by Jacques Vallee: the map makes
no sense as a navigational aid. Vallee notes that, even if we grant
the Fish interpretation, the stars are not drawn to scale - and at any
rate, alien spaceships would surely be navigated the same way we guide
our own spacecraft: via computers and telemetry161
The validity of the Fish interpretation is irrelevent; the point is that
any such chart would have no value to an interstellar
star-farer.
Fish's work raises other
controversies: Allegedly, the map points to Zeta Reticuli as the aliens'
home system and pictures Zeta Reticuli as a single star, a view
consistent with scientific opinion of the 1960s. Yet in later years
scientists discovered that Zeta Reticuli is binary.162
Moreover, how did our abductee manage to remember so accurately a
complex chart glimpsed in passing? Even allowing for the possibility of
increased accuracy of recollection under hypnotic regression, the memory
feat here seems remarkable. Consider the circumstances of the abduction:
Kafka on hallucinogens couldn't have conceived of the nightmare vision
confronting Betty Hill that night - yet for some reason this particular
arrangement of stars emerged as her most intensely-detailed recollection
of the experience.
This memory (if not
confabulated during regression, a possibility we should always weigh) is
comprehensible only as an example of artificially-induced hypermensia.
In other words, Betty Hill was directed to store that chart
within her subconscious. The celebrated star map ought to be recognized
for what it was: a prop, a seemingly confirmatory circumstantial detail
meant to convince her - and perhaps us - of the reality of her
abduction.
The question of motive
arises. Why - if my thesis is correct - were these two fairly innocuous
individuals chosen for this new variation on the old MKULTRA
tricks?
The selection might, of
course, have been arbitrary. Or perhaps circumstances now irretrievably
lost to history rendered the couple a convenient target. Interestingly,
Barney Hill had become acquainted (through church functions) with the
head of Air Force intelligence at Pease Air Force Base; perhaps this
relationship first brought the Hills to the attention of members of the
intelligence community. Arguably, the Hills could have been fingered for
a wide variety of reasons; as a general rule, the clandestine services
prefer to satisfy a number of itches with one scratch.
In fact, the espionage
establishment had one particularly compelling reason to focus on the
Hills. Barney Hill (a black man) and his wife held important positions
in several civil rights organizations, including the NAACP.163
The abduction took place during the 1960s, when the NAACP and allied
groups fell victim to an increasingly paranoid series of attacks from
the FBI and other governmental agencies (under operations COINTELPRO,
CHAOS, GARDEN PLOT, etc.).164 At that
time, infiltration of civil rights groups proved a difficult chore;
while most left-leaning groups provided easy targets for FBI stooges,
the average undercover operative would have had an exceptionally
difficult time posing as a black activist. (In 1961, the only black
people on the FBI's payroll were the servants in J. Edgar Hoover's
home.)
In light of these facts,
we should recall Victor Marchetti's anecdote about the cat that the CIA
had "wired for sound." Perhaps an ambitious covert scientist proposed a
similar experiment, in which a human being would play the role that had
once been assigned to the unfortunate feline? As Estabrooks noted, the
ultimate espionage agent would be the spy who doesn't KNOW he is a spy.
Barney Hill, a well-regarded figure with a near-genius-level IQ, was a
safe bet to obtain a leadership role in any group he joined; he would
have been remarkably well-positioned, had any outsiders wished to use
his ears to over-hear prominent black organizers in confidential
discussion.
Of course, many
intelligence professionals would counter this suggestion by reminding us
that eavesdroppers on the civil rights movement had plenty of
less-flamboyant methods: Bugging, "black bag" jobs, paying for
information, etc. The point is valid. But if the technology to create a
"human bug" was developed circa 1961 - and there is documentation
suggesting that such is indeed the case165 - the
intelligence agencies would surely have wanted to test the possibilities
in the field. And considering the expense of such a test, why not
conduct the experiment in such a way as to reap the maximum benefits?
Why NOT choose a Barney Hill?
Arms and the Abductee
Budd Hopkins told the
follwing story during his lecture at the Los Angeles "Whole Life Expo."166
He considers the case "very good... lots of corroborating witnesses for
parts of it." Though not, presumably, for this part.
Hopkins' informant, after
the by-now familiar UFO abduction, was given a gun by the aliens. Not a
Buck Rogers laser weapon - this was something Dirty Harry might have
packed.
The abductee was also
given someone to shoot. Not a little grey alien, another human being,
tied to a chair. The "visitors" told their armed abductee that this
captive had done "evil on earth, and he's a bad person. You have to kill
him." If the abductee didn't do as asked, he would never leave the ship.
The captive proclaimed his
innocence, and pleaded for his life. The abductee, caught in the middle
of all this, became quite upset. (Worth noting: he seems to have at
least considered the aliens' request to shoot someone he had
never met.) Ultimately, the abductee turned the gun on the aliens and
said, "Nobody's going to get shot here."
According to Hopkins, "The
aliens said 'Fine. Very good.' They took the gun from him; the man
[presumably, the captive] got up, walked away, disappeared, and they
went on to the next thing." Obviously, this little drama had been staged
- a test of some sort.
I submit that this surreal
incident is incomprehensible as either an example of alien incursion or
of "Klass-ical" confabulation. The scenario described here EXACTLY
parallels numerous experiments in the hypnotic induction of anti-social
action as revealed both in the standard hypnosis literature and in
declassified ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA documents. For example, compare Hopkins'
account to the following, in which Ludwig Mayer, a prominent German
hypnosis researcher, describes a classic experiment in the hypnotic
induction of criminal action:
I gave a revolver to
an elderly and readily suggestible man whom I had just hypnotized.
The revolver had just been loaded by Mr. H. with a percussion cap. I
explained to [the subject], while pointing to Mr. H., that Mr. H.
was a very wicked man whom he should shoot to kill. With great
determination he took the revolver and fired a shot directly at Mr.
H. Mr. H. fell down pretending to be wounded. I then explained to my
subject that the fellow was not yet quite dead, and that he should
give him another bullet, which he did without further ado.167
Of course, if a
conservative hypnosis specialist were asked to comment on the above
account, he would quickly point out that hypnotic suggestions which work
in an experimental situation would not easily succeed outside the
laboratory; on some level, the subject will probably sense whether or
not he's playing the game for real.168 Similarly, a
conservative abduction researcher would, in reviewing Hopkins' material,
emphasize the problems inherent in using testimony derived during
regression, where the threat of confabulation lurks. I'll concede both
arguments - for the moment - only to insist that they are beside the
point. The matter of primary importance, the sticking point which
neither Klass nor Hopkins can comfortably confront, is the convergence
of detail between Mayer's hypnosis experiment and the testing event
related by Hopkins' abductee. Why are these two stories so similar?
Did the good Dr. Mayer take pupils from Sirius?169
Hopkins says he knows of
other instances in which abductees found themselves in similar
crucibles. So do I.
One person I spoke to can
remember (sans hypnosis) being handed a gun inside a ziplock
baggy and receiving instructions that she will have to use this weapon
"on a job." Early in my interviews with her (and with no prompting from
me) she recited an apparent cue drilled into her consciousness by the
"entities" (as she calls them): "When you see the light, do it tonight,"
followed by the command, "Execute." (One can only speculate as to how
such commands would be used in the field; we will discuss later the use
of photovoltaic hypnotic induction.) Though her personal feelings toward
firearms are decidedly negative, she vividly describes periods in her
"everyday" life when she feels an uncharacteristic, yet overpowering
urge to be near a gun - a quasi-sexual desire to pick one up and touch
the metal.170
She is not alone. Another
has been so affected by gun fever that he became a security guard, just
to be near the things.171 The abductees I have spoken
to connect this sudden surge of Ramboism to the UFO experience. But I
suggest that the UFO experience may be merely a cover story for another
type of training entirely.
One of the primary goals
of BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, and MKULTRA was to
determine whether mind control could be used to faciliate "executive
action" - i.e., assassination.172
It isn't difficult to
imagine the media's reaction if a public figure were murdered by someone
acting at the behest of the "space brothers." Who would dare to speak of
conspiracy under such circumstances? The hidden controllers could choose
a myth structure that conform's to the abductee's personality, then pose
as higher beings, who would whisper violence into the ear of the
percipient. Using this ruse, the trick that scientists such as Ludwig
Mayer could perform in the lab might now be accomplished in the field.
As Estabrooks' associate Jack Tracktir (professor of hypnotherapy at
Baylor University) explained to John Marks, anti-social acts can be
induced with "no conscience involved" once the proper pretext has been
created.173
They Will Think It's
Flying Saucers
Jenny Randles contributes
an anecdote from Great Britain which dovetails nicely with this
hypothesis.
In 1965, "Margary" (a
pseudonym) lived in Birmingham with her husband, who one night told her
to prepare for a "shock and a test." As Randles describes what she calls
a "rogue case":
They got into his car
and drove off, although her memory of the trip became hazy and
confused and she does not know where they went. Then she was in a
room that was dimly lit and there were people standing around a long
table or flat bed. She was out on it and seemed "drugged" and unable
to resist. The most memorable of the men was tall and thin with a
long nose and white beard. He had thick eyebrows and supposedly said
to Margary, "Remember the eyebrows, honey." A strange medical
examination, using odd equipment, was performed on her.
Both the husband and the
scientists, using (apparently) hypnotic techniques, flooded her mind
with images that, she was told, would be understood only in the future.
According to Randles, "At one point one of the 'examiners' in the room
said to Margary in a tone that made it seem as if he were amused, "They
will think it's flying saucers." The husband also revealed that he
had a second identity. After the abduction, this husband (am I going too
far to assume his employment with MI6 or some cognate agency?) left,
never to be seen again.174 Margary did not recall the
abduction until 1978.
This affair can only
baffle a researcher who insists on fitting all abduction accounts into
the ET hypothesis; once we free ourselves from that set of assumptions,
explanations come easily. I interpret this incident as a case in which
the controllers applied the flying saucer cover story sloppily, or to an
insufficiently receptive subject. If my thesis is correct, the UFO
"hypnotic hoax" technique would still have been fairly new in 1965,
particularly outside the United States; perhaps the manipulators hadn't
yet got the hang of it. The odd comment about the scientist's eyebrows
may refer to an item of disguise donned for the occasion. The
unscrupulous hypnotist, unsure about his ability to induce an
impenetrable amnesia - and mindful of the price paid by his forerunners
in mesmeric criminality175 - would understandably
want to hedge his bets; by indulging in the British penchant for
theatrics, he could further protect his anonymity.
A similar incident was
brought to my attention by researcher Robert Durant. The relevant
excerpt of his letter follows:
Now I want to turn to
a case that I have been investigating for several months. The
subject is an abductee. Standard abduction scenario. Twice regressed
under hypnosis, the first time by a well-known abduction researcher,
the second time by a psychologist with parapsychology connections.
In the course of many
hours of listening to the subject, I discovered that she has had
close personal contact over a long period of time with several
individuals who have federal intelligence connections. She was
hypnotized many years ago as part of a TV program devoted to
hypnosis. Her abductions began shortly after she attended several
long sessions at a laboratory where, ostensibly, she was being
tested for ESP abilities. Two other people who were "tested" at this
same laboratory have also had abductions. All three were told by the
lab to join a local UFO group. During her abductions, the principal
alien spoke to the subject in the English language in a normal
manner, not via telepathy. She recognized the voice, which was at
one time that of her very close friend of yesteryear who was then
and is now employed by the CIA. The other voice was that of an
individual who works in Washington, has what I will call very strong
federal connections as well as a finger in every ufological pie, and
who just happened to bump into her at the aforementioned laboratory.
He also anticipated, in the course of telephone conversations, her
abductions. When the subject confronted him about this and the
voice, he claimed to be psychic. (!)176
The "ESP" connection is
suggestive; the MKULTRA documents betray an astonishing interest
on the part of the intelligence agencies in matters parapsychological.
Some researchers would
object that examples such as this are rare; most abductions contain no
such overt indications of intelligence involvement. But have
investigators looked for them? As mentioned in the introduction, a false
dichotomy limits much ufological thought; as long as the abduction
argument swings between the ET hypothesis and purely psychological
theories, researchers will not recognize the relevance of certain key
items of background data.
Glimpses Of The
Controllers
In an interview with me, a
northern-California abducteee - call him "Peter" - reported an
experience which was conducted NOT by a small grey alien, but by a human
being. The percipient called this man a "doctor." He gave a description
of this individual, and even provided a drawing.
Some time after I gathered
this information, a southern-California abductee told me her story -
which included a description of this very same "doctor." The physical
details were so strikingly similar as to erase coincidence. This woman
is a leading member of a Los Angeles-based UFO group; three other women
in this group report abduction encounters with the same individual.177
Perhaps those three women
were fantasists, attaching themselves to another's narrative. But my
northern informant never met these people. Why did he describe the same
"doctor"?
One of the abductees I
have dealt with insisted, under hypnosis, that her abduction experience
brought her to a certain house in the Los Angeles area. She was able to
provide directions to the house, even though she had no conscious memory
of ever being there. I later learned that this house is indeed occupied
by a scientist who formerly (and perhaps currently) conducted
clandestine research on mind control technology.
This same abductee
described a clandestine brain operation of some sort she underwent in
childhood. The neurosurgeon was a human being, not an alien. She even
recalled the name. (Note: This is not the same individual referred to
above.) When I heard the name, it meant nothing to me - but later I
learned that there really was a scientist of that name who specialzed in
electrode implant research.
Licia Davidson is a
thoughtful and articulate abductee, whose fascinating story closely
parallels many found in the abductee literature - except for one unusual
detail. In an interview with me, described an unsettling recollection of
a human being, dressed normally, holding a black box with a protruding
antenna. This odd snippet of memory did NOT coincide with the general
thrust of her abduction narrative. Could this remembrance represent an
all-too-brief segment of accurately-perceived reality interrupting her
hypnotically-induced "screen memory"? Peter clearly recalls seeing a
similar box during his abduction.
Interestingly, Licia
resides in the Los Angeles suburb of Tujunga Canyon, a prominent spot on
the abduction map; Many of the abductees I have spoken to first had
unusual experiences while living in this area. Near Tujunga Canyon, in
Mt. Pacifico, is a hidden former Nike missile base; more than one
abductee has described odd, seemingly inexplicable military activity
around this location.178 The reader will recall the
connection of Nike missile bases to the disturbing story of
Dr. L. Jolyon West, a veteran of MKULTRA.
Cults
Some abductees I have
spoken to have been directed to join certain religious/philosophical
sects. These cults often bear close examination.
The leaders of these
groups tend to be "ex"-CIA operatives, or Special Forces veterans. They
are often linked through personal relations, even though they espouse
widely varying traditions. I have heard unsettling reports that the
leaders of some of these groups have used hypnosis, drugs, or "mind
machines" on their charges. Members of these cults have reported periods
of missing time during ceremonies or "study periods."
I strongly urge abduction
researchers to examine closely any small "occult" groups an abductee
might join. For example, one familiar leader of the UFO fringe - a man
well-known for his espousal of the doctrine of "love and light" - is
Virgil Armstrong, a close personal friend of General John Singlaub, the
notorious Iran-Contra player, who recently headed the neo-fascist World
Anti-Communist League. Armstrong, who also happens to be an ex-Green
Beret and former CIA operative, figured into my inquiry in an
interesting fashion: An abductee of my acquaintance was told - by her
"entities," naturally - to seek out this UFO spokesman and join his
"sky-watch" activities, which, my source alleges, included a mass
channelling session intended to send debilitating "negative" vibrations
to Constantine Chernenko, then the leader of the Soviet Union. Of
course, intracerebral voices may have a purely psychological origin, so
Armstrong can hardly be held to task for the abductee's original
"directive."179 Still, his past associations with
military intelligence inevitably bring disturbing possibilities to mind.
Even more ominous than
possible ties between UFO cults and the intelligence community are the
cults' links with the shadowy I AM group, founded by Guy Ballard in the
1930s.180 According to researcher David Stupple, "If
you look at the contactee groups today, you'll see that most of the
stable, larger ones are actually neo-I AM groups, with some sort of tie
to Ballard's organization."181 This cult, therefore,
bears investigation.
Guy Ballard's "Mighty I AM
Religious Activity," grew, in large part, out of William Dudley Pelly's
Silver Shirts, an American Nazi organization.182
Although Ballard himself never openly proclaimed Nazi affiliation, his
movement was tinged with an extremely right-wing political philosophy,
and in secret meetings he "decreed" the death of President Franklin
Roosevelt.183 The I AM philosophy derived from
Theosophy, and in this author's estimation bears a more-than-cursory
resemblance to the Theosophically-based teachings that informed the
proto-Nazi German occult lodges.184
After the war, Pelley (who
had been imprisoned for sedition during the hostilities) headed an
occult-oriented organization call Soulcraft, based in Noblesville,
Indiana. Another Soulcraft employee was the controversial contactee
George Hunt Williamson (real name: Michel d'Obrenovic), who co-authored
UFOs CONFIDENTIAL with John McCoy, a proponent of the theory that a
Jewish banking conspiracy was preventing disclosure of the solution to
the UFO mystery.185 Later, Williamson founded the I
AM-oriented Brotherhood of the Seven Rays in Peru.186
Another famed contactee, George Van Tassel, was associated with Pelley
and with the notoriously anti-Semitic Reverend Wesley Swift (founder of
the group which metamorphosed into the Aryan Nations).187
The most visible offspring
of I AM is Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant, a
group best-known for its massive arms caches in underground bunkers. CUT
was recently exposed in COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN as a conduit
of CIA funds,188 and according to researcher John
Judge, has ties to organizations allied to the World Anti-Communist
League.189 Prophet is becoming involved in abduction
research and has sponsored presentations by Budd Hopkins and other
prominent investigators. In his book THE ARMSTRONG REPORT: ETs AND UFOs:
THEY NEED US, WE DON'T NEED THEM[sic],190 Virgil
Armstrong directs troubled abductees toward Prophet's group. (Perhaps
not insignificantly, he also suggests that abductees plagued by implants
alleviate their problem by turning to "the I AM force" within.191)
Another UFO channeller,
Frederick Von Mierers, has promulgated both a cult with a strong I AM
orientation192 and an apparent con-game involving
over-appraised gemstones. Mierers is an anti-Semite who contends that
the Holocaust never happened and that the Jews control the world's
wealth.
UFORUM is a flying saucer
organization popular with Los Angeles-area abductees; its founder is
Penny Harper, a member of a radical Scientology breakaway group which
connects the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard with pronouncements against
"The Illuminati" (a mythical secret society) and other betes noir
familiar from right-wing conspiracy literature. Harper directs members
of her group to read THE SPOTLIGHT, an extremist tabloid (published by
Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby) which denies the reality of the Holocaust
and posits a "Zionist" scheme to control the world.193
More than one unwary
abductee has fallen in with groups such as those listed above. It isn't
difficult to imagine how some of these questionable groups might mold an
abductee's recollection of his experience - and perhaps help direct his
future actions.
Some modern abductees,
with otherwise-strong claims, claim encounters with blond, "Nordic"
aliens reminiscent of the early contactee era. Surely, the "Nordic"
appearance of these aliens sprang from the dubious spiritual tradition
of Van Tassell, Ballard, Pelley, McCoy, etc. Why, then, are some modern
abductees seeing these very same other-worldly Uebermenschen?
One abductee of my
acquaintance claims to have had beneficial experiences with these
"blond" aliens - who, he believes, came originally from the Pleiades.
Interestingly, in the late 1960s, the psychopathically anti-Semitic Rev.
Wesley Swift predicted this odd twist in the abduction tale. In a
broadcast "sermon," he spoke at length about UFOs, claiming that there
were "good" aliens and "bad" aliens. The good ones, he insisted, were
tall, blond Aryans - who hailed from the Pleiades. He made this
pronouncement long before the current trends in abduction lore.
Could some of the
abductions be conducted by an extreme right-wing element within the
national security establishment? Disagreeable as the possibility seems,
we should note that the "lunatic right" is represented in all other
walks of life; certainly hard-rightists have taken positions within the
military-intelligence complex as well.
Grounds For Further
Research
John Keel's
ground-breaking OPERATION TROJAN HORSE, written in an era when abductees
still came under the category of "contactees," includes the following
intriguing data, gleaned from Keel's extensive field work:
Contactees often find
themselves suddenly miles from home without knowing how they got
there. They either have induced amnesia, wiping out all memory of
the trip, or they were taken over by some means and made the trip in
a blacked-out state. Should they encounter a friend on the way, the
friend would probably note that their eyes seemed glassy and their
behavior seemed peculiar. But if the friend spoke to them, he might
receive a curt reply.
In the language of the
contactees this process is called being used...I have known silent
contactees to disappear from their homes for long periods, and when
they returned, they had little or no recollection of where they had
been. One girl sent me a postcard from the Bahama Islands - which
surprised me because I knew she was very poor. When she returned,
she told me that she had only one memory of the trip. She said she
remembered getting off a jet at an airport - she couldn't recall
getting on the jet or making the trip - and there "Indians" met her
and took her baggage.... The next thing she knew she was back home
again.194
Puzzling indeed - unless
one has read THE CONTROL OF CANDY JONES, which speaks of Candy's
"blacked out" periods, during which she travelled to Taiwan as a CIA
courier, adopting her second personality. The mind control explanation
perfectly solves all the mysteries in the above excerpt - save, perhaps,
the odd remark about "Indians."
Hickson and Mendez' UFO
CONTACT AT PASCAGOULA contains the interesting information that Charles
Hickson awakes at night feeling that he is on the verge of re-awakening
some terribly important memory connected with his encounter - yet
ostensibly he can account for every moment of his adventure.
Hickson also received a
letter from an apparent abductee who claims that the grey aliens are
actually automatons of some sort - perhaps an unconscious recognition of
the unreality of the hypnotically-induced "cover story."195
In this light, the film version of COMMUNION - whose screenplay was
written by Whitley Strieber - takes on a new interest: The abduction
sequences contain inexplicable images indicating that the "greys" are
really props, or masks.
COMMUNION and
TRANSFORMATION contain passages detailing what seems to be a
hazily-recalled Candy-Jones-style espionage adventure, in which Strieber
was shanghaied by a "coach" and a "nurse" (both human beings) who
apparently drugged him.196 Recall the example of
Keel's informants. Moreover, TRANSFORMATION contains lengthy
descriptions of alien beings working in apparent collusion with human
beings.
Abductee Christa Tilton
also recalls both human beings and aliens playing a part in her
experience. Ever since her abduction, she claims, she has been
"shadowed" by a mysterious federal agent she calls John Wallis.197
Christa's husband, Tom Adams, has confirmed Wallis' existence.198
In his REPORT ON
COMMUNION, Ed Conroy - who seems to have become a participant in, and
not merely an observer of, the phenomenon - describes harassment by
helicopters, which as we have already noted, seems to be quite a common
occurrence in abductee situations.199 Researchers
blithely assume that these incidents represent governmental attempts to
spy on UFO percipients. But this assertion is ridiculous. Helicopters
are extremely expensive to operate, and the engines of espionage have
perfected numerous alternative methods to gather information. After all,
we now have a fairly extensive bibliography of FBI, CIA, and military
efforts to spy on numerous movements favoring domestic social change.
Why have no veterans of CHAOS or COINTELPRO (either victim or
victimizer) spoken of helicopters? Obviously the choppers serve some
other purpose beyond mere surveillance. One possibility might be the
propagation of electromagnetic waves which might affect the
perceptions/behaviors of an implanted individual. (Indeed, I have heard
rumors of helicopters being used in electronic "crowd control"
operations in Vietnam and elsewhere; alas, the information is far from
hard.)
Contactee Eldon Kerfoot
has written of his suspicions that human manipulators, not aliens, may
be the ultimate puppeteers engineering his experiences. He describes a
sudden compulsion to kill a fellow veteran of the Korean conflict - a
man Kerfoot had no logical reason to distrust or dislike, yet whom he
"sensed" to have been a traitor to his country. Fortunately, the
assassination never materialized.200 But the
situation exactly parallels incidents described in released ARTICHOKE
documents concerning the remote hypnotic induction of anti-social
behavior.
One last speculation
Renato Vesco's INTERCEPT
BUT DON'T SHOOT201 outlines a fascinating scenario
for the "secret weapon" hypothesis of UFOs. Vesco points out that if
these devices are one day to be used in a superpower conflict, the
attacking power would be well-served by the myth of the UFO as an
extraterrestrial craft, for the besieged nation would not know the true
nature of its opponent. Perhaps, then, one purpose of the UFO abductions
is to engender and maintain the legend of the little grey aliens. For
the hidden manipulators, the abductions could be, in and of themselves,
a propaganda coup.
Final Thoughts
I do not insist
dogmatically on the scenario that I have outlined. I do not wish to
dissuade abduction researchers from exploring other avenues - indeed, I
strongly encourage such work to continue. Nor can I easily account for
some aspects of the abduction narratives - for example, any suggestions
I could offer concerning the reports of genetic experimentation would be
extremely speculative.
But I do insist on
a fair hearing of this hypothesis. Criticism is encouraged; that which
does not destroy my thesis will make it stronger. I ask only that my
critics refrain from intellectual laziness; mere differences in
world-view do not constitute a valid attack. God is found in the
details.
I recognize the dangers
inherent in making this thesis public. New and distressing abductee
confabulations may result. I would prefer that the audience for this
paper be restricted to abduction researchers, not victims, who
might be unduly influenced. However, in a society that prides itself on
ostensibly free press, such restrictions are unthinkable. Therefore, I
can only beg any abduction victims who might read this paper to attempt
a superhuman objectivity. The thesis I have outlined is promising, and
(should trepanation ever provide us with an example of an actual
abductee implant) susceptible of proof. But mine is not the only
hypothesis. The abductee's unrewarding task is to report what he or she
has experienced as truthfully as possible, untainted by outside
speculation.
Whether or not future
investigation proves UFO abductions to be a product of mind control
experimentation, I feel that this paper has, at least, provided evidence
of a serious danger facing those who hold fast to the ideals of
individual freedom. We cannot long ignore this menace.
A spectre haunts the
democratic nations - the spectre of technofascism. All the powers
of the espionage empire and the scientific establishment have entered
into an unholy alliance to evoke this spectre: Psychiatrist and spy,
Dulles and Delgado, microwave specialists and clandestine operators.
A mind is a terrible thing
to waste - and a worse thing to commandeer.
Footnotes
1. Budd
Hopkins, MISSING TIME (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1981) and
INTRUDERS (New York: Random House, 1987).
2. Whitley
Strieber, COMMUNION (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987).
3. Cannon,
"Psychiatric Abuse of UFO Witness," UFO magazine, vol. 3, no. 5
(December, 1988)
4. Philip
Klass, UFO ABDUCTIONS: A DANGEROUS GAME (Buffalo: Prometheus Books,
1988). Klass makes some sharp observations, which are undercut by his
refusal to interview abductees directly. The work has no footnotes and
depends heavily on the work of Dr. Martin Orne - of whom more anon.
5. See
bibliography.
6. New
York: Bantam Books, 1979.
7. See
generally PROJECT MKULTRA, THE CIA'S PROGRAM OF RESEARCH IN BEHAVIOR
MODIFICATION, joint hearing before the Select Committee on Health and
Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, Unites States
Senate (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1977).
8. Robert
Eringer, "Secret Agent Man," ROLLING STONE, 1985.
9. John
Marks interview with Victor Marchetti (Marks files, available at the
National Security Archives, Washington, D.C.).
10. In an
interview with John Marks, hypnosis expert Milton Kline, a veteran of
clandestine experimentation in this field, averred that his work for the
government continued. Since the interview took place in 1977, years
after the CIA allegedly halted mind control research, we must conclude
either that the CIA lied, or that another agency continued the work. In
another interview with Marks, former Air Force-CIA liaison L. Fletcher
Prouty confirmed that the Department of Defense ran studies either in
conjunction with or parallel to those operated by the CIA. (Marks
files.)
11.
Estabrooks, HYPNOSIS (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957 [revised
edition]), 13-14.
12. A
copy of this letter can be found in the Marks files.
13.
Estabrooks attracted an eclectic group of friends, including J. Edgar
Hoover and Alan Watts.
14.
Interview with daughter Doreen Estabrooks, Marks files, Washington, D.C.
15.
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, ACID DREAMS (New York: Grove Press,
1985) 3-4; Marks, THE SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE", 6-8
16.
Marks, ibid. 4-6.
17.
Edward Hunter, BRAINWASHING IN RED CHINA (New York: Vanguard Press,
1951.). Hunter invented the term "brainwashing" in a September 24, 1950
Miami NEWS article.
18.
"Japan's Germ Warfare Experiments," THE GLOBE AND MAIL (Toronto), May
19, 1982.
19.
Walter Bowart, OPERATION MIND CONTROL (New York: Dell, 1978), 191-2,
quoting Warren Commission documents. We cannot fairly derive from this
statement a sanguine attitude about PRESENT Soviet capabilities; in this
field, even outdated technology suffices for mischief.
20.
Marks, THE SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE", 60-61. A folk
entymology has it that the "MK" of MKULTRA stands for "Mind Kontrol."
According to Marks, TSS prefixed the cryptonyms of all its projects with
these initials. Note, though, that MKULTRA was preceded by a
still-mysterious TSS program called QKHILLTOP.
21.
Ibid., 224-229. Seven MKULTRA subprojects were continued, under TSS
supervision, as MKSEARCH. This project ended in 1972. CIA apologists
often proclaim that "brainwashing" research ceased in either 1962 or
1972; these blandishments refer to the TSS projects, not to the ORD
work, which remains TERRA INCOGNITA for independent researchers. Marks
discovered that the ORD research was so voluminous that retrieving
documents via FOIA would have proven unthinkably expensive.
22. For a
description of the research into parapsychology, see Ronald M. McRae's
MIND WARS (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984). The best book available
on a subject which awaits a truly authoritative text.
23.
Abduction researcher and hypnotherapist Miranda Park, of Lancaster,
California, reports that she has viewed such anomalies in abductee MRI
scans. See also Whitley Strieber, TRANSFORMATION (New York: Beech Tree
Books, 1988) 246-247. At this writing, both Strieber and Hopkins report
initially promising results in their efforts to document the presence of
these "extras" in abductees.
24.
Allegedly, the experiment took place in 1964. However, in WERE WE
CONTROLLED? (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), the
pseudonymous "Lincoln Lawrence" makes an interesting argument (on page
36) that the demonstration took place some years earlier.
25. New
York: Harper and Row, 1969. Much of Delgado's work was funded by the
Office of Naval Intelligence, a common conduit for CIA funds during the
1950s and '60s. (Gordon Thomas' JOURNEY INTO MADNESS (New York: Bantam,
1989) misleadingly implies that CIA interest in Delgado's work began in
1972.)
26.
J.M.R. Delgado. "Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and Recording in
Completely Free Patients," PSYCHOTECHNOLOGY (Robert L. Schwitzgebel and
Ralph K. Schwitzgebel, editors; New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1973): 195.
27. David
Krech, "Controlling the Mind Controllers," THINK 32 (July-August), 1966.
28.
Delgado, PHYSICAL CONTROL OF THE MIND
29.
Delgado, "Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and Recording in Completely
Free Patients," 195.
30. Note,
for example, Charles Hickson's account of the Pascagoula Incident.
Charles Hickson and William Mendez, UFO CONTACT AT PASCOGOULA (Tuscon:
Wendelle C. Stevens, 1983).
31. John
Ranleigh, THE AGENCY (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1986): 208. Marchetti
casts this story in the form of an amusing anecdote: After much time and
expense, a cat was suitably trained and prepared - only, on its first
assignment, to be run over by a taxi. Marchetti neglects to point out
that nothing stopped the Agency from getting another cat. Or from using
a human being.
32. Of
course, this suggestion raises the knotty question of whether the
abductees suffer from a form of schizophrenia, which may also be
characterized by "voices." I refer the reader to the work of Hopkins,
Strieber, Thomas Bullard, and others who have described the difficulties
of ascribing all abductions to psychotic states.
33. Alan
W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr., THE MIND MANIPULATORS (London:
Paddington Press, 1978), 347.
34.
Thomas, JOURNEY INTO MADNESS, 276.
35. James
Olds, "Hypothalamic Substrates of Reward," PHYSIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, 1962,
42:554; "Emotional Centers in the Brain," SCIENCE JOURNAL, 1967, 3 (5).
36.
Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin, VIOLENCE AND THE BRAIN (New York: Harper
and Row, 1970), chapter 12, excerpted in INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE
FEDERAL ROLE IN BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION, prepared by the Staff of the
Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary,
United States Senate (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1974).
37. John
Lilly, THE SCIENTIST (Berkeley, Ronin Publishing, 1988 [revised
edition]), 90. Monkeys allowed to stimulate themselves continually via
ESB brought themselves to orgasm once every three minutes, sixteen hours
a day. Scientific gatherings throughout the world saw motion pictures of
these experiments, which surely made spectacular cinema.
38.
Scheflin and Opton, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, 336-337. Heath even monitored
his patient's brain responses during the subject's first heterosexual
encounter. Such is the nature of the brave new world before us.
39.
Robert L. Schwitzgebel and Richard M. Bird, "Sociotechnical Design
Factors in Remote Instrumentation with Humans in Natural Environments,"
40.
Thomas, JOURNEY INTO MADNESS, 277. In the BEHAVIOR RESEARCH METHODS AND
INSTRUMENTATION article referenced above, Schwitzgebel details how the
radio signals may be fed into a telephone via a modem and thus analyzed
by a computer anywhere in the world.
41.
Scheflin and Opton, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, 347-349.
42. Louis
Tackwood and the Citizen's Research and Investigation Committee, THE
GLASS HOUSE TAPES (New York: Avon, 1973), 226.
43. Perry
London, BEHAVIOR CONTROL (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 145
44.
Scheflin and Opton, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, 351-353; Tackwood, THE GLASS
HOUSE TAPES, 228.
45.
"Beepers in kids' heads could stop abductors," Las Vegas SUN, Oct. 27,
1987.
46.
Lilly, THE SCIENTIST, 91.
47.
Marks, THE SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE", 151-154.
48.
Interestingly, Lilly has come out of the closet as a sort of
proto-Strieber; THE SCIENTIST recounts his close interaction with alien
(though not necessarily extraterrestrial) forces which he labels "solid
state entities."
49. The
story of Deep Trance, an MKULTRA "insider" who provided invaluable
information, is somewhat involved. I do not know who Trance is/was and
Marks may not know either. He contacted Trance via the writer of an
article published shortly before research on THE SEARCH FOR "THE
MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" began, addressing his informant "Dear Source whose
anonymity I respect." I respect it too - hence my reticence to name the
aforementioned article, which may mark a trail to Trance. The fact that
I have not followed this trail would not prevent others from doing so.
50.
London, BEHAVIOR CONTROL, 139.
51. See
generally, UFO magazine, Vol. 4, No. 2; especially the interesting
contribution by Whitley Strieber.
52.
Lawrence, WERE WE CONTROLLED?, 36-37; Anita Gregory, "Introduction to
Leonid L. Vasilev's EXPERIMENTS IN DISTANT INFLUENCE," PSYCHIC WARFARE:
FACT OR FICTION (editor: John White) (Nottinghamshire: Aquarian, 1988)
34-57.
53.
Lawrence, WERE WE CONTROLLED?, 38.
54.
Bowart, OPERATION MIND CONTROL, 261-264.
55.
Ibid., 263.
56.
Lawrence, WERE WE CONTROLLED?, 52.
57. HUMAN
DRUG TESTING BY THE CIA, 202.
58. Note
especially the Supreme Court's decision in CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
ET Al. V. SIMS, ET AL. (No. 83-1075; decided April 16, 1986). The
egregious and dangerous majority opinion in this case held that
disclosure of the names of scientists and institutions involved in
MKULTRA posed an "unacceptable risk of revealing 'intelligence sources.'
The decisions of the [CIA] Director, who must of course be familiar with
'the whole picture,' as judges are not, are worthy of great
deference...it is conceivable that the mere explanation of why
information must be withheld can convey valuable information to a
foreign intelligence agency." How do we square this continuing need for
secrecy with the CIA's protestations that MKULTRA achieved little
success, that the studies were conducted within the Nueremberg statues
governing medical experiments, and that the research was made available
in the open literature?
59.
Letter, P.A. Lindstrom to Robert Naeslund, July 27, 1983; copy available
from Martti Koski, Kiilinpellontie 2, 21290 Rusko, Finland. Lindstrom
writes that he fully agrees with Lincoln Lawrence, author of WERE WE
CONTROLLED?
60.
Bowart, OPERATION MIND CONTROL, 265. I have attempted without success to
contact Dr. Lindstrom.
61.
Ibid., 233-249. This interview was repinted without attribution in a
bizarre compendium of UFO rumors called THE MATRIX, compiled by
"Valdamar Valerian" (actually John Grace, allegedly a Captain working
for Air Force intelligence).
62.
Robert Anton Wilson, "Adventures with Head Hardware," MAGICAL BLEND, 23
[of course], July 1989.
63.
Michael Hutchison, MEGA BRAIN (New York: Ballantine, 1986); Gerald
Oster, "Auditory Beats in the Brain," SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, September,
1973.
64.
Marilyn Ferguson, THE BRAIN REVOLUTION (New York: Taplinger, 1973), 90.
65.
Ibid., 91-92. The presence of delta in a waking subject can indicate
pathology.
66.
Bio-Pacer promotional and price sheet, available from Lindemann
Laboratories, 3463 State Street, #264, Santa Barbara, CA 93105.
67.
Hutchison, MEGA BRAIN, 117-118. Compare Light's observations about "the
grant game" to Sid Gottlieb's protestations that nearly all "mind
control" research was openly published.
68.
Thomas Martinez and John Gunther, THE BROTHERHOOD OF MURDER (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1988), 230.
69.
Interview, Sandy Monroe of the Los Angeles office of the Christic
Institute.
70. See
generally Paul Brodeur, THE ZAPPING OF AMERICA (Toronto, George J.
MacLeod, 1977).
71. Until
recently, the American Embassy was on a street named after the composer.
72. It
was finally determined that the microwaves were used to receive
transmissions from bugs planted within the embassy. DARPA director
George H. Heimeier went on record stating that PANDORA was never
designed to study "microwaves as a surveillance tool." See Anne Keeler,
"Remote Mind Control Technology," FULL DISCLOSURE #15. I would note that
the Soviet embassy was "bugged and waved" in Canada during the 1950s,
and according to the Los Angeles TIMES (June 5, 1989), the Soviet
embassy in Britain had been similarly affected.
73.
Ronald I. Adams R.A. Williams, BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC
RADIATION (RADIOWAVES AND MICROWAVES) EURASIAN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES,
(Defense Intelligence Agency, March 1976.) Brodeur notes that much of
the work ascribed to the Soviets in this report was actually first
accomplished by scientists in the United States. Keeler argues that this
report constitutes an example of "mirror imaging" - i.e., parading
domestic advances as a foreign threat, the better to pry funding from a
suitably-fearful Congress.
74.
Keeler, "Remote Mind Control Technology."
75. R.J.
MacGregor, "A Brief Survey of Literature Relating to Influence of Low
Intensity Microwaves on Nervous Function" (Santa Monica: RAND
Corporation, 1970).
76.
Keeler, "Remote Mind Control Technology."
77. Larry
Collins, "Mind Control," PLAYBOY, January 1990.
78. Allan
H. Frey, "Behavioral Effects of Electromagnetic Energy," SYMPOSIUM ON
BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS AND MEASUREMENTS OF RADIO FREQUENCIES/MICRO- WAVES,
DeWitt G. Hazzard, editor (U.S. Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, 1977).
79.
Quoted in THE APPLICATION OF TESLA'S TECHNOLOGY IN TODAY'S WORLD
(Montreal: Lafferty, Hardwood & Partners, Ltd., 1978).
80.
Keeler, "Remote Mind Control Technology."
81. L.
George Lawrence, "Electronics and Brain Control," POPULAR ELECTRONICS,
July 1973.
82. Susan
Schiefelbein, "The Invisible Threat," SATURDAY REVIEW, September 15,
1979.
83. E.
Preston, "Studies on the Nervous System, Cardiovascular Function and
Thermoregulation," BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF RADIO FREQUENCY AND MICROWAVE
RADIATION, edited by H.M. Assenheim (Ottawa, Canada: National Research
Council of Canada, 1979), 138-141.
84.
Robert O. Becker, THE BODY ELECTRIC (New York: William Morrow, 1985)
318-319.
85. Ibid.
86.
Ibid., 321.
87. See
Bowart's OPERATION MIND CONTROL, page 218, for an interesting example of
this "rationalization" process at work in the case of Sirhan Sirhan, who
was convicted for the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. In prison,
Sirhan was hypnotized by Dr. Bernard Diamond, who instructed Sirhan to
climb the bars of his cage like a monkey. He did so. After the trance
was removed, Sirhan was shown tapes of his actions; he insisted that he
"acted like a monkey" of his own free will - he claimed he wanted the
exercise.
88.
Keeler suggests that the proposal was revealed only because Schapitz'
sensationalistic implications may have worked to his discredit - and
therefore hide - the REAL research. Personally, I don't accept this
argument, but I respect Keeler's instincts enough to repeat her caveat
here.
89.
Margaret Cheney's TESLA: A MAN OUT OF TIME (New York: Dell, 1981), the
most reliable book in the sea of wild speculation surrounding this
extraordinary scientist, confirms Tesla's early work with the
psychological effects of electromagnetic radiation. See especially pages
101-104; note also the afterword, in which we learn that certain
government agencies have kept important research by Tesla hidden from
the general public.
90. Noted
in Lawrence, WERE WE CONTROLLED?, 29.
91.
Particularly one Thomas Bearden of Huntsville, Alabama; I have in my
possession a document written by Bearden associate Andrew Michrowski
which identifies Bearden as an intelligence agent for an undisclosed
agency.
92.
Kathleen McAuliffe, "The Mind Fields," OMNI magazine, February 1985.
93. May
5, 1985.
94. I
refer to an individual who later wrote a very clear-headed and
thoughtful letter to Dr. Paul Lowinger, who has graciously made his
files available to me. For now, I feel compelled to withhold this
person's name.
95.
Cameron became president of the American Psychiatric Association, the
Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Association of
Psychiatrists, He previously sat on the Nueremberg panel, helping to
draw up the statutes governing ethical medical behavior!
96. In
particular, Opton and Scheflin's overview, though excellent in scope and
detail, continually seeks reassurring interpretations of evidence which
points toward more distressing conclusions.
97.
Martin T. Orne, "Can a hypnotized subject be compelled to carry out
otherwise unacceptable behavior?" INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL AND
EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS, 1972, Vol. 20, 101-117.
98. Marks
mentions, in a letter to Orne, the latter's claim to have been an
unwitting participant in subproject 84. Yet the papers released
concerning subproject 84 clearly establish the Agency's willingness to
put Orne in the know; Orne later admitted to Marks that he was made
aware of his CIA sponsorship (Marks, THE SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN
CANDIDATE", 172-173). In an interview with Marks, Orne discounted the
story of Candy Jones (which we shall recount later) by insisting that if
such an experiment had occurred "someone in some agency would have come
to me." Why would they come to him about a super-secret project, unless
Orne had a high security clearance and worked extensively with
intelligence agencies? Note also that Orne conducted extensive studies
for the Office of Naval Research from June 1, 1968 to May 31, 1971. He
has also been funded by DARPA. Moreover, I consider noteworthy the fact
that Orne somehow became president of the Society for Clinical and
Experimental Hypnosis despite the fact that the organization had decided
not to have a president. (This fact was related to Marks by a prominent
hypnosis specialist in an off-the-record interview that I probably
wasn't supposed to see.)
99. The
story has been told many times. See Turner and Christian's THE KILLING
OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY, 207-208; also Peter J. Reiter, ANTISOCIAL OR
CRIMINAL ACTS AND HYPNOSIS (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas,
1958).
100.
John G. Watkins, "Antisocial behavior under hypnosis: Possible or
impossible?" INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL
HYPNOSIS, 1972, Vol. 20, 95-100.
101.
Milton H. Erickson, "An experimental investigation of the possible
anti-social use of hypnosis," PSYCHIATRY, 1939, vol. 2. Erickson argues
that if a hypnotist has convinced his subject to misperceive reality,
then resulting actions cannot be considered "anti-social," for the
actions would be acceptable within the subject's internal reality
construct. This argument strikes me as semantic quibbling.
102. See
generally Flo Conway and Jim Seigelman, SNAPPING (New York: Lippincott,
1978).
103. Lee
and Schlain, ACID DREAMS, 8-9.
104.
John Marks interview with Victor Marchetti, December 19, 1977 (Marks
files).
105.
Martin T. Orne, "On the Mechanisms of Posthypnotic Amnesia," THE
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS, 1966, vol.
14, 121-134. Orne's work with post-hypnotic amnesia was funded by NIMH,
the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Naval
Research. I should like to hear what innocent explanation, if any, the
Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic
amnesia.
106.
Bowart, OPERATION MIND CONTROL, 242-243.
107.
Obviously Allan Dulles. This may have been a hypnotically-induced
delusion; on the other hand, Dulles' legendary sexual rapacity makes
this claim rather less unlikely than one might first assume.
108.
Always the best indicator of whether or not hypnosis is genuine; I can't
understand why Orne didn't use this test in the Blanchi case.
109.
Herbert Spiegel, "Hypnosis and evidence: Help or hindrance," ANN. N.Y.
ACAD. SCI.; 1980, 347, 73-85.
110.
See, for example, Kroger, HYPNOSIS AND BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION, 21-22
111. See
especially Klass, UFO ABDUCTIONS: A DANGEROUS GAME, 60-61. Orne,
interviewed here, makes reference to the work summarized in his article
"The use and misuse of hypnosis in court" (INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF
CLINICAL HYPNOSIS, 1979, vol. 27, 311-341.)
112.
Klass argues that ufologists, in conducting hypnotic regression
sessions, inadvertently cue their subjects. A close reading of his text
reveals that he never proves or claims that such "cues" have taken place
in any individual instance; he simply believes that cueing MIGHT have
occurred. Had Klass been more willing to deal with abductees directly,
he might have found evidence of cause and effect; as it stands, his
argument really amounts to no more than a suggestion. For all that, I
find his ideas regarding therunning of "clean" hypnotic regression
sessions potentially valuable.
113.
Marks, THE SEARCH FOR "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE", 34-37.
114.
Donald Bain, THE CONTROL OF CANDY JONES (Chicago, Playboy Press, 1976).
115. The
use of hypnotized couriers in warfare goes back to the 19th century.
116.
Estabrooks, HYPNOTISM, 193-214.
117.
John Marks interview with Milton Kline, December 22, 1977 (Marks files).
In another interview, Professor Clare Young (a colleague of Estabrooks'
at Colgate University) confirmed that Estabrooks' hypnosis work for the
government has never been published.
118. Or
could her marriage have been part of the program? "Long John," as he was
popularly known, was famous in UFO circles, and had provided a forum for
such early-day contactees as Howard Menger. He also knew Jackie Gleason,
a prominent (if unlikely) name in the "crashed disc" rumor vaults. Could
Candy have been assigned to discover what Nebel knew?
119.
Marks files. John Marks did excellent work on the Candy Jones story; he
erred - almost unforgivably - on the side of conservatism when he
refused to include information about this incident in his book. I know
the name of the institute involved; however, since Candy saw fit to keep
this aspect of her story secret (probably for sound legal reasons), I
shall follow her lead.
120.
Scheflin and Opton, THE MIND MANIPULATORS, 446-447.
121.
Interviews, Marks files. One of Marks' informants offered the
interesting speculation that Candy's torture sessions were not conducted
in the field, but in the lab - her entire mission might have been a
hypno-programmed fantasy.
122. The
information about Candy's CIA files stems from a telephone interview
with Candy Jones. A problem looms here: CIA cover stories unravel like
the skin of an onion; once you remove the outer layer, the next lie is
revealed. In the case of Candy Jones, the substrata of buncombe involves
allegations that she WILLINGLY complied with the CIA, and used Jensen's
hypnosis experiments as a rationalization for her compliance. Such is
the explanation offered by certain of Marks' informants; alas, Opton and
Scheflin seem to have bought this line. Anyone familiar with the vile
acts of self-degradation to which Candy's programmers subjected her will
laugh this story out of court. No one, short of a severely psychotic
masochist, would willingly undergo what she went through.
123.
Marks files.
124.
William Kroger, CLINICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1963), 299.
125.
Recently, ufologist Jim Moseley, an acquaintance of Candy's, has claimed
that an unidentified source on Nebel's "inner circle" once,
off-the-record, pronounced Candy's story "a crock." This assertion
deserves careful and respectful consideration. Still, Moseley won't
identify his source, and we have no way of telling if this insider spoke
from instinct or certain knowledge, or indeed, what he really meant. Did
he feel Candy was fantasizing or fibbing? If the former, why did her
hallucinations match details of MKULTRA released only after publication
of her book? If the latter, how are we to explain the many hypnotic
regression tapes, at least some of which were made available to outside
investigators? (Fairly elaborate, for a hoax.) In any case, how could
Candy have known the fact (confirmed by Marks' associates) that Kroger
taught "Jensen" at a certain West-coast institute? Why, if the story was
"a crock," would Candy risk libel suits by naming - to associates and
investigators, if not to the general public - real-life hypnotherapists?
All in all, I would suggest that Moseley's "insider" was speaking
glibly, and did not know the true facts.
126.
Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1976.
127.
Ibid., 415.
128.
Similar paranoid outbreaks led to the dissolution of Dr. Richard Neal's
UFO abductee group in Los Angeles, according to a phone interview I had
with Dr. Neal.
129.
Affidavit of Dr. Simpson-Kallas in the case of Sirhan-Sirhan, 1973; see
Bowart, OPERATION MIND CONTROL, 225.
130. All
true MPs have experienced some form of abuse or trauma, psychological or
physical, during childhood.
131. One
was ritually abused in an occult setting. If I were a "spy-chiatrist"
scouting potential fodder for mind control experiments, I would seek out
abused children from military families. (A military background would
ensure that the "right" doctor gets access to the child.) Abduction
researchers should look for such a pattern.
132. I
refer here to the vast upsurge in alien abductions which took place that
year; see generally Kevin Randle, THE OCTOBER SCENARIO (Middle Coast,
1988). Of course, abductions (or, according to my hypothesis, disguised
mind control operations) occurred previous to this year.
133.
John Marks interview with Milton Kline, December 22, 1977 (Marks files).
134.
Brenda Butler ET AL., SKY CRASH, expanded edition (London: Grafton
Books, 1986), 305-321, 354-355.
135.
Telephone interview with Nancy Wright.
136.
Telephone interview with Miranda Parks.
137.
William Moore, "UFOs and the U.S. Government," FOCUS, vol. 4, June 30,
1989. Moore's role in the affair strikes me as highly questionable, even
scandalous - although at least here we have one instance of direct and
irrefutable "insider" testimony of government harassment.
138.
Some have also raised questions about his psychiatric treatment of
Oswald assassin Jack Ruby. I find it odd that a CIA mind control veteran
- who did NOT reside or practice in Dallas - should have been assigned
to the Ruby case.
139.
Samiel Chavkin, THE MIND STEALERS (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1978),
96-107.
140.
Raymond Fowler, THE ANDREASSON AFFAIR (New York: Prentice Hall, 1979).
141. New
York: Warner Books, 1989; 198-202.
142.
Ruth Montgomery, ALIENS AMONG US (Ballantine, 1985), 49. My article
"Psychiatric Abuse of UFO Witness," referred to earlier, also documents
this phenomenon.
143.
Chung-Kwang Chou and Arthur W. Guy, "Quantization of Microwave
Biological Effects," SYMPOSIUM OF BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS AND MEASUREMENT OF
RADIO FREQUENCY/MICROWAVES, edited by Dewitt G. Hazzard (U.S. Department
of Health, Education and Welfare, 1977).
144.
MIAMI HERALD, May 28, 1984 and June 6, 1984; NATIONAL EXAMINER, vol. 22,
no. 18, April 30, 1985. Although the EXAMINER is a supermarket tabloid,
and therefore a questionable source, this periodical has rendered
researchers the service of printing the X-ray of Petit's brain, showing
the implant.
145. Los
Angeles TIMES, March 28, 1988.
146.
Raymond Fowler, THE ANDREASSON AFFAIR, PHASE TWO (Reward, 1982). This
book includes rare photographs of the unmarked helicopters which have
plagued this abduction victim and her family.
147. A
mutual friend described for me an incident in which the former SEAL,
mistakenly perceiving a threat, almost instantly felled, and nearly
killed, a man twice his size. Whatever the truth of my informant's other
statements, he certainly has received advanced combat training.
148.
Fenton Bresler, WHO KILLED JOHN LENNON? (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1989), 45-46.
149.
Bowart, OPERATION MIND CONTROL, 27-42.
150.
Denise Winn, THE MANIPULATED MIND (London, Octagon Press, 1983), 72-73;
Bresler, WHO KILLED JOHN LENNON?, 41; see generally: Peter Watson, WAR
ON THE MIND (London: Hutchison, 1978) (Watson broke the story on Narut
for the London TIMES).
151.
Larry Collins, "Mind Control," PLAYBOY, January 1990.
152.
John Marks interview with Milton Kline, December 22, 1977 (Marks files).
153.
Richard A. Gabriel, NO MORE HEROES (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 124.
154.
Ibid., 150-151.
155. See
generally: Mark Lane, CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS (Simon and Shuster,
1970); A.J. Langguth, HIDDEN TERRORS (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
156.
John G. Fuller, THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY (New York: Dell, 1966).
157.
This detail plays a part in other abductions - for example, it crops up
in the Betty Andreasson Luca case. See Raymond Fowler, THE ANDREASSON
AFFAIR (New York: Bantam, 1980), 50-51.
158.
Stanton Friedman, for example; the reader is referred to his 1988 Whole
Life Expo lecture, "UFOs: A Cosmic Watergate."
159. THE
BODY ELECTRIC, 196-202.
160. The
Fish map has received wide discussion; for a representative sampling,
the reader is directed to the aforementioned Friedman lecture (note
158); Terence Dickenson, "The Zeti Reticuli Incident," ASTRONOMY,
December, 1974; Klass, UFO ABDUCTIONS: A DANGEROUS GAME, 20-23; and John
Rimmer, THE EVIDENCE FOR ALIEN ABDUCTIONS (Weillingborough: Aquarian,
1984), 88-92. Incidentally, Klass has proposed to Friedman a test
regarding the ability to recall such material accurately under hypnotic
regression; Friedman, for reasons best known to himself, declined the
offer to participate.
161.
Jacques Vallee, DIMENSIONS (Chicago: Contemporary, 1988), 266.
162. See
Rimmer, THE EVIDENCE FOR ALIEN ABDUCTIONS, 91-92. None of this is meant
to denigrate Marjorie Fish, whose work has received universal praise.
163.
Fuller, THE INTERRUPTED JOURNEY, 18-19.
164.
Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, THE BOSS: J. EDGAR HOOVER AND
THE GREAT AMERICAN INQUISITION (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1978), 325; Chip Berlet, "The Hunt for the Red Menace," COVERT ACTION
INFORMATION BULLETIN, no. 31 (winter, 1989); J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO
(memo), March 4, 1968.
165. For
example, Delgado's work pre-dates the Hill incident. Moreover, one of
the few pages released on MKULTRA subproject 119 concerns "a critical
review of the literature and scientific developments related to the
recording, analysis and interpretation of bioelectric signals from the
human organism, and activation of human behavior by remote means." The
review took place in 1960-61. Presumably, the CIA wanted to DO something
with the information so derived.
166.
"UFO Abductions Workshop," Whole Life Expo, March, 1988.
167.
Ludwig Mayer, DIE TECHNIC DER HYPNOSE (Munich: J.H. Lehmanns Verlag,
1953), 225; quoted in: Heinz E. Hammerschlag (translation: John Cohen)
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME (Hollywood: Wilshire Book Company, 1957), 24-25.
168.
Numerous articles discuss this possibility; see, for example, William C.
Coe ET AL. "An Approach Toward Isolating Factors that Influence
Antisocial Conduct in Hypnosis," THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL
AND EXPERIMENTAL HYPNOSIS, 1972, vol XX, no. 2, 118-131, as well as
other reports in that issue. The difference between the laboratory and
the "field" settings may account for the success of Mayer's experiment
and the apparent failure of the "aliens."
169. For
a description of a quite similar experiment conducted under CIA auspices
in 1954, see "CIA able to control minds by hypnosis, data shows," THE
WASHINGTON POST, February 19, 1978.
170.
Abductee interview, "Veronica." The reader will, I hope, forgive my use
of a pseudonym here. For the most part, I hope to deal in this work with
published cases. Suffice it to say, Veronica's testimony proved
fascinating, troubling, convoluted, problematical; in spite of all the
questions raised by this case, I still believe it to have substantial
bearing on my thesis. The reader will forgive me for severing relations
with this abductee before completing an investigation; she keeps a
mini-armory next to her bed.
171.
Abductee interview, "Veronica," At one point, she ran an informal
abductee/contactee group; as a result, she was able to describe many
other cases to me.
172. One
ARTICHOKE document explicitly details a failed attempt to use hypnosis
to induce the assassination of a foreign leader. The document is
undated; the experiment took place January 8-January 15, 1954. Document
reproduced in CIA PAPERS, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Capitol Information
Associates, 1986),39-41.
173.
John Marks interview of Prof. Jack Tracktir (Marks files).
174.
Jenny Randles, ABDUCTIONS (London: Robert Hale, 1988), 52-53.
175. As
in, for example, the Palle Hardrup affair.
176.
Private correspondence, Robert Durant to the author.
177.
Abductee interview, "Polly." I won't give the facial details here;
suffice it to say that this abductor, like Margary's (noted earlier),
has something of the smell of greasepaint about him.
178. The
base is mantioned in Ann Druffel's and D. Scott Rogo's THE TUJUNGA
CANYON CONTACTS (New York: Signet, 1989) [expanded edition], 157.
179. On
the other hand, Armstrong asks us to accept his own channelled material,
so he would have an awkward time should he choose to challenge the
"psychic impressions" of others.
180.
Jacques Vallee, MESSENGERS OF DECEPTION (Berkeley: And/Or Press, 1979),
192-193.
181.
Curtis G. Fuller (editor), PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL UFO
CONGRESS (New York: Warner Books, 1980), 307.
182. For
information of Pelley, see John Roy Carlson, UNDER COVER (New York:
Dutton, 1943).
183.
Gerald B. Bryan, PSYCHIC DICTATORSHIP IN AMERICA (Los Angeles: Truth
Research, 1940). An essential book-length expose of Ballardism. One of
Bryan's sources alleges that Ballard, before founding the I AM group,
may have practiced some variety of black magic.
184. The
student should carefully compare the I AM dogma with the available
information on pre-Third Reich occultism; the best sources are James
Webb's masterful analyses, THE OCCULT ESTABLISHMENT and THE OCCULT
UNDERGROUND (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing, 1976).
185.
Vallee, MESSENGERS OF DECEPTION, 192-194.
186.
Even a cursory examination of Williamson's SECRET OF THE ANDES (London:
Neville Superman, 1961), written under the pseudonym Brother Philip,
will reveal the I AM connections.
187.
Personal sources. Van Tassell's "Integration," a domed structure
allegedly built under extra-terrestrial guidance (located near
Twentynine Palms, California) prominently displays, to this day, key I
AM artifacts such as the portraits of Jesus and Saint Germain
(commissioned by Ballard).
188.
"The Afghan Arms Pipeline," COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN, no. 30
(summer, 1988).
189.
Telephone interview with John Judge.
190.
Village of Oak Creek, Arizona: Entheos, 1989, 119. I can't recall ever
encountering another book title which contained so many grammatical
errors. Armstrong's accomplishment is genuinely impressive.
191. For
further information on I AM, Prophet's organization, saucer cults, and
other groups, see the appropriate sections of J. Gordon Melton's
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN RELIGION.
192.
Ruth Montgomery, ALIENS AMONG US (New York: Ballantine, 1985), 128-188.
193.
Penny Harper, "Are Aliens Taking Over the Earth?" WHOLE LIFE TIMES,
January 1990.
194.
John Keel, WHY UFOS: OPERATION TROJAN HORSE (New York: Manor Books,
1970) [paperback edition], 228.
195.
Hickson and Mendez, UFO CONTACT AT PASCAGOULA, 242.
196.
Strieber, COMMUNION, 134; TRANSFORMATION, 109.
197. "Contactee:
Firsthand," UFO magazine, vol. 4, no. 2, 1989.
198.
Telephone conversation, Tom Adams.
199. Ed
Conroy, REPORT ON COMMUNION (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 365-385.
200. "Contactee:
Firsthand," UFO magazine, vol. 3, no. 3.
201. New
York: Zebra, 1971. See especially note 2, Chap. 9.
Selected
Bibliography On Mind Control
ACID DREAMS, by Martin A.
Lee and Bruce Shlain (Grove, 1985). Outstanding work on MKULTRA and
drugs.
THE BODY ELECTRIC, by
Robert Becker (Morrow, 1985). Important.
THE BRAIN CHANGERS, by
Maya Pines (Signet, 1973). Outdated, but an excellent chapter on the
stimoceiver and related technologies.
BRAIN CONTROL, by Elliot
Valenstein (John Wiley and Sons, 1973). Highly conservative; outdated;
still worth reading.
CIA PAPERS, compiled by
Capitol Information Associates (POB 8275, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48107).
Interesting selection of MKULTRA documents.
THE CONTROL OF CANDY
JONES, by Donald Bain (Playboy Press, 1976). Mandatory reading.
HUMAN DRUG TESTING BY THE
CIA, hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research
on the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate (Government
Printing Office, 1977).
HYPNOTISM, by George
Estabrooks (Dutton, 1957). See especially the chapters on hypnosis in
warfare and crime. Some modern experts in clinical hypnosis decry
Estabrooks' work. These "experts" tend to have a history of funding by
CIA cut-outs and military intelligence. I suspect they denounce
Estabrooks not because his work was shoddy, but because he let the cat
out of the bag.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND THE
FEDERAL ROLE IN BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION, by the Staff of the Subcommittee
on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, United
States Senate (Government Printing Office, 1974).
MEGABRAIN, by Michael
Hutchison (Ballantine, 1986). The only popular book on modern mind
machines.
MESSENGERS OF DECEPTION,
by Jacques Vallee (And/Or, 1979). Vallee has been criticized, correctly,
for including in this book invented "conversations" with a composite
character he calls Major Murphy. But the section on cults in this book
bears a haunting resemblance to stories I have heard in my own
investigations.
THE MIND MANIPULATORS, by
Opton and Scheflin (Paddington Press, 1978). Conservative, but extremely
useful as a reference work.
MIND WARS, by Ronald
McCrae (St. Martin's Press, 1984).
OPERATION MIND CONTROL, by
Walter Bowart (Dell, 1978). The best single volume on the subject.
Difficult to find; indeed, this book's rapid disappearance from
bookstores and libraries has aroused the suspicions of some researchers.
(Tom David Books, POB 1107, Aptos, CA 95001, carries this work.)
PHYSICAL CONTROL OF THE
MIND, by Jose Delgado (Harper and Row, 1969). Outdated but still
essential.
PROJECT MKULTRA, joint
hearing before the Select Committee on Health and Scientific Research of
the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate (Government
Printing Office, 1977).
PSYCHIC WARFARE: FACT OR
FICTION? edited by John White (Aquarian, 1988). See especially Michael
Rossman's contribution.
PSYCHOTECHNOLOGY, Robert
L. Schwitzgebel and Ralph K. Schwitzgebel (Holt, Rhinehart and Winston,
1973).
THE SCIENTIST, by John
Lilly (expanded edition: Ronin, 1988). Bizarre - Lilly is an
ex-"brainwashing" specialist who claims to be in contact with aliens. Is
he controlled or controlling?
THE SEARCH FOR "THE
MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE", by John Marks (Bantam, 1978). An invaluable book.
However, many people have made the mistake of assuming it tells the full
story. It does not.
WERE WE CONTROLLED? by
Lincoln Lawrence (University Books, 1967). Explores possible connections
to the JFK assassination. Dr. Petter Lindstrom's endorsement of this
work makes it mandatory reading.
WHO KILLED JOHN LENNON? by
Fenton Bresler (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Interesting thesis concerning
the possible use of mind control on Mark David Chapman. Better in its
analysis of Chapman than in its history of mind control. In my own work,
I have encountered data which may help confirm Bresler's theory.
THE ZAPPING OF AMERICA, by
Paul Brodeur (MacLeod [Canadian edition], 1976). Contains a good chapter
on microwave mind control technology.
