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 abductee’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, 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 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 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]
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 other tools, thoughtless and effective.
And it is my contention that to create this soldier of the future, the controllers 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 had 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.