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 with 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 tetrahydrocannabinol, 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 CHATTER, 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 note worthies 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, psycho-surgery, 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 Psychocivilized Society [25] 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 a therapist — odd term, under the circumstances — can communicate with his subject.[33]