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 (1 mW) 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 dizziness, 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. Cazamalli, 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 (extra-low-frequency) 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 intracerebral 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 the 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 electromagnetic 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 early 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 alarmists[91] 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 an amplifier 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 as 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 Republic[93] described the experiment, “A matched control group sat in the same room without being bombarded by non-ionizing radiation.” Apparently, one can focus “the wave” quite narrowly — a fact which has wide implications for abductees.