CIA MIND CONTROL
AT STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE

         
By Alex Constantine

         
December 1996

Concrete evidence that electronic mind control was an object of study at SRI was exposed by the Washington Post on August 7, 1977:

"When the Navy awarded a contract to the Institute, the scientific assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Sam Koslov, received a routine briefing on various research projects, including SRI's. As the briefer flashed his chart onto the screen and began to speak, Koslov stormily interrupted, 'What the hell is that about?' Among the glowing words on the projected chart, the section describing SRI's work was labeled,

ELF and Mind Control.

ELF stands for extremely [low] frequency electromagnetic waves, from the very slow brain frequencies up to about 100 cycles per second.... But the Mind Control label really upset Koslov. He ordered the SRI investigations for the Navy stopped, and canceled another $35,000 in Navy funds slated for more remote viewing work."

Contrary to Koslov's order to kill the research, the Navy quietly continued to fork out $100,000 for a two-year project directed by a BIONICS specialist.

Mind control is not a humanitarian pastime: the project was military, and if SRI was indeed a source of covert EMR brain experimentation, test subjects from the community at large were subjected to torture plied with the same thorough disregard for human rights as the radiation tests conducted at the height of the Cold War.

The treatment subjects have received at the hands of their own government would be considered atrocities if practiced in wartime.

Mind control was also used in domestic covert operations designed to further the CIA's heady geopolitical ambitions, and during the Vietnam War period SRI was a hive of covert political subterfuge. The Symbionese Liberation Army, like the People's Temple, was a creation of the CIA. The SLA had at its core a clique of black ex-convicts from Vacaville Prison. Donald DeFreeze, otherwise known as Cinque, led the SLA. He was formerly an informant for the LAPDs Criminal Conspiracy Section and the director of Vacaville's Black Cultural Association (BCA), a covert mind control unit with funding from the CIA channeled through SRI. The Menlo Park behavior modification specialists experimented with psychoactive drugs administered to members of the BCA. Black prisoners were programmed to murder selected black leaders once on the outside.

The CIA/SRI zombie killer hit list included Oakland school superintendent Dr. Marcus Foster, and Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, among others. DeFreeze stated that at Vacaville in 1971-72, he was the subject of a CIA mind control experiment. He described his incarceration on the prisons third floor, where he was corralled by CIA agents who drugged him and said he would become the leader of a radical movement and kidnap a wealthy person. After his escape from Vacaville (an exit door was left unlocked for him), that's exactly what he did.

EM mind control machines were championed at Stanford University by Dr. Karl Pribram, director of the Neuropsychology Research Laboratory: "I certainly could educate a child by putting an electrode in the lateral hypothalmus and then selecting the situations at which I stimulate it. In this was I can grossly change his behavior." Psychology Today feted Pribram as "The Magellan of Brain Science." He obtained his B.S. and M.D. degrees at the University of Chicago, and at Stanford University studied how the brain processes and stores sensory imagery. He is credited with discovering that mental imaging bears a close resemblance to hologram projection (the basis for transmitting images to the craniums of test subjects under the misnomer "remote viewing?").

The Institute is bonded incestuously to corporate sponsors. Former SRI Chairman E. Hornsby Wasson, for example, was a director of several major companies, including Standard Oil of California, and he went on to become chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and CEO of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph and Bell Telephone of Nevada.

The SRI/SAIC psi experiments were supervised at Langley by John McMahon, second in command under William Casey, succeeding Bobby Ray Inman, the SAIC director. McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the CIA whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for technological exotics for CIA covert actions. He was recruited by the Agency after his graduation from Holy Cross College (the alma mater of CIA contractees Edward Bennett Williams, attorney, and Robert Maheu, hit man). He is a former director of the Technical Services Division, deputy director for Operations, and in 1982 McMahon was appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence. He left the Agency six years later to take the position of president of the Lockheed Missiles and Space Systems Group. In 1994, he moved on to Draper Laboratories. He is a director of the Defense Enterprise Fund and an adviser to congressional committees.

Many of the SRI empaths were mustered from L. Ron Hubbard's Church of Scientology. Harold Puthoff, the Institute's senior researcher, was a leading Scientologist. Two remote viewers from SRI have also held rank in the Church: Ingo Swann, a Class VII Operating Thetan, a founder of the Scientology Center in Los Angeles, and the late Pat Price. Puthoff and Targ's lab assistant was a Scientologist married to a minister of the church. When Swann joined SRI, he stated openly, "fourteen Clears participated in the experiments, more than I would suspect." At the time he denied CIA involvement, but now acknowledges, "it was rather common knowledge all along who the sponsor was, although in documents the identity of the Agency was concealed behind the sobriquet of an east-coast scientist."

The Agency's interest was quite extensive. A number of agents of the CIA came themselves ultimately to SRI to act as subjects in remote viewing experiments, as did some members of Congress.

"If you recall," astronaut Edgar Mitchell, another participant in the experiments, informed radio disinformation broker Art Bell on April 30, 1996, "back in the early '70s, I did work at SRI with Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ and Uri Geller, and I was invited to brief the CIA on our results. George Bush was head of the CIA at that time. Subsequently, a great deal of psychic work was done by CIA, and very successfully because the Soviets were doing it at that time as well -- very successfully."

Mitchell spins a cocoon of mystical yarns as outrageously far-fetched as any of his SRI cronies. He claims to have traced the brain's center of ESP to native creativity, a "relationship that exists in nature, it's responsible for our inner-experience.... It involves the zero-point field, quantum physics, mystical experience, parapsychological functioning...." The ubiquitous "aliens," he insists, are at the heart of the federal UFO cover-up, visitors from a civilization "a few million, or even a few billion years older than we are." His book The Way of the Explorer is chock-a-block with the astronaut's rambling Shamanic cover stories, supposedly the culmination of 25 years of research on intelligent life in the universe and the paranormal.

The Agency was purportedly so taken with the SRI experiments that the bankroll for "human augmentation" research swelled. Millions of dollars were thrown at "Grill Flame" under (DIA) and Navy auspices. The projects at SRI were augmented by a parapsychology team at Fort Meade in Maryland under INSCOM and the NSA. Military intelligence personnel were recruited, including Major Ed Dames, the Psi-Tech founder, occultist and communer with "demons." General Stubblebine ran the project and broadened it to include tarot and the channeling of spirits. By this time, Puthoff and Swann left the Church of Scientology to join a spin-off religious movement.

The DIA inherited "Grill Flame." A reporter for the BBC (requesting anonymity) offers a glimpse of the Army's remote viewing project at Fort Meade, and declares he was given The Official Line, i.e., "we were about to be used for disinformation. As soon as I started asking hard questions, the project was taken away from us and [given] to a far more docile broadcaster." The British correspondent learned that medical oversight for the psi experiments was provided by Dr. Louis Jolyon West, then a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, one of the most notorious CIA mind-control specialists in the country. Apart from monitoring the health of the subjects, according to SRI spokesmen, Dr. West conducted his own experimental studies of the phenomenology of dissociative states," or multiple personalities, at the Institute. Colin Ross, a specialist in dissociative disorders, confirms that Dr. West's work for the CIA centered on the biology or personality of dissociative states.

In "Pseudo-Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults" (1994), Dr. Louis "Jolly" West examines the creation of "changelings," or dissociative personalities that enable the subject of mind-control conditioning to adapt to trauma. "Prolonged environmental stress," UCLA's own ranking CIA mind-control specialist observed (in a drastic departure from the public stance of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, an organization he formerly directed as a advisory board member, on multiplicity), "or life situations profoundly different from the usual, can disrupt the normally integrative functions of personality. Individuals subjected to such forces may adapt through dissociation by generating an altered persona, or pseudo-identity."

Patricia Hearst (examined by Dr. West for trial) hosted an alternate personality named "Pearl," he offers, a manifestation more distinct and individuated than "Tania." The newspaper heiress was subjected to a regimen of "persuasive coercion" (a personal form of harassment by an organized group, any form of intimidation short of violence) and trauma-based programmimg of a sort developed by CIA specialists (like Dr. West) -- "violently abducted by members of the [CIA-mustered] Symbionese Liberation Army in February of 1974, brutalized, raped, tortured, and forced to participate in illegal acts beginning with the bank robbery for which she was later (in our view wrongly) convicted. The traumatic kidnapping and subsequent 2 months of torture produced in her a state of emotional regression and fearful compliance with the demands and expectations of her captors. This was quickly followed by the coerced transformation of Patty into Tania and subsequently (less well known to the public) into Pearl, after additional trauma over a period of many months (Hearst & Moscow, 1988; The Trial of Patty Hearst, 1976). Tania was merely a role coerced on pain of death; it was Pearl who later represented the pseudo-identity which was found on psychiatric examination by one of us (West) shortly after Hearst's arrest by the FBI. Chronic symptoms of PTSD were also prominent in this case."

Many victims of the CIA-anchored experimentation have been left with multiple personalities induced at a young age, and it is certain that the CIA can trigger induced multiple personalities electronically from a remote source to commit any act on cue, the ultimate Manchurian Candidate. Under Dr. West's tutelage at UCLA, parapsychology experiments of another sort were conducted by Kirlian aura researcher Thelma Moss, a writer for television and a human guinea-pig herself in LSD experiments conducted in 1957. Three years later, as a UCLA psychology student, she designed protocols for her own LSD experiments under the supervision of Dr. Oscar Janiger.

The CIA, of course, could not be far away. Dr. Janiger's supplier of the drug was the legendary Captain Al Hubbard, the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. "Nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard," Janiger once said, "and probably nothing ever should."

Hubbard, a convicted rum-runner, had a knack for electronic communications. He was recruited by the OSS by agents of Allen Dulles and surely reported to the CIA thereafter. Hubbard, an arch-arch-conservative, joined SRI at the urging of Willis Harman, director of the Institute's Educational Policy Research Center, ostensibly as a security guard. Harman, an LSD experimenter himself, admits, "Al never did anything resembling security work." Hubbard was employed on the Alternative Futures Project, a corporate strategy program. Al had a grandiose idea, one co-worker recalls, that "if he could give the psychedelic experience to the major executives of the Fortune 500 companies, he could change the whole of society." Hubbard was a major supplier to university's sponsoring experimentation, and flooded the youth subculture he despised with LSD in the 1960s. The massive drug-dealing operation at least as large as the government's, and had Harmon's was full support. Al Hubbard's contract at SRI was canceled in 1974.

Among the labs closed in 1966 with the criminalization of LSD was Dr. Janiger's.

His protege, Thelma Moss, continued to pursue experimentation with the hallucinogen as a psychotherapeutic tool, later as an ESP trigger and for experiments in "behavior modification." Her increasingly bizarre interests led her to Kirlian photography, and she set up a lab at the Neuropsychiatric Institute under Dr. West.

At least one volunteer in Moss' experiments alleges to have been led down a blind alley to lifelong torture. D.S. (requesting anonymity) appeared on Moss' doorstep in 1978. After the experiments, she was overwhelmed by back-to-back psychic experiences. Not true ones, she realized, but precognitive dreams that had to be fed to me. (Biotelemetric subjects routinely complain that their dreams are commandeered.) For 15 years she walked through a barrage of EM novelty effects. The psychic episodes gradually gave way to torture, including severe head pains and endless hours of persuasive coercion, the art of psychological paralysis honed by the CIA in the prison system.

In 1994 she began to receive non-stop audio transmissions that still torment her, cybernetic voices registering on her brain's primary frequency allocation, her mental channel.

Another indication that military biotechnology, cyber-psi, was focal in Stargate research was the Agency's choice of The American Institutes of Research (AIR) in Washington, D.C. to evaluate the validity of remote viewing. AIR could be counted on to keep the (mind control) secrets. In the 1970s, the Army's Office of the Inspector General released declassified files disclosing a series of CIA-DoD behavior modification experiments conducted in prisons, mental hospitals and campuses from 1950 through 1971. The documents identified 44 laboratories enriched with public tax funds for secret, inhumane brain research. The first on the list was AIR. SRI also received funding. An in-house study ensured CIA personnel would not be dragged in from the cold. Some of the aims of the research:

Inducing toxic psychosis, terminal cancer, stress, sleep, headaches and chemical lobotomies.

Developing foods that taste normal but stimulate fear and anxiety.

The concoction of drugs to facilitate the brainwashing of civilians.

Using LSD-25 and electrodes in the brain to pinpoint pain centers.

A number of SRI spinoffs have taken remote viewing into the private sector. A brochure for the Farsight Institute states flatly that technology is used, and promotes the alien diversion: The Farsight Institute (TFI) was founded by Courtney Brown, Ph.D., in 1995, evolving from a research program he conducted in the early 1990s, described in his book Cosmic Voyage: A Scientific Discovery of Extraterrestrials Visiting Earth (Dutton 1996). "Dr. Brown's investigations began with his training in a remote viewing technology that had previously been used by the U.S. military during highly classified operations in the 1980s and '90s," according to his sales literature. "Historically, the principal breakthroughs with this technology were made at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s and 1980s by the gifted artist and natural psychic, Ingo Swann. The vision of The Farsight Institute is to promote the continued research and development of the most modern and effective forms of this continually evolving technology." Other remote viewing gurus from the SRI program have sprung up like poison mushrooms around the country, ranting obliquely on the paranormal and scapegoating "aliens."

The rhetoric is a serious development in intelligence cult programming for mass consumption. The populace is subjected to the same crazed systems used to indoctrinate recruits of the mind control cults.

Psi-Tech founder Ed Dames claimed on Art Bell's syndicated radio program that his company can comb "the collective unconscious" for answers to such mysteries as the origins of the AIDS virus. By scanning the "Global Mind," Dames claims, "we perceived massive global weather changes that preclude growing crops, a tremendous problem with epidemics and pandemics in Third World countries because it appears the ozone problem is increasing the mutation rate. Were perceiving a bovine AIDS that kills a lot of babies. The future gets grimmer after that."

Parapsychology, E.T.s and the "End Times" are not just for the cults anymore. The intelligence community wants the you to believe ... believe ...

... the Cold War-style propagandists. Current mind control disinformation has its foundations in anti-Communist propaganda. Lt. Col Thomas Beardon, an Army Reservist, was made to order in magazines published by the "Committee to Restore the Constitution" and other ultra-conservative organizations. Beardon had a loyal following. He made a career of writing about emergent Soviet EM mind-control technology, but somehow it rarely seemed to cross his mind that the U.S. might be pursuing the same initiative. Beardon warned that the Soviets were developing weapons that generate "time-reversed (TR) electromagnetic waves," and were capable of launching a "TR Blitzkrieg War" of awful proportions. He warned grimly that the black-hearted Communists had their hands on "time-reversal" weapons that could "take Europe." A single flying Soviet "TR wave weapon," he claimed, was capable of knocking out all British and American radars. It could "kill personnel wholesale."