The Canadian psychiatrist and specialist on trauma and dissociation, Dr. Colin Ross, presented a paper at the 9th Annual Western Clinical Conference on Trauma and Dissociation in Orange County, California, where he showed that he encountered evidence from released CIA-FOIA documents that the agency did research on the creation of Manchurian candidates since World War II. Dr. Ross and research organizations like the New York based Advocacy Committee for Human Experiment Survivors-Mind Control (ACHES-MC) also came across survivors of horrific experiments involving electroshock, drugs, brain implants, sensory deprivation, psychic driving, locked in cages, forced sleep and sexual and ritual abuse.[7,8] Once selected, victims have been used as human lab animals repeatedly–some of them have been used throughout their lifetime in one externally controlled and monitored experiment after another.
Lecture given at 9th Annual Western Clinical Conference on Trauma and Dissociation, April 18, 1996, Orange County, California]
I’m very very happy that you are all here. This is the first time that I have talked on this stuff in public, and the problem was that Kevin made a little mistake on the schedule. He didn’t get the title quite right. This is actually a performance art piece. It’s entitled: “Psychiatrist Trying to Stay Calm and Casual“. But before we go any further, by the way, there are a couple of messages here for people who are supposed to call home: William C. Hollinger (if he’s here) – he’s supposed to call his lab in Pittsburgh. L. Wilson Green, you’re supposed to call your lab at Edgeware Arsenal. And Ewen Cameron, there’s a message to call Leonard in Montreal. So why is it I am talking about this, and what is it I am trying to say here?
Well, one explanation is no one has the faintest idea what I am talking about and I am here talking about it because I am a little wacky. Hopefully by the end of the day, that won’t be the conclusion. However, that is a conclusion that unhappily is in print in various esteemed locations such as the British Journal of Psychiatry, Esquire Magazine, and Richard’s Ofshe’s book, and a CBC film.
It’s been a very curious experience to go through this little journey that Kevin just alluded to, which is the same journey that we have all gone through if we have heard this from patients. It’s starts off back in the remote past, 1981-85, when I am a psychiatric resident. I mentioned yesterday that in four years of medical school and four years of residency, I have had more multiple choice questions on Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, which just to remind you, as you all know, is an inherited deficiency of enzyme hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosltransferase-I had more questions on that syndrome in my four years of medical school and four years of psychiatric residency than on childhood sexual abuse, and more teaching.
So then somewhere in the course of the residency I get up to speed on dissociative disorders and connect them to childhood abuse and read up on the literature and get a little bit grounded, and the avalanche of MPD cases starts for me in late 1985 into 1986, and I think I have kind of (a little bit) got what’s going on and some person comes in and starts telling me about their father was killed by the Mafia and they were taken to a child prostitution brothel and then they were involved in satanic ritual stuff.
So I go “Gee”, no books, no literature, nobody ever heard of it, nobody talks about it, totally in outer space, no idea what to do, which way to turn. I go to the Eastern Regional Conference, go to Chicago, find out a little bit, start getting a little bit grounded and the first couple of cases, my personal reaction is, “Gawh!” – this sure sounds real, could be real, it’s pretty scary. Wonder if I should let my kids out on Halloween or not. And then the sort of basic experience is whatever percent of SRA is actually real, it is clear that we got into some sort of hysteria wave in society in general, and in the profession, and a lot of people went a bridge or two too far on their journey, and we had to reign ourselves back in.
So the time course now is, in my training, there is no sexual abuse at all. It doesn’t exist. It’s not relevant because it doesn’t exist. Then it goes to, well, it exists, but it’s not really all that relevant and then there’s these sorts of outlaw gadfly sort of people who are into dissociative disorders who aren’t accepted by the mainstream. Then the dissociative disorders people from a foundation of reality that was hidden go off into outer space on this-it wasn’t alien abductions, but it was still outer space-on this ritual abuse stuff. Then they sort of come back to earth and get a little bit grounded-and the next thing you know it’s all this government experiments, mind control stuff. So if you follow the pattern, what should be the case is just another hysteria wave. And the more you look at it, the more it will just dissolve, and we will all settle down and forget about it.
Well the pattern didn’t work. Because when I systematically started looking into CIA military mind control, the more I looked, the more solid reality there was there. And as you will see as we go through these slides, and through this talk, it’s a completely different deal from SRA. Somewhere out there in the justice system, there may actually be objective evidence where somebody has actually busted a SRA cult. If there is, that information is not generally publicly available to us. It is a fact that we have not nailed down human ritual sacrifice cults in North America if they exist. So it’s all conjecture.
Today I will prove to you, completely locked down, documented, proven, beyond dispute discussion that intelligence agencies have been creating Manchurian candidates and MPD for operational use since the Second World War. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a fact.
Now that’s very amazing because if you took an opinion poll of all the psychiatrists in the American Psychiatric Association today-or you took the same poll five years ago — 99.999% … over 99% of the psychiatrists would say “it’s fiction, we know the movie is fiction, Frank Sinatra did a good job, but there’s just no way, it’s absolutely impossible.” (There might be two outlaw psychiatrists in the whole group who would say that it’s possible that Manchurian candidates are real.) This is a very, very strange phenomena that actually in 1996 this is a completely documented fact-it’s a very strange sociological little development in the field of psychiatry. How could that be possible? Well I’m going to try and explain how it’s possible. So that’s “what” I am going to talk about. Also I am going to talk about not just creating Manchurian candidates, but the whole network of mind control doctors that is involved in this and supports this-this kind of old boys’ network that maintains all of this. And you will see a whole bunch of slides with godzillian interconnections that I will go into in detail. And every one of those steps – unless I otherwise specify – is completely documented. Absolutely objective in full.
So there is something real peculiar about the whole story. It’s a very strange story. It tells us that there is something going on in our culture and in the mental health field that is hidden and secret. This is another kind of incest secret in the field of psychiatry that all of these people who have been running psychiatry in the latter half of the 20th century are either directly or loosely connected to a whole huge universe of covert hidden secretly funded mind control research, and as I emphasized, that’s a fact.
Now why should we be talking about that at this conference? Well it’s obvious. If in fact experimental MPD has been created and has been tight and hard and real enough for operational use by intelligence agencies for the last 50 years, then it is something of interest to the dissociative disorders field.
This is profound evidence in favour of the iatrogenic pathway to DID that I talked about this morning. When I combine the expert witness experience that I have had at clinically created iatrogenic DID using the techniques of destructive psychotherapy cults in the course of persuasion, as I described this morning-when I take that expert witness evidence and see those cases created out of a base of no pre-existing DID and then I go to this CIA military mind control literature, my only possible conclusion is yes, you can create full tilt DID artificially from ground zero.
Also I have to conclude that you can create any degree of complexity, permutations of false memory that you want. There is absolutely no limit on the quantity, complexity, reality, congruence, plausibility of false memories that you can insert in somebody’s mind-wittingly or unwittingly.
So-they didn’t tell me that in medical school. This is a little sub paradigm revolution in the DID field. There is a huge wealth of information, experimental information, clinical anecdotal information, and operational street smarts knowledge of DID that’s been up and running and full tilt in the mental health field for 50 years now. This did not spring out of nowhere in 1980, and we are missing a ton of experimental research data that’s still classified that bears directly on this false memory debate that is going on in our society now. And you will see some of the players in this whole scenario of interesting people. (If we could put the slide projector on)
Every slide that I will show you is in your handout packet, so you don’t have to take notes. Anybody who is listening to the tape-there are also a few examples of the documents. If you want that information, you can call me at Charter Hospital at 1-800-255-3312 and we can just mail that to you.
The first point is that there are a lot of documented declassified mind control research programs that are completely objectively proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. I have a lot of this material and some I have on order. This is CIA now. Bluebird and Artichoke were two programs that ran from 1951-53 and I will read you some stuff from Artichoke in a minute. These were then rolled over into MKULTRA which ran from 1953 to 1963 and then there are 149 sub-projects that you will see a listing of in a second. That was then administratively rolled over into MKSEARCH which ran until 1973.
Contiguously with that, and in collaboration with Edgeware Arsenal, MKNAOMI which involved MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD type research done abroad and nationally ran from 1953 to 1970. This involves all kinds of hallucinogens, hypnosis and so on that I will go into in detail. STARGATE just recently declassified E.S.P., paranormal, remote viewing military uses of telekinesis type research that was done from an uncertain start date up until 1984. Bill Gates, former Director of the CIA on ABC’s Dateline in December of 1995 said that it ran up until 1984. They had one of the academic contractors to STARGATE on the show and they had the man whose job was CIA oversight of military experimentation under STARGATE.
So this really went on, they really used psychics operationally and they believed in it enough to keep spending millions of dollars on it for several decades probably. Now when you read all the Senate materials from the 1970’s and you read all the existing literature, the claim of the intelligence community was that all this mind control research was stopped in 1973 due to Senate oversight and so on. One of the MKULTRA sub-projects is on the paranormal, esp and using esp for covert operations purposes. That element of MKULTRA didn’t stop in 1973. We now know from the CIA itself that it ran on until 1984. So we know for a fact that at least that element of this mind control research program that was said to have stopped in 1973, continued to 1984. My position is that it is simply implausible that this stuff isn’t ongoing up to the present.
You can see from this list (Projects Chatter, Often, Derbyhat, Third Chance, Chickwit, MKDelta and QK Hilltop) that there was a large number of different programs in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s … all of which have a just a little tidbit of information about them. Most of the actual documents and so on, nobody has either reviewed or obtained through the Freedom of Information Act yet. So this is a huge amount of, as yet still classified information.
Now we are going to give you a smattering run-through of the institutions that were sites for MKULTRA research. In MKULTRA there were 149 different sub-projects and these were not in obscure little corners of the world. This is the American Psychological Association, this is the Butler Hospital Health Centre which is part of Harvard, Children’s International Summer Village … this is a charming place … this is a project involving a study of children at an international summer camp aged 11 and the study of how children who don’t share a common language communicate and in the CIA report it states that the investigator was unwitting of the fact that it was CIA funding and the purpose of the CIA in these 11 year olds was that they might possibly identify promising young foreign nationals for future use by the Agency.
Columbia University, Cornell, Denver, Emory, Florida, George Washington, Harvard. This will give you a feel for who is involved in this stuff. Houston, Illinois, Indiana Universities, Johns Hopkins, Eli Lilly was the big supplier of LSD to the CIA. Those of you who can remember the sixties might remember the “House of the Rising Sun” by the British rock group, The Animals. They had a song called “The Girl Named Sandoz”. Sandoz was the employer of Hoffman who discovered LSD in the forties, and Sandoz was the original supplier of LSD to the CIA and the military in the 1950’s and they wanted a secure American supplier so they contracted with Eli Lilly to become the developer. University of Minnesota, New Jersey Reformatory, Bordentown in Tennessee … Ohio, University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, Princeton, Stanford, a couple of universities in Texas, Wisconsin, the Bureau of Narcotics, a prison, a narcotics farm. So these contracts … McGill, NIH, NIMH, National Philosophical Society … everything and everybody gets in on the act a little. NRC. So these were all of the major players in North American psychiatry and psychology who were receiving this kind of funding.
Office of Naval Research … which you are going to see multiple times on the slides. Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology … all kinds of different agencies and groups. MKSEARCH was the one that MKULTRA was rolled into. It ran from 1963 to 1973. Again Bureau of Narcotics, New Jersey Neuropsychiatric which is also an MKULTRA site which I will talk about in more detail. Vacaville State Prison which you are going to hear a whole bunch about.
Now BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE which were 1951-53 … institutions there include the Bureau of Narcotics, Cornell, Eli Lilly again, NIH, Public Health Service, University of Minnesota … you get the idea. Now what about the proven identity of some of the actual contractors? The terminology here is … we’ve got the contractor and we’ve got the sub-project number and I have most of the sub- contract files. Security status … TS means top secret cleared, UW means unwitting because this money was usually put through a funding front and you will see a slide showing how that was all organized so a person could get money through a CIA funding front and genuinely not know it was CIA money. They would just think it was another Foundation. Most of the people you haven’t heard of like James Hamilton, Harold Abramson, Carl Pfeiffer, but you will hear more about them later today.
Some of these people might sound a little familiar … Louis Jolyon West at UCLA, Ewen Cameron who was at McGill, he’s been written about a lot, and yes this is Carl Rogers of Rogerian psychotherapy fame. He was actually a spook psychiatrist with top secret clearance who was on the Advisory Board of one of the funding fronts and received funding for psychotherapeutic research on schizophrenia. It’s a very funny thing that Mr. Friendly Carl was in the network. Martin Orne, you will hear a lot about him. These people were at University of Oklahoma. They were doing research on street gangs. Four of the MKULTRA sub-projects were on children and all of the investigators for those were UW unwitting.
Martin Orne’s top secret clearance status. Maitland Baldwin who did stuff on monkey brains. George White was a CIA career officer who constructed safe houses in San Francisco and New York where people were recruited in off the streets to have sex with prostitutes and were given LSD and other drugs without their knowing it. The rationale for this was that they were attempting to study reaction of unwitting subjects in civilian settings to mind control drugs. An alternative hypothesis to this was that they were actually testing Manchurian candidate prostitute performance.
Harold Wolff was at Cornell. Raymond Prince I have corresponded with. He was UW unwitting. He did research among the Aruba in Nigeria on their folk healing practices. R. Gordon Watson-I was a little bit unhappy to see him on the list, but relieved to see he was unwitting because I read a book of his called “SOMA: Divine Mushrooms of Immortality” … a very interesting book on Fly Agrate which is the little red toadstool with the white flakes on it. The use of that by circumpolar shamans has a very interesting history. John Mulholland is actually a magician. When you go through these documents, all these names are whited out. You have to piece it together from here and there. It’s a great big story trying to track it all down. Except they goofed it up. John Mulholland was not whited out once. When you get a file on one of these sub-projects, there is usually a page in there that has standardized wording about no individuals associated with this project are witting or so and so whose name is whited out has top secret clearance and is aware of agency involvement.
There’s somebody you have probably heard of. His name is B.F. Skinner. I am still doing some of the archival research to find out what his sub-project number is, and what his security status is but I would suspect it will turn out to be top secret. Just before we get to that slide, I am going to read you some material, some of which is in your handout. As you can see, these slides are going to show you an awful lot of connections between an awful lot of different things here. You get the gist … there were a lot of different sub-projects, a lot of different investigators all over mainstream academia.
Now I am going to jump to proving to you that MPD has been created by the CIA and the military since WWII. The first stop off point is at the back of your series of handouts there. It’s a publication called “Science Digest, April 1971”, the author is G.H. Estabrooks. The article is called “Hypnosis Comes of Age”. When you go to page 48, I am going to read this out loud for the benefit of people listening to this on tape. He’s now writing, in 1971, and says the following:
“One of the most fascinating but dangerous applications of hypnosis is its use in military intelligence. This is a field with which I am familiar through formulating guidelines for the techniques used by the United States in two world wars.”
(Ross: For those of you who are not history buffs, that means at least back to 1914.)
“Communication in war is always a headache. Codes can be broken. A professional spy may or may not stay bought. Your own man may have unquestionable loyalty but his judgment is always open to question. The “hypnotic courier” on the other hand, provides a unique solution.
I was involved in preparing many subjects for this work during World War II. One successful case involved an Army Service Corps Captain whom we’ll call George Smith. Captain Smith had undergone months of training. He was an excellent subject but did not realize it. I had removed from him, by post-hypnotic suggestion, all recollection of ever having been hypnotized.
First I had the Service Corps call the captain to Washington and tell him they needed a report on the mechanical equipment of Division X headquartered in Tokyo. Smith was ordered to leave by jet next morning, pick up the report and return at once. These orders were given him in the waking state. Consciously, that was all he knew, and it was the story he gave his wife and friends. Then I put him under deep hypnosis, and gave him-orally-a vital message to be delivered directly on his arrival in Japan to a certain colonel-let’s say his name was Brown-of military intelligence. Outside of myself, Colonel Brown was the only person who could hypnotize Captain Smith. This is “locking”.
(Ross: I have had patients talk to me about “locking”.)
I performed it by saying to the hypnotized Captain: ‘Until further orders from me, only Colonel Brown and I can hypnotize you. We will use a signal phrase ‘the moon is clear’. Whenever you hear this phrase from Brown or myself you will pass instantly into deep hypnosis.’
When Captain Smith re-awakened, he had no conscious memory of what happened in trance. All that he was aware of was that he must head for Tokyo to pick up a division report. On arrival there, Smith reported to Brown, who hypnotized him with the signal phrase. Under hypnosis, Smith delivered my message and received one to bring back. Awakened, he was given the division report and returned home by jet.
There I hypnotized him once more with the signal phrase, and he spieled off Brown’s answer that had been dutifully tucked away in his unconscious mind.
The system is virtually foolproof. As exemplified by this case, the information literally was “locked” in Smith’s unconscious for retrieval by the only two people who knew the combination. The subject had no conscious memory of what happened, so couldn’t spill the beans. No one else could hypnotize him even if they might know the signal phrase. Not all applications of hypnotism to military intelligence are as tidy as that. Perhaps you have read ‘The Three Faces of Eve’.
(Ross: Now here he makes a scholarly mistake because he’s talking about Morton Prince’s “The Dissociation of a Personality” but he refers to the book “The Three Faces of Eve”.)
The book was based on a case reported in 1905 by Dr. Morton Prince of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard. He startled everyone in the field by announcing that he had cured a woman named Beauchamp of a split personality problem. Using post-hypnotic suggestion to submerge an incompatible, childlike facet of the patient, he’d been able to make two other sides of Mrs. Beauchamp compatible, and lump them together in a single cohesive personality.
Clinical hypnotists throughout the world jumped on the multiple personality bandwagon as a fascinating frontier. By the 1920’s, not only had they learned to apply post-hypnotic suggestion to deal with this weird problem, but also had learned how to split certain complex individuals (Ross: a very interesting phrase) into multiple personalities like Jeckyll-Hydes. The potential for military intelligence has been nightmarish. During World War II, I worked this technique with a vulnerable Marine lieutenant I’ll call Jones. Under the watchful eye of Marine Intelligence, I split her personality into Jones A and Jones B. Jones A, once a “normal” working Marine, became entirely different. He talked communist doctrine and meant it. He was welcomed enthusiastically by communist cells, was deliberately given a dishonorable discharge by the Corps, which was in on the plot, (Ross: that’s called “sheep-dipping”, that’s the technical term for that) and became a card-carrying party member.
The joker was Jones B, the second personality, formerly apparent in the conscious Marine. Under hypnosis, this Jones had been carefully coached by suggestion. Jones B was the deeper personality, knew all the thoughts of Jones A, was a loyal American and was “imprinted” to say nothing during conscious phases. All I had to do was hypnotize the whole man, get in touch with Jones B, the loyal American, and I had a pipeline straight into the Communist camp. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. While there was no way for an enemy to expose Jones’ dual personality, they suspected it, and played the same trick on us later.
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