Mind Control: Fact or Fiction? (Patreon)

As the fear of Communism escalated after World War II, the US government decided to develop a new weapon that sounds like it’s from the annals of science fiction: mind control. This effort was led by the CIA in a program called MKULTRA, which was made up of 149 "subprojects" involving more than 80 academic institutions, prisons, and organizations.

In 1975, then-CIA Director William Colby appeared before the US Senate’s Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly called the Church Committee after its Chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Colby proved that he wasn’t averse to publicizing the Agency’s nasty secrets or “family jewels.” In front of a national television audience, he candidly confessed to assassination initiatives and mind-control programs that had been shrouded from the American public. Colby didn’t receive accolades for his candor, but, rather, incurred the wrath of ranking intelligence officials and President Gerald Ford—Ford fired him as CIA Director, and Colby was replaced by then-envoy to China, George H.W. Bush. Colby later wrote that he found solace in his disclosures before the Church Hearing, because he believed the CIA must be accountable to Congress and the public under the Constitution—he felt he had done the right thing, not only for his country but also for his conscience.

But we will never know the true savagery and horrors of the MKULTRA, because in 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms ordered that all of the documentation from the CIA’s mind control programs be destroyed. However, bureaucratic ineptitude enabled a fraction of the MKULTA documentation to survive, and some of it is chilling.

During my interview with Wendy Hoffman, I mentioned Subproject 136. Documentation from that subproject demonstrates that the agency was willing to carry out extremely ominous experimentation on children that included electroshock, drugs, hypnosis and “psychological tricks,” and the documents discussed the experimenters’ inducing disassociation and multiple personality disorder. I also mentioned CIA funded psychiatrist Lauretta Bender conducting extremely cruel mind control experiments on children.

Like Lauretta Bender, psychiatrist Ewen Cameron’s CIA funded research was sheer sadism. He dressed up his procedures with pseudo-scientific names like ‘de-patterning’ and ‘psychic driving.’ Cameron varied them over time and from patient to patient but they typically involved a mix of the following: drug-induced coma, each experimental ‘treatment’ for Cameron’s patients (two thirds of whom were women) would usually begin and conclude with ‘sleep therapy’ (i.e. a coma induced by administering barbiturates). During the drug-induced sleep, patients would be woken up for feeding, the toilet and to be given regular electroshocks (i.e. ECT) which would start after about three days of sleep. The combined sleep-electroshock ‘treatment’ lasted between 15-30 days, sometimes up to 65 days. So that patients did not harm themselves as a result of the epileptic seizures caused by the ECT, they were immobilized with muscle relaxant drugs. In the standard electroshock therapy of the time, doctors would give patients a single dose of 110 volts, lasting a fraction of a second, every one or two days. In contrast Cameron used a from 20 to 40 times more intense, two or three times daily, with the power turned up to 150 volts.

Cameron then started psychic driving, which was negative taped messages (e.g. ‘my mother hates me’). The aim of psychic driving was to ‘get rid of unwanted behavior and then this would be followed by positive messages ‘to condition in desired personality traits’. The messages (taken from recordings of Cameron’s interviews with patients) were played repetitively on a tape-loop system via loudspeakers or a football helmet contraption for 16 hours a day for several weeks. Cameron sought to intensify the effect by placing his patients in a sensory deprivation ‘box’ in the hospital and giving them cocktails of drugs which would immobilize them, but, yet, keep them awake whilst they experienced hallucinations induced by psychedelic drugs.

The studies of ritual abuse and mind control survivors have contained relatively limited numbers of subjects, but in 2007 a team of researchers from the United States and Germany conducted the Adult Survivors of Extreme Abuse Survey (EAS), the largest study of ritual-abuse survivors to date. The team provided an online website for survivor advocates and survivors. The website featured a survey of 238 questions, ranging from demographics to categories of abuse. Of the 1,471 participants responding to the questionnaire, 987 completed the “Categories of Abuse” component:

191 participants claimed to have experienced only ritual abuse, 69 said that they had undergone only mind control, and 513 reported that they experienced both ritual abuse and mind control.

Of the 704 EAS respondents reporting ritual abuse, 543 respondents specifically reported ritual abuse. When the EAS investigators crunched the numbers concerning the participants who claimed ritual abuse, they were amazed at how closely the types of ritual abuse reported by the EAS respondents matched the types of ritual abuse found in a 1991 study conducted by the National Center for the Treatment of Dissociative Disorders. The latter study, published in the Journal of Child Abuse and Neglect, found that 100% of the subjects reporting ritual abuse had been sexually abused, physically abused and/or tortured, had witnessed animal mutilations, and received death threats: The respective percentages of the EAS respondents reporting abuse in those categories were 95%, 96%, 86%, and 93%. The National Center for the Treatment of Dissociative Disorders found that 83% of the subjects in its ritual abuse study had witnessed a human sacrifice, and 82% of EAS respondents had witnessed murder carried out by their abusers.

When I started to explore ritual abuse and mind control, I thought it was merely the stuff of nightmares, and, I have to confess, I was initially dubious of the therapists I contacted who worked with ritual abuse survivors and mind control victims. But over the years, as I’ve cultivated a rapport with these therapists, I’ve concluded that they haven’t lost their minds, nor are they religious zealots. In fact, a 1995 study published in the Journal of Professional Psychology: Research and Practice looked at the question of whether or not therapists who work with ritual abuse victims tended to be religious. The study looked at 497 Christian therapists and 100 members of the American Psychological Association, and their respective diagnoses of dissociative disorder, sexual abuse and ritual abuse. The study concluded that Christian therapists and APA members diagnosed dissociative disorder and sexual abuse with the same frequency, and Christian therapists’ diagnosis of ritual abuse was only slightly higher than that of the APA members questioned. A second study, published in The Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, concluded that religious beliefs had no relationship to a therapist’s identification of ritual abuse.