This was a man once fêted by the Soviet government, which — ten years earlier — had instructed him to blast his silent messages at Red Army troops on their way to Afghanistan. Those messages said, “Do not get drunk before battle.”125
Then, however, the story began to get very interesting, and with it, the implications of such technologies for claims of revelation multiply like rabbits:But the glory days were long gone by March 1993 — the month Igor Smirnov received a telephone call, out of the blue, from the FBI. Could he fly to Arlington, Virginia, right away? Igor Smirnov was intrigued, and quite amazed, and he got on a plane.
The U.S. intelligence community had been spying on Igor Smirnov for years. It seemed he’d succeeded in creating a system of influencing people from afar — putting voices into their heads, remotely altering their outlook on life — perhaps without the subjects even knowing it was being done to them.... The question was: Could Igor do it to David Koresh? Could he put the voice of God into David Koresh’s head?126
At this juncture, it is worth pausing to take some stock of the situation, and at some crucial techniques used by Dr. Smirnov.
First, it is to be noted that Dr. Smirnov’s technology was taken very seriously, not only by the former Soviet government, but by the American FBI. Secondly, it is also to be noted that the FBI was not hesitant to deploy such technology on American citizens. Thirdly, and finally, it is also to be noted that the FBI had a specific use in mind for that technology in Koresh’s case: it wanted Smirnov to convince Koresh that he was receiving another revelation, hearing the voice of God Himself, while in reality, the voice being heard was only the hidden agenda of the FBI. The pattern — that of an elite in possession of a technology which it is using for a hidden agenda, hiding it behind the “voice of God” — has its own obvious and disturbing implications for the hypothesis of the possible existence and use of such technologies in ancient times.
But one should also take note of two basic facts about the technology — and the technique — used by Dr. Smirnov, for both optical and aural techniques were used simultaneously and in conjunction with each other. The BBC even ran a short report on two unnamed Russian “psychologists” that were brought in by the FBI. During the report, the Russians’ equipment was shown, which included flashing lights on television, as the reporter stated that various key words were beamed in white noise to the “listener.” We may refer to these two significant data points and techniques as the “flashing lights” and “strange sounds” techniques.127
In any case, what came of the FBI’s attempt to recruit Dr. Smirnov and his technology for use during the Waco massacre?The FBI flew Dr. Smirnov from Moscow to Arlington, Virginia, where he found himself in a conference room with representatives of the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The idea, the agents explained, was to use the telephone lines. The FBI negotiators would bargain with Koresh as usual but, underneath, the silent voice of God would tell Koresh whatever the FBI wanted God to say.
Dr. Smirnov said this was possible.
But then bureaucracy crept into the negotiations. An FBI agent said he was concerned that the endeavor might somehow lead to the Branch Davidians committing mass suicide. Would Dr. Smirnov sign something to the effect that if they did kill themselves as a result of the voice of God being subliminally implanted in their heads, he would take responsibility?
Dr. Smirnov said he wouldn’t sign something like that.
And so the meeting broke up.
An agent told Dr. Smirnov it was a shame it didn’t work out. He said they had already co-opted someone to play the voice of God.
Had Dr. Smirnov’s technology been put into practice at Waco, the agent said, God would have been played by Charlton Heston.128
If true — and there is no reason to disbelieve Ronson’s research — then this account sheds much light not only into the disturbing possibilities of mind manipulation technology, but also upon the agendas of the elites who would use it, for note the subtle suggestion is that the FBI was perhaps contemplating putting the “suggestion” into Koresh’s mind to have everyone inside his compound commit mass suicide à la Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple cult. Had that happened, it would not have been the first time that the voice of “God” has urged wholesale slaughter through a spokesman who has received a “revelation.” But more of that later.
B. THE MIND MANIPULATORS: MIND MANIPULATION TECHNOLOGIES
But was Dr. Smirnov in fact correct? Could technology actually be used to induce people to hear the “voice of God” and, by implication, see Him as well? Could those technologies be used, additionally, to induce emotional states of willing obedience and to suppress the individual conscience and will, if not to alter it completely? It is here that the story and its implications become even more — to coin a pun — mind-boggling.
1. The Alien Abduction Scenario and the Moral Disconnect
Martin Cannon is a researcher who has pulled together the most salient articles and books on the subject of mind control and compiled them into an intriguing examination of the alleged phenomenon of “alien abduction” in an Internet article entitled “The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abduction.”129 However, the philosophical implications of his observations certainly spill far beyond the containers of “alien abduction” and raise serious questions for the whole prospect of religious revelations as a technologically manipulated phenomenon. Cannon observes that within the field of ufologythe term “abduction” has come to refer to an infinitely confounding experience, or matrix of experiences, shared by a dizzying number of individuals, who claim that travelers from the stars have scooped them out of their beds, or snatched them from their cars, and subjected them to interrogations, quasi-medical examinations, and “instruction” periods. Usually, these sessions are said to occur within alien spacecraft; frequently, the stories include terrifying details reminiscent of the tortures inflicted in Germany’s death camps. The abductees often (though not always) lose all memory of these events; they find themselves back in their cars or beds, unable to account for hours of “missing time.”130
But the oddest fact that seems to be a common feature of all these stories is that “many abductees, for all their vividly recollected agonies, claim to love their alien tormentors.”131 In other words, there is a “moral disconnect” between the actual experience itself, and the feelings its victims experience or recall toward their perpetrators, reactions that, under ordinary circumstances, normal persons would not feel. As will be seen subsequently, this “moral disconnect” is a common feature within “post-revelation” occurrences within religion, and even then, when “ordinary” emotions appear to surface within the religious “experiencer,” these are quickly dealt with by a variety of techniques.
2. The False Dialectic, Occam’s Razor, and Their Implications
Cannon maintains that a false dialectic of interpretive possibilities has been deliberately created around the abduction phenomenon, a dialectic created precisely in order to deflect attention from a possible interpretation that explains the phenomenon and its real origins. That dialectic is between the “extraterrestrial believers” on the one hand, and the “abduction skeptics” who would maintain that nothing other than particularly vivid nightmares are occurring on the other: The myth of the UFO has provided an effective cover story for an entirely different sort of mystery. Remove yourself from the Believer/Skeptic dialectic, and you will see the third alternative.”132 That third alternative is to consider that (1) the phenomenon itself is very real, but (2) what produced it was a terrestrial technology and agenda, not an extraterrestrial one:I posit that the abductees have been abducted. Yet they are also spewing fantasy — or, more precisely, they have been given a set of lies to repeat and believe. If my hypothesis proves true, then we must accept the following: the kidnapping is real. The fear is real. The pain is real. The instruction is real. But the little grey men from Zeta Reticuli are not
real; they are constructs, Halloween masks meant to disguise the real faces of the controllers. The abductors may not be visitors from Beyond; rather, they may be a symptom of the carcinoma which blackens our body politic.133
This “believer-skeptic” dialectic is strongly suggestive of a similar method that I believe was put into place to control the interpretive possibilities of another famous UFO-related event: the Roswell incident of July 1947.
There, once again, the interpretive possibilities were quickly promulgated by the United States Army Air Force within mere hours of each other, for it maintained that what had crashed, and what it had recovered, were either (1) a flying saucer (with all its “extraterrestrial” implications), or (2) a mere weather balloon. These two poles established what I call “The Roswell Dialectic.”134 What both dialectics are designed to do is to conceal the possibility of very terrestrial technological explanations for the two events, and to conceal the possible agendas those technologies might suggest.
This dialectic immediately reveals serious ramifications for the technological possibilities of explanation of various “special revelations” in religious history, for one need but substitute the word “God” in the “ET” pole of the dialectic to disclose yet another possibility of locking interpretations into two mutually exclusive poles to conceal a possibly hidden third technological alternative: God becomes opposed to “skepticism,” that is to say, to atheism and agnosticism with their “purely mundane” trivializations of what ancient texts state about their special “revelations.”
Cannon states this difficulty in connection with Occam’s razor:Certainly, we are not being narrow-minded if we ask researchers to exhaust all terrestrial explanations before looking heavenward.
Granted, this particular explanation may, at first, seem as bizarre as the phenomenon itself. But I invite the skeptical reader to examine the work of George Estabrooks, a seminal theorist on the use of hypnosis in warfare, and a veteran of Project MKULTRA.135 Estabrooks once amused himself during a party by covertly hypnotizing two friends, who were led to believe that the Prime Minister of England had just arrived; Estabrooks’ victims spent an hour conversing with, and even serving drinks to, the esteemed visitor. For ufologists, this incident raises an inescapable question: If the Mesmeric arts can successfully evoke a non-existent Prime Minister, why can’t a representative from the Pleiades be similarly induced?136
And by the same token, if non-existent Prime Ministers and Pleiadeans can be induced, why not Moses’ Burning Bush or Mohammed’s visions of Gabriel, and so on?
There is yet another thorny implication posed by the existence of such technologies and techniques for religious apologetics, and that is the “disposal problem.” During the era of the CIA’s initial mind-control experiments, there was a problem: how to “dispose” of the victims of the experiments and thus keep the experiments secret? As outright murder was considered to be morally repugnant, the solution quickly devolved into erasing the memory of the event, or implanting entirely false contexts within the victims’ minds by which to interpret it. Thus a whole new chapter in mind-control experimentation began, namely, how to wipe selective memories and replace them with false ones? And here, an experience of “God” will work just as well as an experience with “ET,” raising yet more possibilities.
3. Electronic Methods of Mind Manipulation
So what exactly are the known technologies of mind manipulation? How do they work? And what are their capabilities? We have already, in our examination of their planned and actual use on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, seen some of them. The various means might conveniently be divided into two categories: (1) “soft” ones, involving techniques of manipulating the mind into channels of interpretive possibilities, such as was noted in the case of the dialectical channeling of the interpretations of “alien abductions” and the Roswell incident; and (2) “hard” ones, involving actual technological manipulations of the mind by various means. Our concentration here will be upon the technological means, as opposed to the techniques.
In the CIA’s own studies of the techniques and technologies of mind manipulation — which we may assume is a fairly representative template of the work conducted in other nations — virtually the entire spectrum was experimented upon, from “soft” techniques such as hypnosis, drugs, the creation and manipulation of religious cults, extra-sensory perception (ESP), sensory deprivation, and conditioning, to “hard” technologies such as the use of microwaves, brain implants, psychosurgery, and all possible combinations of them.137 These experiments included projects forthe “erasure of memory, hypnotic resistance to torture, truth serums, post-hypnotic suggestion, rapid induction of hypnosis, electronic stimulation of the brain, non-ionizing radiation, microwave induction of intracerebral “voices,” and a host of even more disturbing technologies.138
Whatever the “host of even more disturbing technologies” may have been, it is crucial to note here the use of microwaves to induce the actual “hearing” of voices into the human brain. The implication, both for the “ET abduction” scenario and for the technological potentialities of “revelation manipulation” are rather obvious.
a. Electromagnetic Fields, Implants, and Combinational Approaches
The earliest types of electric manipulation of the brain included direct implantation of electronic components in the brain. Noting that abductees “often describe operations in which needles are inserted into the brain” and “more frequently still, they report implantation of foreign objects through the sinus cavities,” Cannon observes that as abduction researchers leap to the extraterrestrial conclusion from these bizarre circumstances, they “have failed to familiarize themselves with certain little-heralded advances in terrestrial technology.”139 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 minature 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 bullring. 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.140
This episode, recounted many times in the literature of mind control, palpably demonstrated the potentialities of the technologies, even in the late 1950s, so it is a simple matter to extrapolate what might be done now, decades later, after enough money, research, and manpower, and those willing to throw morality and humanity out the window in order to achieve breakthroughs.
Delgado pressed his research, and was able by 1973 to report that “Radio stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus... produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses.”141 Note that by 1973, direct contact of an implanted device in the brain was no longer necessary; the effects, including “colored visions,” could be induced remotely from a distance via electromagnetic targeting of certain regions of the brain.
These types of discoveries soon ushered in a new quest within the technologies of mind manipulation, technologies that could induce specific auditory, visual, and emotional effects in an individual or group target.According to a [Defense Intelligence Agency] report released under the Freedom of Information Act, microwaves can induce metabolic changes, alter brain functions, and disrupt behavior patterns. [Project Pandora] discovered that pulsed microwaves can create leaks in the blood/brain barrier, induce heart seizures, and create behavioral disorganization. In 1970, a RAND Corporation scientist reported that microwaves could be used to pr
omote insomnia, fatigue, irritability, memory loss, and hallucinations.
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.142
Note again that all that is needed is to entrain a wave onto a target brain in the desired frequency of a normal electro-encephalogram and this process can be used to inflict memory loss, hallucinations (seeing visions), and even inflict heart attacks from a distance, and leave no readily apparent evidence that this has been done!
b. The Remote Induction of Trances and “Hearing Voices”
But such technologies and techniques were taken even further in work done in 1973! Trance may be remotely induced — but can it be directed? Yes. Recall the intracerebral voices... 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 intra-cerebral static (this phenomenon is now called “the Frey effect”); in 1973, Dr. Joseph Sharp, of the Walter Reed Amy 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.
Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men: The Surviving Elites of the Cosmic War and Their Hidden Agenda Page 9
