Response to:

[Note:1]

Mind Games
by Sharon Weinberger
Washington Post Magazine, January 14, 2007

Allen Barker, Ph.D. says:

January 24th, 2007 at 11:39 pm

These are my comments on the article by Sharon Weinberger in the Jan. 14, 2007
Washington Post Magazine, titled “Mind Games.” The article is available online
at: 1

I would like to thank Ms. Weinberger for researching and writing this arti-
cle. The article seems reasonably fair, based on the openly available sources de-
scribing research into areas like “voice-to-skull” technologies. That might not
seem like much, except that up until now even that has been a very rare thing, in-
deed—especially published in a mainstream paper like the Washington Post.

As the article points out, such technologies have been researched for many
years. The advanced forms are highly classified. Given this, any victims of non-
consensual experimentation truly have an uphill battle as far as even getting peo-
ple to acknowledge what is going on.

Even the state of open technology in this area is not widely known. Many
ordinary citizens who think about the problem for ten minutes, based on naive
views of government and outdated knowledge of 70s-era technology, will tend to
dismiss the claims of TIs.[Note:2] Even back in the 70s there was more existing
technology than many people are aware of, and consider how much more exists
now after all the advances in computers and in other areas. For example, here are
a couple of links to some recent articles on open-technology: 2

These two articles involve RFID chips and neural prosthetics, and describe
a level of technology that is beyond what people commonly assume is available as
the unclassified state of the art.

Most people also tend not to think like “mind controllers.” That is to their
credit in most cases, but we all know that some tyrants—both petty and large—

[Note:1] Response from “Washington Post Magazine on Mind Control,” January 19th, 2007,
sharonweinberger.com.
1 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399_pf.html
[Note:2] TI is an abbreviation for “Targeted Individual.”
2 http://www.umc.pitt.edu/pittmag/spring2006/feature3.html
http://www.umc.pitt.edu/pittmag/fall2005/feature1.html

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covet nothing more than the ability to control other people’s lives. Just because
you and I do not think like that, some people do think like that—some people will
always want to be the next Stalin. That is why eternal vigilance is necessary to
maintain liberty even if there is just a potential threat.

In evaluating technologies, then, one has to have some idea about how
such technologies might be abused. Various conditioning effects, for example,
can be used to influence people using only fairly low levels of technology and
surveillance. Influencing operations do not require 100% total control over a per-
son (that is a common straw man argument, in fact). Even if the influencing does
not work as planned, it can nonetheless constitute torture to a nonconsensual sub-
ject.

Below are a few general comments on parts of the article.

In the article, Gloria Naylor’s book is compared to a 1957 book by Evelyn

Waugh in which a character is “gaslighted” with voices to his head as well as
“performances” designed to be meaningful only to him. I am not going to com-
ment on Waugh or the character in his book, but this does give me an opportunity
to point out part of the long history of mind-control technologies and operations.

The year 1957 was during the height of MKULTRA mind-control experi-
mentation. A reading of the limited, surviving, redacted financial records gives a
picture of how widespread the program was, as well as how it was covertly
funded through “cutouts.” It is commonly believed that MKULTRA was mainly
about LSD testing, but there were literally hundreds of subprograms which inves-
tigated just about every conceivable way to manipulate and influence human be-
ings. This included things like remote polygraphs and electronic influencing and
control.

One major goal of MKULTRA was to find ways to discredit people. That
much is explicitly documented. One way to discredit a person was to drop them
acid in public, but there are many other ways. Certainly dropping acid to unwit-
ting people was tested on nonconsensual citizens, and it is reasonable to assume
that many other techniques were similarly tested.

Besides just the capability for “street theater” performances, what voice-
to-skull technologies existed back in 1957?

In the late 50s Ewen Cameron was already experimenting with what he
called “psychic driving.” He would tape-record interviews with his patients and
then play parts of those tapes back to them, repetitively. He used speakers in the
ceilings, pillow speakers, and even speakers in football helmets that the patients
could not remove in order to constantly bombard his “patients” with voices. He is
known to have experimented with mimicking the voices of people familiar to the
subjects, as well as with using multiple voices to exploit possible effects of social

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influencing such as “peer pressure.” This research was funded by the CIA under
MKULTRA. So the idea of beaming voices at people for mind control was not
new to people in the clandestine world of mind control, even back in the late 50s.

Another late-50s voice-to-skull technology is the tooth implant. This is

really rather simple technology, despite some people’s unwarranted skepticism.
All it takes is a small radio receiver and a piezoelectric vibrator for bone-
conducted audio. There is a patent for such a device which was submitted to the
patent office in the late 50s. That particular patent also makes use of facial nerves
in addition to bone conduction (which was already prior art at the time).

Experiments were also conducted to try to replicate the radio reception

that some people naturally experienced due to certain fillings in their teeth,
though what resulted from such investigations is not well-documented. I am not
saying that a tooth implant was used in any particular case, but that the technol-
ogy has existed for a very long time. It is a possibility that at least deserves con-
sideration in certain cases, rather than completely dismissing a priori the entire
hypothesis that external (or exogenous) voices were ever inflicted on a person.

Back in the 50s hypnosis was a major focus of mind-control research. It is

a commonly-held belief that people cannot be hypnotized against their will or
made to do things under hypnosis which they wouldn’t ordinarily do, but the be-
lief is not true; it is false. Although not everyone can be hypnotized against their
will or made to do things that they would not ordinarily do, some people are
highly susceptible to hypnosis and hence are highly vulnerable. Given that, con-
sider how much more effective hypnosis against a susceptible individual would be
if the hypnotist had 24/7 voice contact with that subject in order to constantly re-
inforce the “training” and to issue commands.

The hypnosis research under programs like BLUEBIRD and MKULTRA

in the 50s also made use of technology. There was research into how radio waves
of various sorts affected hypnotic susceptibility. There were literally experiments
into hypnotizing people and installing posthypnotic commands which could be
activated over the telephone. This was not just a Hollywood movie; it is docu-
mented to have been tested on actual human subjects. Another area which was
researched by the CIA was the use of hidden subliminals in music to enhance
hypnosis. This use of auditory subliminals to transmit hidden signals is similar to
more modern techniques such as the Russian “acoustic psycho-correction” tech-
nology and the Lowery “silent sounds” technique (where a high-frequency audio
carrier tone is voice-modulated). The FBI was reported to have investigated using
the Russian technology to send the fake “voice of God” to Koresh at Waco, so
clearly the FBI knows that such things exist. The Russian technology was ac-
quired in the 90s by a Richmond, Va. company.

The point is that these techniques and technologies have existed in various
forms and have been researched and tested for literally decades. The new tech-

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nologies just open up even more potential for abuses of human rights (as well as
any positive applications that the technologies might enable if they were to be
used to actually help people). Human beings and governments have long con-
spired to harass certain individuals; only the methods change over the years.
COINTELPRO, for example, has a long history going back many years.

In addition to comparing Naylor’s book with Waugh’s book, the article

also compares TIs to people claiming to have been abducted by aliens. I do not
want to get too much into that because the TI who was quoted as saying it would
keep them “marginalized and discredited” was right. Even just mentioning the
subject tends to bring in the space-alien connotations and associated ridicule. One
main and obvious difference that seems to somehow get “overlooked” is that
mind-control operations are real. They have, for example, been investigated by
Congress and are known to have been conducted by the CIA et al. In that way the
issue of mind control is completely and utterly different from alien abductions.

Interestingly, though, the Air Force is known to have used UFOs as a

cover story to distract from investigations of its classified aircraft flights. A simi-
lar use of UFOs as purposeful disinformation to discredit investigations into clas-
sified mind-control experimentation cannot be dismissed. Consider, for example,
the documents relating to Project Pandora at the DOD’s FOIA reading room, es-
pecially the 469-page Project Pandora Operational Procedure document.3

Now Project Pandora, as the Washington Post article mentions, was an in-
vestigation into the use of microwaves to influence human behavior. That is solid,
real, and scientific. The document above describes, for example, experiments with
monkeys trained to work on tasks and then subjected to performance-degradation
due to intentional microwave exposure. It describes studies of sailors exposed to
microwaves. It includes results related to the effects of microwaves on EEGs and
on heart rates in rabbits. Then guess what follows, in the Project Pandora Opera-
tional Procedure document?

What follows is a full-blown Majestic-12/Roswell UFO disinformation

story. Yes, this “serious” government FOIA document discusses the supposed
finding of space-alien bodies at Roswell. Really. The pages have written on them
that they cannot be authenticated as an official government document, but what
are they doing there in the first place? They do not have any relevance to micro-
wave research, and the time period is not even the same.

It is curious to note what comes right after the Roswell space-alien part of
the Pandora document: the transfer of the Pandora Project to the US Army in
1970, and 1977. Congressional inquiry letters into whether Pandora research in-
cluded areas of “what is popularly known as ‘mind control.’” This clumsy use of
Roswell space-alien disinformation is almost breathtaking for its brazenness. One

3
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/foi/master_reading_list01.html

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statement that does appear in the Operational Procedure document is the follow-
ing (from the minutes of a meeting in 1970):

“2. Definitive research in this area will also require work with hu-
man subjects, and ethical procedures for working with humans
may conflict with security needs.”

As one final note on alien abductions, I should point out that some of the
people claiming to be alien abductees could actually be mind-control victims, ei-
ther purposely deceived with psyops exploiting (and/or inculcating) that belief
system or else people who simply misperceived what really happened to
them.[Note:3]

Following the comparison of TIs with alien abductees, the Post article
proceeds to quote professional psychiatrists. The professional psychiatrists, as ex-
pected, assume a priori that all TIs are delusional and therefore are sick and in
need of care. This is not a scientific attitude, but then again psychiatry has major
components which are strictly political rather than scientific. Since the technology
undeniably exists, and since documented mind-control operations and mind-
control experimentation victims undeniably exist, logic demands that at least the
possibility of exogenous harassment should be considered in any given case. In-
deed, people subjected to severe harassment can suffer severe psychological con-
sequences—just like PTSD victims and victims of physical torture—but these are
the effects (sequelae) of actual harassment. What the DSM manual unscientifi-
cally (they admit as much in the DSM) classifies as “schizophrenia” is really a
cluster of cases with roughly similar symptoms. It is actually made up of several
distinct sub-clusters, corresponding to different causes. One such sub-cluster in-
cludes people who truly have been harassed and persecuted—often by people who
know quite well what the DSM labels as mental illness.

Of course it is not politically acceptable to admit that people—citizens—

truly are harassed and persecuted in the United States. To admit that would re-
quire some action to stop it, and would focus attention on the perpetrators of such
abuses. But then again, psychiatrists have participated in all of the historically
documented mind-control programs. And not just any psychiatrists, but the lead-
ing psychiatrists of their day. As a profession, psychiatry is in deep denial about
its complicity with these abuses. As a profession (a supposed “healing” profes-
sion) it will not face up to even its documented involvement in mind-control re-
search. It will not acknowledge the documented victims of such programs and try
to heal the damage that it helped to inflict on them. So, in this case, the profession
of psychiatry has a serious conflict of interest.

In ending this commentary, I would like to again thank Ms. Weinberger

for her relatively fair article on the TIs and their plight. I hope that the article will
spur serious investigations into the allegations of TIs and will help lead to greatly

[Note:3] See The Controllers, Martin Cannon. Aptos, California: Davis Books, 1989.

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increased oversight of the black-budget, special access programs where such tech-
nologies and techniques are being developed and researched.