“Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves Are Murdering Him,” reported the March 21, 1979, edition of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. The subject of the article, electronics engineer Leonard Kille, claimed his brain had been destroyed in mind-control experiments by CIA-sponsored psychiatrists Vernon Mark of Boston City Hospital and UCLA’s Frank Ervin.
Kille was a co-inventor of the Land camera, named for Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation. A veteran researcher in government-sponsored mind-control programs, Land had founded the Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) on behalf of the CIA. In July 1968 at South Vietnam’s Bien Hoa Hospital, SEI teams had implanted electrodes in the skulls of Vietcong prisoners of war in experimental attempts to direct the behavior of brain-wired subjects by remote control. Upon completion of the experiments, the POWs were shot and cremated by a company of Green Berets.
In 1966 Kille suspected that his wife was having an affair. She denied it; he flew into rages. A psychiatrist interpreted Kille’s anger as a “personality pattern disturbance” and referred him to Mark and Ervin for neurological tests. Although Mark and Ervin described Kille’s behavior as “dangerous,” Kille’s most violent outburst consisted of throwing tin cans at his wife (he missed). Hospitalized by order of the psychiatrists, Kille was involuntarily subjected to experimental brain surgery.
During the touch-and-go operation, electrical strands were implanted in Kille’s brain. Each strand was studded with approximately 20 electrodes. Only after installation of the apparatus was Kille enlisted to sign his official consent to the procedure; the electrodes were already in place, zapping his brain.
Following the nightmarish operation, Dr. Peter Breggin of the Center to Study Psychiatry, an ombudsman of psychiatric abuses, investigated Kille’s case and found—despite Mark’s and Ervin’s reports of therapeutic success—that the post-op patient was “totally disabled and subject to nightmarish terrors that he will be caught and operated on again at the Massachusetts General Hospital.”
In 1971, a hospital attendant discovered Kille holding a metal wastebasket over his head to “stop the microwaves.” A sympathetic doctor at Boston’s VA hospital, where Kille was transferred, ordered for him “a large sheet of aluminum foil so he may fashion a protective helmet for himself.” Uninformed that Kille had been fitted with electrodes, the VA doctors diagnosed him as a delusional paranoiac.
According to Kille, Mark and Ervin controlled his moods by remote electronic stimulation. “They turn me up or turn me down,” Kille insisted.
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In the 1920s, the development of the electroencephalograph (EEG)—an apparatus for detecting and recording brain waves—offered brain physiologists the key to unlock the mysteries of the body’s pivotal organ of thought, intellect and personality. While giving hope for a specific means of mapping mental-health ailments, the newfound electrical pattern to brain function also opened a monstrous Pandora’s box: possible radio control of the mind. In 1934 Doctors E. L. Chaffee and R. U. Light published “A Method for Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System,” an introductory monograph on electromagnetic mind-control methodology. In 1964,[Note:2] electromagnetic-response (EMR) researcher Dr. José Delgado of Cordoba, Spain, climbed into a bullring and, with the push of a button, triggered an electrode implanted in the brain tissue of a charging bull, halting the beast in its tracks.
Also in 1934, Russian physiologist L. L. Vasiliev published “Critical Evaluation of the Hypnogenic Method,” an article detailing the experiments of Dr. I. F. Tomashevsky in remote-radio control of the human brain “at a distance of one or more rooms and under conditions where the participant would not know or suspect that she would be experimented upon.” Reported Vasiliev, “One such experiment was carried out in a park with the subject at a distance. A post-hypnotic mental suggestion to go to sleep was complied with within a minute.”
The CIA created an EMR laboratory at Allan Memorial, a Montreal, Canada, research facility created in 1943. The heart of Allan Memorial’s Radio Telemetry Laboratory (a telemeter is an electrical apparatus for measuring a quantity, transmitting the result by radio to a distant station, and there indicating or recording it) was called the Grid Room. In the Grid Room, an involuntary subject would be strapped into a chair, by force if necessary. Violent resistance was quelled with curare, the powerful plant extract used in arrow poisons by South American Indians and in medicine to produce muscular paralysis. From a head bristling with electrodes and transducers, the subdued subject’s brain waves would be beamed to a nearby reception room crammed with voice analyzers and radio receivers cobbled together by laboratory assistant Leonard Rubenstein. Rubenstein, a man who lacked professional medical credentials, believed passionately in the political uses of mind control. Experiments at Allan Memorial’s telemetry lab, he declared, would one day help governments “keep tabs on people without their knowing.”
Hearing “Voices”
“De-patterning” was accomplished with heavy doses of LSD, barbiturate-induced comas, and electroconvulsive therapy administered at 75 times the normal dose for psychiatric therapy.
“De-patterning”—the systematic annihilation of a subject’s mind and memory—was accomplished at Allan Memorial with heavy doses of LSD, barbiturate-induced comas lasting up to 65 days and electroconvulsive therapy administered at 75 times the customary dose for psychiatric therapy. Following depatterning, “psychic driving”—the repetition of a recorded message for 16 hours a day—programmed the freshly emptied mind.
In 1965 the New York Times reported obscure EMR experiments secretly funded by the government under the front-page headline: “Mind Control Coming, Scientist Warns.” Quoted in the article, University of California psychology professor Dr. David Krech cautioned, “EMR research may carry with it even more serious implications than the achievements of the atomic physicists.”
Earlier, a 1963 CIA-issued manual prepared on the study of Radio-Hypnotic Intra-Cerebral Control (RHIC) explained: “When a part of your brain receives a tiny electrical impulse from outside sources, such as vision, hearing, etc., an emotion is produced—anger at the sight of a gang of boys beating an old woman, for example. The same emotions of anger can be created by artificial radio signals sent to your brain by a controller. You could instantly feel the same white hot anger without any apparent reason.”
Richard Helms, Plans Director for the CIA, oversaw military-oriented EMR research pursuing the possible transmission of strategic subliminal messages into the aggregate minds of enemy populations. In a 1964 memo to the Warren Commission regarding the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a mind-controlled assassin, Helms outlined the existence of “biological radio communication.”
“Cybernetics [the science of communication and control theory that is concerned with the study of automatic control systems, such as the brain and mechanical-electrical communications],” Helms admitted, “can be used in molding of a child’s character, the inculcation of knowledge and techniques, the amassing of experience, the establishment of social behavior patterns ... all functions which can be summarized as control of the growth processes of the individual.”
A subsequent CIA directive, summarized in a brochure on “cybernetic technique” distributed by Mankind Research Unlimited, an EMR study facility in Washington, D.C., detailed the CIA’s development of a “means by which information of modest rate can be fed to humans utilizing other senses than sight or hearing.” According to the brochure, the CIA’s cybernetic technique, “based on Eastern European research,” involved beaming information via radio frequencies to individual human nerve cells. The purpose, the directive stated, was “the enhancement of a subject’s mental and physical performance.”
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Kille was a co-inventor of the Land camera, named for Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation. A veteran researcher in government-sponsored mind-control programs, Land had founded the Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) on behalf of the CIA. In July 1968 at South Vietnam’s Bien Hoa Hospital, SEI teams had implanted electrodes in the skulls of Vietcong prisoners of war in experimental attempts to direct the behavior of brain-wired subjects by remote control. Upon completion of the experiments, the POWs were shot and cremated by a company of Green Berets.
In 1966 Kille suspected that his wife was having an affair. She denied it; he flew into rages. A psychiatrist interpreted Kille’s anger as a “personality pattern disturbance” and referred him to Mark and Ervin for neurological tests. Although Mark and Ervin described Kille’s behavior as “dangerous,” Kille’s most violent outburst consisted of throwing tin cans at his wife (he missed). Hospitalized by order of the psychiatrists, Kille was involuntarily subjected to experimental brain surgery.
During the touch-and-go operation, electrical strands were implanted in Kille’s brain. Each strand was studded with approximately 20 electrodes. Only after installation of the apparatus was Kille enlisted to sign his official consent to the procedure; the electrodes were already in place, zapping his brain.
Following the nightmarish operation, Dr. Peter Breggin of the Center to Study Psychiatry, an ombudsman of psychiatric abuses, investigated Kille’s case and found—despite Mark’s and Ervin’s reports of therapeutic success—that the post-op patient was “totally disabled and subject to nightmarish terrors that he will be caught and operated on again at the Massachusetts General Hospital.”
In 1971, a hospital attendant discovered Kille holding a metal wastebasket over his head to “stop the microwaves.” A sympathetic doctor at Boston’s VA hospital, where Kille was transferred, ordered for him “a large sheet of aluminum foil so he may fashion a protective helmet for himself.” Uninformed that Kille had been fitted with electrodes, the VA doctors diagnosed him as a delusional paranoiac.
According to Kille, Mark and Ervin controlled his moods by remote electronic stimulation. “They turn me up or turn me down,” Kille insisted.
*
*
*
In the 1920s, the development of the electroencephalograph (EEG)—an apparatus for detecting and recording brain waves—offered brain physiologists the key to unlock the mysteries of the body’s pivotal organ of thought, intellect and personality. While giving hope for a specific means of mapping mental-health ailments, the newfound electrical pattern to brain function also opened a monstrous Pandora’s box: possible radio control of the mind. In 1934 Doctors E. L. Chaffee and R. U. Light published “A Method for Remote Control of Electrical Stimulation of the Nervous System,” an introductory monograph on electromagnetic mind-control methodology. In 1964,[Note:2] electromagnetic-response (EMR) researcher Dr. José Delgado of Cordoba, Spain, climbed into a bullring and, with the push of a button, triggered an electrode implanted in the brain tissue of a charging bull, halting the beast in its tracks.
Also in 1934, Russian physiologist L. L. Vasiliev published “Critical Evaluation of the Hypnogenic Method,” an article detailing the experiments of Dr. I. F. Tomashevsky in remote-radio control of the human brain “at a distance of one or more rooms and under conditions where the participant would not know or suspect that she would be experimented upon.” Reported Vasiliev, “One such experiment was carried out in a park with the subject at a distance. A post-hypnotic mental suggestion to go to sleep was complied with within a minute.”
The CIA created an EMR laboratory at Allan Memorial, a Montreal, Canada, research facility created in 1943. The heart of Allan Memorial’s Radio Telemetry Laboratory (a telemeter is an electrical apparatus for measuring a quantity, transmitting the result by radio to a distant station, and there indicating or recording it) was called the Grid Room. In the Grid Room, an involuntary subject would be strapped into a chair, by force if necessary. Violent resistance was quelled with curare, the powerful plant extract used in arrow poisons by South American Indians and in medicine to produce muscular paralysis. From a head bristling with electrodes and transducers, the subdued subject’s brain waves would be beamed to a nearby reception room crammed with voice analyzers and radio receivers cobbled together by laboratory assistant Leonard Rubenstein. Rubenstein, a man who lacked professional medical credentials, believed passionately in the political uses of mind control. Experiments at Allan Memorial’s telemetry lab, he declared, would one day help governments “keep tabs on people without their knowing.”
Hearing “Voices”
“De-patterning” was accomplished with heavy doses of LSD, barbiturate-induced comas, and electroconvulsive therapy administered at 75 times the normal dose for psychiatric therapy.
“De-patterning”—the systematic annihilation of a subject’s mind and memory—was accomplished at Allan Memorial with heavy doses of LSD, barbiturate-induced comas lasting up to 65 days and electroconvulsive therapy administered at 75 times the customary dose for psychiatric therapy. Following depatterning, “psychic driving”—the repetition of a recorded message for 16 hours a day—programmed the freshly emptied mind.
In 1965 the New York Times reported obscure EMR experiments secretly funded by the government under the front-page headline: “Mind Control Coming, Scientist Warns.” Quoted in the article, University of California psychology professor Dr. David Krech cautioned, “EMR research may carry with it even more serious implications than the achievements of the atomic physicists.”
Earlier, a 1963 CIA-issued manual prepared on the study of Radio-Hypnotic Intra-Cerebral Control (RHIC) explained: “When a part of your brain receives a tiny electrical impulse from outside sources, such as vision, hearing, etc., an emotion is produced—anger at the sight of a gang of boys beating an old woman, for example. The same emotions of anger can be created by artificial radio signals sent to your brain by a controller. You could instantly feel the same white hot anger without any apparent reason.”
Richard Helms, Plans Director for the CIA, oversaw military-oriented EMR research pursuing the possible transmission of strategic subliminal messages into the aggregate minds of enemy populations. In a 1964 memo to the Warren Commission regarding the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a mind-controlled assassin, Helms outlined the existence of “biological radio communication.”
“Cybernetics [the science of communication and control theory that is concerned with the study of automatic control systems, such as the brain and mechanical-electrical communications],” Helms admitted, “can be used in molding of a child’s character, the inculcation of knowledge and techniques, the amassing of experience, the establishment of social behavior patterns ... all functions which can be summarized as control of the growth processes of the individual.”
A subsequent CIA directive, summarized in a brochure on “cybernetic technique” distributed by Mankind Research Unlimited, an EMR study facility in Washington, D.C., detailed the CIA’s development of a “means by which information of modest rate can be fed to humans utilizing other senses than sight or hearing.” According to the brochure, the CIA’s cybernetic technique, “based on Eastern European research,” involved beaming information via radio frequencies to individual human nerve cells. The purpose, the directive stated, was “the enhancement of a subject’s mental and physical performance.”
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