In Lobster 19 I tried to convey some sense of a very complicated area I had come across which concerned the uses, misuses and effects of electromagnetic fields. Although not really in Lobster‘s territory (which is?) — and well beyond my technical competence — this seemed very important. If true, this is the most important weapons story since 1945. I mentioned an American — Harlan Girard — I had met who claimed that the CIA had been using him as an involuntary experimental subject, bombarding him with telepathically transmitted messages, instructions and pain.
Harlan Girard’s claims are extremely difficult to deal with. On one hand, the CIA has already used involuntary experimental subjects in other programs it funded in the 1950s and 60s. Anyone who has read Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control and believed only a quarter of it would not find Girard’s claims about the way the CIA is behaving difficult to believe. The CIA has been here before. On the other hand, for most people — and for most of the medical and psychiatric profession — “voices in the head’ is prima facie evidence of mental illness. Claims like Harlan’s are going to appear incredible in the absence of evidence of the technical ability to do what Harlan (and others) claim: namely, to project thoughts and instructions subvocally using Extremely Low Frequency magnetic fields as the carrier, the medium. Here, however, all is not as reassuringly black and white as it appears. There appeared to be some evidence to support sub-vocal ELF projection in a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) survey of work in this field in what used to be called the Soviet bloc.
Since then…
Last year a request was made, by a British researcher, under the United States Freedom of Information legislation for a copy of that DIA report. Some months later a copy duly appeared — with the passages which appeared to support Girard’s allegations now missing. The report has been sanitized. This confirms reports dating back to the late 1970s that material in this field which was once in the “open’ scientific literature was being reclassified and disappearing from view. Why would knowledge of Soviet activities in this field be worthy of US classification now if not then?
Girard is no longer the only person telling this strange story. Harlan himself has come across another American, a woman, whose story is uncannily like his own. After applying to the CIA for a job as a psychologist, she was interviewed, changed her mind, and declined the position. After which, to quote from her letter of complaint to the Inspector-General of the CIA, she
‘went on a week-long canoe trip in the Thousand Island area of New York. There, most of my conscious thoughts were sexual fantasies. I have never had such an episode in my life……’ A period of intense activity was followed by “panic-like anxiety….thoughts that people could read my mind…. Voice broadcasting. On Tuesday evening, January 16, 1989 the voices began to identify themselves. They explained to me the CIA had developed a technology which could stimulate thought by broadcasting radio transmissions …..I also began to experience episodes which can only be described as “psychotic”…..My routine and driving habits began to be erratic….[in two days] I had two automobile accidents in which I totalled four cars. For about 30 minutes prior to the first accident I underwent a behaviour modification progam in which the voice in my head told me to drive through stop signs in an unfamilar community…’.
Of course, I hear the sceptics saying to themselves, there is nothing going on here, merely an account of a psychologist spectating on her own break-down. But this is strikingly similar to the experience of Girard. (And those who have read Open Secret, Tony Collins’ account of the strange deaths of a number of British scientists, will hear in this certain obvious resonances with some of the “suicides’ in that story.)
I recently talked to another victim of this stuff. Again, apparently intelligent and (more or less) rational. (I say “more or less’ rational because in their isolation and terror the victims I have spoken to have developed paranoid edges to their thinking — hardly surprising in their circumstances.) This woman has not been given the “voices’ but, like Girard and Anthony Verney (see Lobster 19), reports apparently meaningless break-ins of her flat in which nothing of value is taken but some trivial domestic item — a bar of chocolate, in one instance; a tooth-brush in another — is stolen or switched. (Harlan Girard’s story first rang a bell for me when he mentioned that one of the side-effects of this bombardment was terrible trouble with his teeth. Anthony Verney had already mentioned his dental nightmare.)
Something very strange and very ugly is going on out there. A number of journalists from the higher media have made preliminary recces into this field but have yet to find it sufficiently persuasive to put before an editor. This is understandable. But something is going on. If it may be safely assumed that most of the people who report hearing voices are mentally ill, in my view it is no longer safe to assume that this is true of all such reports. Therein lies the difficulty.
Robin Ramsay
What’s in a name?
No 237: Chapman Pincher
A Chapman, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, was an itinerant peddler who sold cheap tracts and ephemeral literature (chap-books, that is).
A Pincher, according to the Penguin Dictionary of Surnames (Harmondsworth 1987 p. 294) is a nickname of Middle English origin meaning ‘grumbler, fault-finder, haggler’.
So there we have it: a grumbler, flogging cheap literature!
Anthony Edward Weeks