Monday, August 29, 2016

Stranger Things: Meet Me in Montauk


So many-- maybe too many-- loose strands are tying together it seems.

2016 seems to be a year in which the curtain has raised quite a bit more than in the past and Stranger Things feels like a definitive part of that unveiling. If it weren't intentionally designed to coincide with the ongoing apocalyptic process that's upon us, whether we like it or not, it should have been.


Stranger Things' mixture of horror and historical sci-fi brings a real-world connection into relief, one that had seemed like it could only be a google-eyed paranoid rumor, and that's the bleedover from the pseudoscientific to the supernatural in CIA black projects, particularly that juncture at which MK Ultra and ARTICHOKE bled into MK OFTEN:
According to author Gordon Thomas' 2007 book, Secrets and Lies, the CIA's Operation Often was also initiated by the chief of the CIA's Technical Services Branch, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to "explore the world of black magic" and "harness the forces of darkness and challenge the concept that the inner reaches of the mind are beyond reach". 
As part of Operation Often, Dr. Gottlieb and other CIA employees visited with and recruited fortune-tellers, palm-readers, clairvoyants, astrologists, mediums, psychics, specialists in demonology, witches and warlocks, Satanists, other occult practitioners, and more. 
There's been some controversy over the exact nature of OFTEN, but given that Gordon Thomas is a reporter whose sources are very much first-hand and very much inside, I think it's a safe bet that OFTEN was putting one set of directives on paper (for the suits upstairs) and following an entirely more arcane path once the checks were cashed.


I certainly hadn't expected this series to tie so closely in with the Lucifer's Technologies series that took up so much of my time these past few months. But Bell Labs lurks beneath the storyline in Stranger Things, even if an oblique, indirect kind of way. 
Stranger Things’ original title was Montauk, named after the sleepy fishing village on Long Island’s easternmost tip. Among so many tales, local lore tells of young boys being abducted and forced to participate in an assortment of psychological and paranormal experiments on a nearby secret military base, including time travel, telekinesis, teleportation and mind-control...
Radar too was part of the Montauk mythos that inspired the story in the first place, and the allegedly unconventional, off-the-books usage of the technology:
Key to the Montauk Project allegations, the SAGE radar worked on a frequency of 400 MHz – 425 MHz, providing access to the range of 410 MHz – 420 MHz signals said by theory proponents to influence the human mind.
At Montauk, the chair was connected to the SAGE antenna and the thought patterns of the occupant of the chair could be amplified and transmitted at the 410-420 MHz range in order to influence the minds of anyone within range of the transmission. 
I wrote about Montauk lore several years ago, and commented on the power that a postmodern myth like it can have in the Internet Age, almost in defiance of the facts at hand. 

The stories in the series of  Montauk books are nearly delirious in their nose-thumbing at the laws of physics and common sense and are themselves are based on an urban legend with an even dodgier pedigree. 


But never underestimate the power of a myth told with utter conviction and a total lack of shame or apology.
The alleged time travel properties of the ‘Montauk Project’ were fictionalized into a book in 1978 and then a film in 1984, both called The Philadelphia Experiment.  
It's all a hell of a story- I'd love to believe it. Unfortunately, even as far as conspiracy theories go, there's hardly a speck of evidence for any of it. But these things don't need to actually be true to make an impact on the Dreaming Mind. In fact, it often helps when they aren't.

I wrote that in a two-part piece on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another of these films I've watched more times than is actually healthy. As many of you know, Montauk plays a feature role in the film, which uses the kind of selective memory erasure technology that MK Ultra ghouls were in endless pursuit of as a central conceit. 

The question is how did a romantic comedy come to incorporate such esoteric topics in the first place:
The mind-erasing properties of Dr. Mierswiak’s device and the ‘reversal of time’ motif used in the storytelling of Eternal Sunshine tie in too neatly with Montauk Project and mystery school lore to be coincidental. I'm thinking that Kaufman ran across information on the Philadelphia Experiment and Montauk, and thought a memory-erasing mind control machine would be a great plot device in a romantic comedy. Which sounds pretty typical for Kaufman, come to think of it.
There's also another possibility: 
Either that or the CIA spooks who he encountered while writing Confessions of A Dangerous Mind fed him the inside scoop for this movie as well. I'm open to all possibilities when it comes to these films.
And here we find ourselves back in the horror show, the one that those mainstream puff pieces on the "secret government experiments" you see in the mainstream media won't go near, Let's start with:
QKHILLTOP was a cryptonym assigned in 1954 to a project to study Chines Communist brainwashing techniques and to develop interrogation techniques. Most of the early studies are believed to have been conducted by the Cornell University Medical School Human Ecology Study Programs. 
The effort was absorbed into the MKULTRA program and the QKHILLTOP cryptonym became obsolete. The Society for the investigation of Human Ecology, later the Human Ecology Fund, was an outgrowth of the QKHILLTOP.
If "Human Ecology" rings a bell, it's because it was one of the fronts that funded the loathsome Loretta Bender, who administered electroshock treatment to children as young as three.

Mentally-ill
children.

One source reports that, inclusive of Bender's work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children's Service from 1956 to 1969.  
Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation... A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York.
Electroshock therapy ravages the memory, and several programs were undertaken to use ECT in conjunction with drugs to erase memories of torture and interrogation victims (which may in fact have originally inspired the technology in Eternal Sunshine).

But ECT was a primitive technology; efforts were undertaken to find more exotic methods of memory erasure:
Another MKUltra effort, Subproject 54, was the Navy's top secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory. However, the program was never carried out. 
Translation: "we destroyed the paperwork, suckers."

Then there was the notorious Dr. Delgado, who implanted electrodes into subjects brains in order to control them like puppets:
Delgado, a neurophsiologist at Yale University School, was especially interested in Electronic Stimulation of the Brain. By implanting a small probe into the brain, Delgado discovered that he could wield enormous power over his subject. Using a device he called the 'stimoceiver' which operated by FM radio waves, he was able to electrically orchestrate a wide range of human emotions. These included rage, lust and fatigue.

Delgado's work may have inspired even more insidious experiments and practices in order to neurologically control subjects. Either that or it inspired a corpus of rumors and urban legends about said technology, if not outright disinformation.

Whichever the case may be, it's beyond question that work into the remote control of the human brain was an overriding concern for many involved in projects like MK-Ultra and its sister programs:

Over the years, certain journalists have asserted that the CIA has mastered a technology called RHIC-EDOM, Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control and Electronic Dissolution of Memory. Together these techniques can — allegedly — remotely induce hypnotic trance, deliver suggestions to the subject, and erase all memory for both instruction period and the act which the subject is asked to perform. 
According to published accounts, RHIC uses the stimoceiver, or a microminiaturized offspring of that technology, to induce a hypnotic state.  
EDOM is the erasure of memory from consciousness through the blockage of synaptic transmission in certain areas of the brain. By jamming the brain's synapses through a surfeit of acetocholine, neural transmission along selected pathways can be effectively stilled. According to the proponents of RHIC-EDOM, acetocholine production can be affected by electromagnetic means.
The topic remains controversial, with many researchers arguing both for and against the actual execution of these planned methodologies. The fact that we're continually seeing bogus science stories about similar systems (always presented in some kind of therapeutic context) might argue against them, but it could well be that RHIC and EDOM are deep in the black and used only rarely. 
A careful comparison of Lawrence's work with the MKULTRA files declassified ten years later indicates a strong possibility that the writer did indeed have 'inside' sources. Here is how Lawrence describes RHIC in action: 'It is the ultra-sophisticated application of post-hypnotic suggestion triggered at will by radio transmission. 
It is a recurring state, re-induced automatically at.intervals by the same radio control. An individual is brought under hypnosis. This can be done either with his knowledge — or without it — by use of narco-hypnosis, which can be brought into play under many guises. He is then programmed to perform certain actions and maintain certain attitudes upon radio signal.'
There have been cases of individuals involved in crimes of violence who complain of outside influence (Kyle Odom and Aaron Alexis (the Washington Navy Yard shooter) spring to mind) but since schizophrenia can account for similar symptoms it all stays very much in that gray area.  There's also an entirely different conversation to be had about the voices issue (see this post).

As discussed before Montauk ties in not only with advanced radar systems like SAGE, it ties into the use of decommissioned NIKE bases (again, connected to Bell Labs) for the use of mind control experiments on children. 

We have documented evidence of these experiments taking place in California under the direction of Louis Jolyon West:
 Some of the planned areas of study for the Center included: 
  
• Studies of violent individuals. 

• Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and hyperkinetic children. 
  
• Experiments with violence-producing and violent inhibiting drugs. 

• Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys. 
• Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various ethnic groups. 

• Studies of pre-delinquent children.
• It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of children before they became delinquents.
A room in Montauk AFS's "Acid House"

The question remains why NIKE bases, when you have an entire Federal infrastructure to work with? There had to be something connected to the installations themselves. And as discussed before it may have something to do with radar, which started the entire Montauk ball rolling in the first place. 

Radar uses microwave technology, and it appears that microwave technology was/is part of the mind control arsenal:
What can low-level microwaves do to the mind? According to a DIA report released under the Freedom of Information Act, microwaves can induce metabolic changes, alter brain functions, and disrupt behaviour patterns. 
PANDORA discovered that pulsed microwaves can create leaks in the blood/brain barrier, induce heart seizures, and create behavioural disorganization.  In 1970 a RAND corporation scientist reported that microwaves could be used to promote insomnia, fatigue, irritability, memory loss and hallucinations. 
And "microwave auditory effect" is a very real thing:
The microwave auditory effect, also known as the microwave hearing effect or the Frey effect, consists of audible clicks (or, with speech modulation, spoken words) induced by pulsed/modulated microwave frequencies. The clicks are generated directly inside the human head without the need of any receiving electronic device. The effect was first reported by persons working in the vicinity of radar transponders during World War II. 
I'm convinced that very exotic experiments were being done at Montauk, only they had nothing to do with time travel tunnels and Total Recall thrones. They were almost certainly mind control experiments using advanced microwave technology and drugs, quite possibly on children. We may never know exactly how or why. 

But it's almost certain similar work continues today.