Today (July 16th) is the tenth anniversary of the first Stranger Things series, a landmark date sadly forever contaminated by the dumpster-fire sequels and a truly loathsome and cringe-inducing finale.
I’m currently at work on a video presentation explaining how the franchise was so thoroughly infantilized and sabotaged by Netflix, and the following will hopefully give you a sense of why they had to destroy it.
This is an expanded, revised and reformatted version of a piece from 2016, looking at the very real and very evil experiments that were done on Americans — and American children — during the Cold War.
The people behind these atrocities would have you believe it was all done in the name of Science, yet somehow it all ended up looking like the same old black magic practiced by the Sorcerarchy for millennia…
ANNOUNCEMENT: Be there Friday night at 10 PM ET for the premiere of that aforementioned new video, "Why They Destroyed Stranger Things."
You can't afford to miss this one. So click here for your free Secret Sun Institute membership.
And click here for a rock 'n roll-related Stranger Things piece, complete with November 1983 playlist.
Now back to our feature presentation...
(The real) 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.
I’m talking here about the bleed-over from the pseudoscientific to the supernatural in CIA black projects, particularly that juncture at which MKULTRA 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 inside, I think it’s a safe bet that OFTEN was producing one set of directives for the suits upstairs and following an entirely more arcane path once the checks were cashed.
But the real controversy isn’t so much over the nature of OFTEN’s work, but more about the people involved in it. As our man Recluse wrote:
John Marks indicates that OFTEN was under the direction of a Dr. Stephen Aldrich who ran the project out of the Office of Research and Development (ORD).
Aldrich was a veteran of the Office of Scientific Intelligence and had been involved in ARTICHOKE during the early 1950s, a point in which it had formally begun to investigate parapsychology and other fringe topics (including lobotomies, radiation, ultrasonics, etc).
Researcher Alex Constantine wrote this about Aldrich in his 1995 book, Psychic Dictatorship in the USA:
At Langley, the experiments were presided over by Dr. Stephen Aldrich, a patron of occult research, foreshadowing the use of mind control technology by satanic cults in the 1980’s and 90’s, according to Julianne McKinney, director of the Electronic Surveillance Project of the Association of National Security Alumni.
Dr. Aldrich, a graduate of Amherst and Northwestern, took control of The Firm’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) in 1962 upon the departure of Sidney Gottlieb. The occasion marked the birth of Operation Often, an investigation of the occult. With Houston sorceress Sybil Leek as their guide, CIA behaviorists studied the arcana of the occult underground.
The SEI contributed a social laboratory to Often in 1972 at the University of South Carolina in the form of a course in rituals of demonology and voodoo.
What was the SEI?
The Scientific Engineering Institute in Boston, another CIA cover, was established in 1956 to study radar.
Radar again. Huh. Constantine:
Aldrich took control of the Office of Research and Development (ORD) in 1962 from Gottlieb. CIA behaviorists carefully studied every aspect of the occult underground.
In 1972 the Scientific Engineering Institute sponsored a course at the University of South Carolina in rituals of demonology and voodoo… Aldrich focused on remote brain manipulation and the occult, the thread that runs through SEI.
Aldrich’s interest in the occult (shared by scores of others in the intelligence world.) may explain his penchant for remote brain manipulation, based as it is in “psychic” technology.
Under the direction of Aldrich, writes John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, ORD technocrats “kept probing for ways to control human behavior, and they were doing so with space-age technology that made the days of MKULTRA look like the horse-and buggy era.”
Dr. Aldrich was born in Evanston, Illinois. He attended Deerfield Academy and Amherst College before entering Northwestern Medical School from which he received his medical doctorate in 1947.
Following his residency in Internal Medicine at St. Luke's Hospital (Chicago) and a year as the Parmly Fellow (teaching and research) at Northwestern University Medical School, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency and served until 1979.
While with the CIA, he established their overseas medical support program and created and managed the first national life sciences program in scientific intelligence.
He served as a consultant to the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health, and the Departments of Defense and Justice.
ALL MONTAUK AND NO ACTION
Then there's the Montauk angle, based on a series of books by Peter Moon that put forth an elaborate theory about time travel and mind control:
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...
