The idea that the government could have the means to control a person’s mind is certainly an unsettling thought. It’s definitely the kind of fodder that can open the floodgates for discussion among even the most casual of conspiracy theorists. Is the government really working on mind control techniques and taking advantage of its unknowing citizens? Well, to put it bluntly they already have and some cryptic new documents suggest they possibly could still be.
Before we get into possible 21st century “psycho-electronic” weaponry and “forced orgasms” (yes, it gets weird) let’s look at the United States’ history of attempted mind control.
Mind control experimentation run amok with MKUltra
In the mid-20th century, the United States was in a tense power struggle with the USSR, with each looking to get an advantage over the other. Among the ways the United States looked to get an upper hand over the Soviets during the Cold War was through “the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,” according to the 1977 testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner.
The series of 162 projects known as MKUltra began in 1953 and over the next 11 years, resulted in at least 80 institutions carrying out, sometimes unknowingly, CIA-sponsored projects on hundreds of participants. The test subjects ranged from university students to sex workers, prisoners, cancer patients and even CIA agents themselves. While some of the test subjects volunteered, many were unknowingly given drugs such as LSD – often without medical supervision.
The experiment was largely deemed a failure and was directly linked to at least two deaths, one being the death of agent Frank Olson who was drugged without his knowledge. He later fell to his death out of a hotel window after suffering a nervous breakdown.
In all likelihood, the public may never even have learned about MKUltra if it weren’t for a careless cleanup. Most of MKUltra’s records were destroyed in a 1973 purge, but some 8,000 pages were mistakenly not destroyed and were uncovered four years later. Two lawsuits resulted from the MKUltra and eventually reached the Supreme Court, but were ultimately dismissed.
A possible new chapter of mind control?
One would hope that after that debacle, the government would lay off the whole mind control kick. That might just be wishful thinking though. New documents point to some pretty strange possible technology that reads like straight out of an episode of The X-Files.
Reporter Curtis Waltman was working for Muckrock, a nonprofit group that aids people in making Freedom of Information Act request to the government, when he got an email file back he wasn’t expecting.
Waltman was requesting info on white supremacy groups and far-left activists Antifa when he received an email back with the attachment: “EM effects on human body.zip”. The documents provided by the Washington State Fusion Center describe elements of psycho-electronic weaponry with some pretty terrifying effects. Everything from controlling dreams to bypassing a person’s eyes and planting thoughts and voices in their head with mobile phone networks. There’s even physical manipulation such as racing heart rate, manipulated speech and “forced orgasm and genital pain.”
Waltman said he had no idea how the documents ended up as part of the release and believes it could be from the files of an intelligence officer that got mixed up by mistake. It’s entirely possible the files contained a keyword that was accidentally pinged with the FIA request.
One of the images comes from a software engineer named Supratik Saha, according to the document. Others show up in an alternative news and conspiracy theory publication called Nexus magazine. The magazine covered the legal case brought by John St Clair Akewi against the NSA, claiming the agency was running “covert psychological control operations.”
So far, the WSFC has not responded to further press inquiries.
Does all of this mean that we need to start walking around with tin foil hats on our heads? Probably not. Nothing about the documents suggests that they were created by the government. This could also just be the result of a hack or a fake leak. Even still, it’s incredibly fascinating and enough to have Reddit conspiracy theorists gossiping for months.
What do you think, should we be worried about the government controlling our dreams, or is this all just another rabbit hole leading to nowhere?
