Microwave Auditory Effect (Wikipedia)

Microwave Auditory Effect

Portions of the Wikipedia document ´Microwave Auditory Effect´  are mirrored below. I´ve updated some of the links and inserted local pdf documents:

Patented Applications

• Flanagan GP. Patent #3393279 “Nervous System Excitation Device” USPTO granted 7/16/68.
• Puharich HK and Lawrence JL. Patent #3629521 “Hearing systems” USPTO granted 12/21/71.
• Malech RG. Patent #3951134 “Apparatus and method for remotely monitoring and altering brain waves” USPTO granted 4/20/76.
• Stocklin PL. Patent #4858612 “Hearing device” USPTO granted 8/22/89.
• Brunkan WB. Patent #4877027 “Hearing system” USPTO granted 10/31/89.
• Thijs VMJ. Application #WO1992NL0000216 “Hearing Aid Based on Microwaves” World Intellectual Property Organization Filed 1992-11-26, Published 1993-06-10.
• Mardirossian A. Patent #6011991 “Communication system and method including brain wave analysis and/or use of brain activity” USPTO granted 1/4/00.

Notes

1. ^ Kreithen ML. Patent #5774088 “Method and system for warning birds of hazards” USPTO granted 6/30/98

References

• R.C. Jones, S.S. Stevens, and M.H. Lurie. J. Acoustic. Soc. Am. 12: 281, 1940.
• H. Burr and A. Mauro. Yale J Biol. and Med. 21:455, 1949.
• H. von Gierke. Noise Control 2: 37, 1956.
• J. Zwislocki. J. Noise Control 4: 42, 1958.
• R. Morrow and J. Seipel. J. Wash. Acad. SCI. 50: 1, 1960.
• A.H. Frey. Aero Space Med. 32: 1140, 1961.
• P.C. Neider and W.D. Neff. Science 133: 1010,1961.
• R. Niest, L. Pinneo, R. Baus, J. Fleming, and R. McAfee. Annual Report. USA Rome Air Development Command, TR-61-65, 1961.
• A.H. Frey. “Human auditory system response to modulated electromagnetic energy.” J Applied Physiol 17 (4): 689-92, 1962.
• A.H. Frey. “Behavioral Biophysics” Psychol Bull 63(5): 322-37, 1965.
• F.A. Giori and A.R. Winterberger. “Remote Physiological Monitoring Using a Microwave Interferometer”, Biomed Sci Instr 3: 291-307, 1967.
• A.H. Frey and R. Messenger. “Human Perception of Illumination with Pulsed Ultrahigh-Frequency Electromagnetic Energy”, Science 181: 356-8, 1973.
• R. Rodwell. “Army tests new riot weapon”, New Scientist Sept. 20, p 684, 1973.
• A.W. Guy, C.K. Chou, J.C. Lin, and D. Christensen. “Microwave induced acoustic effects in mammalian auditory systems and physical materials”, Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 247:194-218, 1975.
• D.R. Justesen. “Microwaves and Behavior”, Am Psychologist, 392(Mar): 391-401, 1975.
• S.M. Michaelson. “Sensation and Perception of Microwave Energy”, In: S.M. Michaelson, M.W. Miller, R. Magin, and E.L. Carstensen (eds.), Fundamental and Applied Aspects of Nonionizing Radiation. Plenum Press, New York, p 213-24, 1975.
• E.S. Eichert and A.H. Frey. “Human Auditory System Response to Lower Power Density Pulse Modulated Electromagnetic Energy: A Search for Mechanisms”, J Microwave Power 11(2): 141, 1976.
• W. Bise. “Low power radio-frequency and microwave effects on human electroencephalogram and behavior”, Physiol Chem Phys 10(5): 387-98, 1978.
• J.C. Lin. “Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications”, Thomas, Springfield Ill, p 176, 1978.
• P.L. Stocklin and B.F. Stocklin. “Possible Microwave Mechanisms of the Mammalian Nervous System”, T-I-T J Life Sci 9: 29-51, 1979.
• H. Frolich. “The Biological Effects of Microwaves and Related Questions”, Adv Electronics Electron Physics 53: 85-152, 1980.
• H. Lai. “Neurological Effects of Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Radiation” In: J.C. Lin (ed.), Advances in Electromagnetic Fields in Living Systems vol 1, Plenum, NY & London, p 27-80, 1994.
• R.C. Beason and P. Semm. “Responses of neurons to an amplitude modulated microwave stimulus”, Neurosci Lett 333: 175-78, 2002.
• J.A. Elder and C.K. Chou. “Auditory Responses to Pulsed Radiofrequency Energy”, Bioelectromagnetics Suppl 8: S162-73, 2003.

External links

• Seaman, Ronald L., “Transmission of microwave-induced intracranial sound to the inner ear is most likely through cranial aqueducts” Mckesson Bioservices Corporation, Wrair US Army Medical Research Detachment. (PDF)
• Lin, J.C., 1980, “The microwave auditory phenomenon”, Proceedings of the IEEE, 68:67-73. Navy-NSF-supported research.
• Lin, JC., “Microwave auditory effect- a comparison of some possible transduction mechanisms“. J Microwave Power. 1976 Mar;11(1):77-81. 1976.
• Guy, A.W., C.K. Chou, J.C. Lin and D. Christensen, 1975, Microwave induced acoustic effects in mammalian auditory systems and physical materials, Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 247:194-218
• Fist, Stewart, “Australian exposure standards“. Crossroads, The Australian, March 1999.
• Microwave auditory effects and applications, James C. Lin; Publisher: Thomas; ISBN 0-398-03704-3
• Malech, Robert G., “US3951134 : Apparatus and method for remotely monitoring and altering brain waves”. April 20, 1976.
• McMurtrey, John J., “Inner Voice, Target Tracking, and Behavioral Influence Technologies” (PDF file Download 14965.pdf). Nov. 14, 2004.
• US Department of Defense, Air Force Research Laboratory comprehensive review on RFR-auditory effect in humans
• Thijs VMJ. Application #WO1992NL0000216 “Hearing Aid Based on Microwaves” World Intellectual Property Organization Filed 1992-11-26, Published 1993-06-10.
• Kohn B. “Communicating Via the Microwave Auditory Effect” Defense Department Awarded SBIR Contract # F41624-95-C9007, 1993.
• “Auditory Responses to Pulsed Radiofrequency Energy” Bioelectromagnetics Suppl 8: S162-73, 2003.
• Suppes P, Lu Z, and Han B. “Brain wave recognition of words” Proc Natl Acad Sci 94: 14965-69, 1997.
• Suppes P, Han B, and Lu Z. “Brain-wave recognition of sentences” Proc Natl Acad Sci 95: 15861-66, 1998.
• Assadullahi R and Pulvermuller F. “Neural Network Classification of Word Evoked Neuromagnetic Brain Activity” In: Wermter S, Austin J, and Willahaw D (eds.) Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Emergent Neurocomputational Architectures Based on Neuroscience Heidelberg Springer, p 311-20, 2001.
• Smith C. “On the Need for New Criteria of Diagnosis of Psychosis in the Light of Mind Invasive Technology” J Psycho-Social Studies 2(2) #3, 2003.
• McMurtrey JJ. “ “Microwave Bioeffect Congruence with Schizophrenia Download microwave_congruence_schizophrenia.pdf In press, 2003.

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect“

AirForce: Military Should Use Microwave Weapons on US Citizens (AP 2006)

Air Force official says nonlethal weapons should be used on people in crowd-control situations.

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions in the international community over any possible safety concerns, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

The Air Force has funded research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service isn’t likely to spend more money on development until injury issues are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.

Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.

On another subject, Wynne said he expects to pick a new contractor for the next generation aerial refueling tanking by next summer. He said a draft request for bids will be put out next month, and there are two qualified bidders: The Boeing Co. and a team of Northrop Grumman Corp. and European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., the majority owner of European jet maker Airbus SAS.

The contract is expected to be worth at least $20 billion.

Chicago-based Boeing lost the tanker deal in 2004 amid revelations that it had hired a top Air Force acquisitions official who had given the company preferential treatment.

Wynne also said the Air Force, which is already chopping 40,000 active duty, civilian and reserves jobs, is now struggling to find new ways to slash about $1.8 billion from its budget to cover costs from the latest round of base closings.

He said he can’t cut more people, and it would not be wise to take funding from military programs that are needed to protect the country. But, he said he also encounters resistance when he tries to save money on operations and maintenance by retiring aging aircraft.

We’re finding out that those are, unfortunately, prized possessions of some congressional districts,” said Wynne, adding that the Air Force will have to “take some appetite suppressant pills,” he said. He said he has asked employees to look for efficiencies in their offices.

The base closings initially were expected to create savings by reducing Air Force infrastructure by 24 percent.

Official Touts Nonlethal Weapons for Use

Lolita C. Baldor
The Associated Press
12 September 2006

Microwave Hearing Pathway (pdf file)

MICROWAVE HEARING PATHWAY
942
TRANSMISSION OF MICROWAVE-INDUCED INTRACRANIAL SOUND TO THE INNER EAR IS MOST LIKELY THROUGH
CRANIAL AQUEDUCTS
RONALD L. SEAMAN
MCKESSON BIOSERVICES CORPORATION
AT WRAIR US ARMY MEDICAL RESEARCH DETACHMENT 8308 HAWKS ROAD, BUILDING 1168, BROOKS AIR FORCE BASE, TEXAS 78235 USA

Abstract
The most frequently cited sequence of events used to explain auditory sensations resulting from microwave pulses, or “microwave hearing”, starts with transduction of microwave energy to sound in the head. In this explanation, the sound is then transmitted through cranial bones, i.e., by bone conduction, to stimulate hair cells in the inner ear. Recently reported experiments with animals and humans indicate that sound conduction through bone itself is not necessary in bone-conduction hearing. Instead, sound generated inside the cranium is most efficiently transmitted through holes in the cranium that form channels to the inner ear: vestibular aqueduct, cochlear aqueduct, and/or perivascular and perineural spaces. The short latency of cochlear microphonics reported for microwave hearing and the oscillation of the microphonics at the calculated brain
resonant frequency are consistent with transmission through the channels. Thus, the channels are the most likely pathway for transmission of sound to the inner ear in microwave hearing. Consideration of this transmission pathway may be useful in reconciling results from various microwave hearing experiments.

Introduction
Microwave hearing is the auditory perception of microwave pulses impinging on the head, which has been reviewed in the literature [1-3]. The chain of events described in these reviews starts with generation of acoustic energy (sound) in the head. The sound produced is transmitted by bone conduction to the inner ear where it stimulates auditory receptors in the cochlea. The resulting neural signal is then processed normally by the auditory nervous system. Understanding processes involved in microwave hearing is important because of the use of microwave hearing thresholds in setting limits for human exposure to microwave pulses [4]. Fig. 1 shows principal components of the mammalian inner ear for reference and locations of the
components within the temporal bone. The figure is adapted from images created by Alec N. Salt, Washington University [http://oto.wustl.edu/cochlea/intro1.htm].

Fig. 2 emphasizes acoustic pathways in a schematic diagram of the inner ear and nearby tissues. The cochlear aqueduct connection with the cochlea is much closer to the middle ear than depicted in this figure. Cranial contents are represented by brain tissue and cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) in Fig. 2. Distance between CSF and the temporal bone is exaggerated in both figures for clarity.

The most likely mechanism for transduction of a pulse of microwave energy to sound in tissue is thermoelastic expansion during the pulse [1-3,5-7]. Mathematical models of thermoelastic expansion in spherical heads having the dielectric properties of brain tissue predict that the generated sound has a fundamental resonant frequency determined only by head size [3,6]. Characteristics of sound measured in spherical tissue models and animal heads of different sizes are consistent with the prediction [7-9]. In addition, the round- window cochlear microphonic, which represents the acoustic waveform in the cochlea, recorded in animals in response to a microwave pulse oscillates near the calculated resonant frequency for the head being exposed [2,3,10,11].

Reports of and reviews on microwave hearing that mention bone conduction of sound to the inner ear [1-3,5,12] do not distinguish among the several known mechanisms of bone conduction. Stimulation of auditory receptors in the cochlea by bone conduction, differentiated from stimulation by air condution through the external meatus, was previously thought to occur through the following three pathways: (1) relative motion of inner ear contents due to inertial lag, (2) relative motion of inner ear contents due to distortion of the bony cochlear shell, and (3) coupling of energy to air in the external meatus [13,14]. These pathways, all of which depend on sound transmission in bone, are depicted in Fig. 2 by two curved arrows originating near the bone stimulator, a device commonly used to elicit auditory responses by bone conduction. The solid arrow directed to
the cochlea represents the first two pathways. The dashed arrow directed to the external meatus-middle ear region is dashed to indicate the minor contribution of the third pathway to bone-conduction hearing unless the
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Figure 1. A diagram of the mammalian inner ear.
Scala Media, Endolymph
Scala Tympani, Perilymph
Cochlear Aqueduct
Vestibular Aqueduct
Semicircular
Canals
Semicircular
Canals
Cochlea
Endolymphatic
Sac
Middle Ear
Bones
External Meatus
Temporal Bone
Cerebral Spinal Fluid
bottom
top
left
right

external meatus is blocked. Because microwave hearing literature sites work on bone-conduction hearing tested with a bone stimulator [15], a pathway through bone of the type represented by the solid arrow from the bone stimulator and to the cochlea in Fig. 2 was probably intended. Of course, when the source of sound is inside the cranium, the pathway through bone originates at the interior surface of temporal bone rather than the exterior. An additional pathway for sound transmission to the inner ear by bone conduction has recently been discovered in experiments on rodents and humans [14,16]. This pathway is not through bone tissue itself but through channels that connect cranial contents with the inner ear. This pathway is shown in Fig. 2 as a curved Figure 2. Sound pathways in air- and bone-conduction hearing.

Sound
Source
Temporal Bone
Brain
Air Conduction
Pathway
Bone Stimulator
Endo
Peri
CSF
Bone Conduction Pathways
Endo
Bone Conduction Pathways
top
bottom
ri
g
ht
top
le
ft
Virtual
Sound
Source
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arrow originating near the bone stimulator, passing as two branches (one partially obscured) into cranial contents, and then through channels in the bone into the inner ear. The channels likely contributing most to transmission in this pathway are the vestibular and cochlear aqueducts, as shown Fig. 2. Channels through which nerves and blood vessels travel provide additional possible paths for sound transmission in parallel with the aqueducts. Together these channnels constitute a “non-osseous” pathway that accounts for most of the sound transmitted to the cochlea in bone-conduction hearing [14,16].

An experimental finding in the recent bone-conduction experiments is that sound in cranial contents capable of stimulating the inner ear does not produce detectable vibration of bone [14,16]. This was tested in a number of ways that included placing a bone stimulator directly on the dura mater, which covers the CSF. Stimulation of the amphibian inner ear has also been observed by tapping exposed dura [17]. We can expect that sound generated by absorption of microwave pulses inside the cranium travels to the inner ear by the same pathway. Sound generation within the cranial contents, say, by microwave absorption, is represented in Fig. 2 by a sound source located in the brain. The pathway to the inner ear is shown by curved arrows originating at the sound source and passing through the aqueducts. An arrow from the sound source to bone is shown to
represent generated sound that is transmitted into bone. Because of the difference in acoustic impedance at the
CSF-bone interface [14], most of the sound is reflected back into intracranial soft tissues (straight arrow) and
very little is transmitted into bone (dashed curved arrow).

At least two observations in microwave hearing research provide support for the proposed direct pathway for sound transmission. One is the correspondence between the frequency of cochlear microphonic oscillations and the calculated resonant frequency of the brain [2,3,11]. If sound generated intracranially were to couple to bones of the skull we would expect resonant vibration of the skull to be reflected in the cochlear microphonic. The resonant frequency of the adult human skull is 1-2 kHz [18-20]. This is about one-tenth of the predicted brain resonant frequency of 11 kHz for microwave hearing in adults [3]. In the absence of data on animal skulls, we might expect a similar ratio between resonant frequencies of brain and skull for other mammals. However, only the higher frequency of brain resonance is observed in cochlear microphonic oscillations. Lack of skull vibration is consistent with vibration not being detected with exposure to microwave pulses [21].

Another relevant observation is the short delay of less than 40 μs between onset of microwave pulse and start of cochlear microphonic in animals [2,10,11]. Auditory responses to bone stimulation can be expected to be delayed 0.1-0.5 ms (100-500 μs) from stimulus onset, depending on type of animal, location of stimulus, and other factors [22-23]. We might also expect a delay due to mass inertia of the skull and the relatively low resonant frequency of the skull. Propagation delays of sound travelling between points on the skull and low-pass filtering by the skull have been measured with bone stimulation [23]. One might suggest that a later, slower component of the microwave cochlear microphonic might have been overlooked in microwave hearing experiments because of the short time window used to study the high-frequency cochlear microphonic at the
round window. However, one would expect that a microphonic component of comparable or larger amplitude,
as well as being less impacted by the early microwave-pulse-induced artifact, would be easily identified before
detailed observations of the high-frequency component were made. The short latency of the only or, perhaps,
the most dominant microwave cochlear microphonic is inconsistent with forms of bone conduction that involve
vibration of the bone.

Summary
Based on a number of considerations, we can reasonably conclude that the pathway for transmission of sound from intracranial tissues to the inner ear in microwave hearing is through various channels in bone that connect to the intracranial space to the inner ear. This pathway appears to dominate over other pathways in bone-conduction hearing and can be driven by bone-conducted sound, but the pathway through bone does not require that sound actually travel in the bone itself. The previously proposed pathway for sound transmission to the cochlea in microwave hearing that includes bone vibration is most likely not the pathway. This observation should be useful in reconciling results from various experiments on microwave hearing. Results from future microwave hearing experiments to test for non-osseous bone conduction can be considered in setting exposure limits for microwave pulses.

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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command contract DAMD17-94-C- 4069 awarded to McKesson BioServices Corporation. The views, opinions and/or findings contained in this report are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy or decision unless so designated by other documentation. This article is a US Government work and, as such, is in the public domain in the United States of America. WRAIR is the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, DC USA. The author is grateful to Dr. Clifford Sherry for various stimulating discussions on microwave hearing topics.

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References
[1] Lin JC. 1980. The microwave auditory phenomenon. Proc IEEE 68(1):67-73.
[2]
Chou CK, Guy AW, Galambos R. 1982. Auditory perception of radio frequency electromagnetic
fields. J Acoust Soc Am 71(6):1321-1334.
[3]
Lin JC. 1990. Auditory perception of pulsed microwave radiation. In Gandhi OP (ed): Biological
Effects and Medical Applications of Electromagnetic Fields. New York: Prentice-Hall, pp 277-318.
[4]
International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection. 1998. Guidelines for limiting
exposure to time-varying electric, magnetic, and electromagnetic fields (up to 300 GHz). Health
Phys 74(4):494-522.
[5]
Foster KR, Finch ED. 1974. Microwave hearing: Evidence for thermoacoustic auditory stimulation
by pulsed microwaves. Science185(147):256-258.
[6] Lin JC. 1978. Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications. Springfield,Illinois: Charles C. Thomas.
[7]
Lin JC, Su JL, Wang Y. 1988. Microwave-induced thermoelastic pressure wave propagation in the
cat brain. Bioelectromagnetics 9(2):141-147.
[8]
Olsen RG, Lin JC. 1981. Microwave pulse-induced acoustic resonances in spherical head models.
IEEE Trans Microwave Theory and Tech 29(10):1114-1117.
[9]
Olsen RG, Lin JC. 1983. Microwave-induced pressure waves in mammalian brains. IEEE Trans
Biomed Eng 30(5):289-294.
[10]
Chou CK, Galambos R, Guy AW, Lovely RH. 1975. Cochlear microphonics generated by
microwave pulses. J Microwave Power 10(4):361-367.
[11]
Chou CK, Guy AW, Galambos R. 1977. Characteristics of microwave-induced cochlear
microphonics. Radio Sci 12(6S):221-227.
[12]
Chou CK, Galambos R. 1979. Middle-ear structures contribute little to auditory perception of
microwaves. J Microwave Power 14(4):321-326.
[13]
Tonndorf J. 1972. Bone conduction. In Tobias JV (ed): Foundations of Modern Auditory Theory.
New York: Academic Press, pp 197-237.
[14]
Freeman S, Sichel JY, Sohmer H. 2000. Bone conduction experiments in animals: Evidence for a
non-osseous mechanism. Hear Res 146(1-2):72-80.
[15]
Corso JF. 1963. Bone-conduction thresholds for sonic and ultrasonic frequencies. J Acoust Society
Am 35(11):1738-1743.
[16]
Sohmer H, Freeman S, Geal-Dor J, Adelman C, Savion I. 2000. Bone conduction experiments in
humans: A fluid pathway from bone to ear. Hear Res 146(1-2):81-88.
[17] Seaman RL. 2002. Non-osseous sound transmission to the inner ear (letter). Hear Res
166(1-2):218-219.
[18]
Håkansson B, Carlsson P, Tjellström A. 1986. The mechanical point impedance of the human head,
with and without skin penetration. J Acoust Soc Am 80(4):1065-1075.
[19]
Kosugi Y, Ikebe J, Hara S, Takakura K. 1987. Detection and analysis of cranial bruit. IEEE Trans
Biomed Eng 34(3):185-191.
[20]
Stenfelt S, Håkansson B, Tjellström A. 2000. Vibration characteristics of bone conducted sound in
vitro. J Acoust Soc Am 107(1):422-431.
[21]
Frey AH, Coren E. 1979. Holographic assessment of a hypothesized microwave hearing
mechanism. Science 206(4415):232-234.
[22]
Sohmer H, Freeman S. 2001. The latency of auditory nerve brainstem evoked responses to air- and
bone-conducted stimuli. Hear Res 160(1-2):111-113.
[23]
Durrant JD, Hyre R. 1993. Observations on temporal aspects of bone-conduction clicks: Real head
measurements. J Am Acad Audiol 4(3):213-219.

This is the html version of the file http://www.beperkdestraling.org/Studies%20en%20Rapporten/Tinnitus/Microwave%20Hearing%20Pathway.pdf.

Microwave Hearing Pathway (download pdf file)

Hearing “Voices” by Alex Constantine (Hustler Magazine 1/1994)

The Hidden History of the CIA’s Electromagnetic Mind-Control Experiments 1995

Controlling human behavior by remote radio transmission isn’t science fiction—it’s a fact. After years of secret experiments, the U.S. government has achieved its goal: Breaking and entering American minds at will.Hearing “Voices”

At 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.

“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.

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.”

In 1965, the Department of Defense (DOD) discovered that the American embassy in Moscow was being purposely irradiated by the Russians with massive levels of microwaves. By that time, the DOD’s secretive Advance Research Projects Agency (ARPA) at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the nation’s capital had itself developed a prodigious arsenal of electromagnetic weapons. Doctor José Delgado—whose current work with radio waves was underwritten by the CIA and Navy—believed scientists could transform, shape, direct and robotize humankind. “The great danger of the future,” Delgado warned, “is that we will have robotized human beings who are not aware that they have been robotized.”

Baffled by the cause and intent of the microwave saturation at the embassy in Moscow, officials of the American intelligence community consulted experts on the biological effects of the radiation. Recalls Dr. Milton Zaret, a leading microwave scientist later recruited by “Pandora,” a code-named CIA project for the study of radio-frequency-directed brain response, “The CIA inquired whether I thought electromagnetic radiation beamed at the brain from a distance could affect the way a person might act, and if microwaves could be used to facilitate brainwashing or to break down prisoners under investigation.” The State Department elected to keep the so-called Moscow Signal a secret from American Embassy employees—and studied the side-effects of the radiation instead. Ambassador Walter J. Stoessel Jr., a long-time American diplomat in the Soviet Union, whose office was situated in the magnetic beam’s center, succumbed by stages to blood disease, bleeding eyes, nausea and lymphoma. State Department employees Charles Bohlen and Llewellyn Thompson fell prey to cancer. The existence of the Soviet beam was finally acknowledged by the U.S. in 1976, in response to a report by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Officially, the State Department concluded that the microwave saturation of the embassy served not to brainwash, but to activate bugging devices in the walls. However, Dr. Zaret, after conducting his own tests, deduced that the Moscow Signal was psychoactive. “Whatever other reasons the Russians may have had [for irradiating the American embassy],” posits Zaret, “they believed the beam would modify the behavior of personnel.”

Back in 1956, geophysicists R. E. Holzer and O. E. Deal, detected naturally occurring electromagnetic signals in the auditory range that were produced by thunderstorms. With little variation, most of the electromagnetic bursts were metered at 25 to 130 cycles per second, with a very low attenuation rate. In other words, lightning discharges could be picked up anywhere in the world as “magnetic noise” on the extremely low frequency (ELF) radio dial.

RF-mind-control testing became a military priority—a simple, pulsed microwave beam outperformed drugs, ECT, torture and brain surgery as a means of behavior modification.

Two years later, Dr. Allan Frey, a bio-physics researcher conducting studies at General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Center at Cornell University (and a contractor for the U.S. Office of Naval Research), published a “technical note” in Aerospace Medicine reporting that the human auditory system responds “to electromagnetic energy in at least a portion of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum. Further, this response is instantaneous and occurs at low-power densities … well below that necessary for biological damage.” Frey’s subjects “heard” buzzes and knocks when exposed to low-frequency radio emissions. In one experiment, Frey swept a radio beam over a subject. With each sweep, the subject heard the radio frequency sound for a few seconds and reported it. When Frey modulated power densities, he discovered that even clinically deaf subjects perceived RF sounds. Experiments with transmitter settings proved that radio beams could induce the perception of severe buffeting of the head or prick the skin like needles.

Frey concluded that the brain is a powerful receiver of electromagnetic rays, and the “vocabulary” of RF noises could be expanded by modulating the pulse of the charge, which would be perceived by the subject as originating from within or slightly behind the head.

Among practical applications of auditory stimulation, Frey proposed “stimulating the nervous system without the damage caused by electrodes.” Attracting the attention of CIA and DOD officials, Frey’s work with microwaves had obvious uses in covert military operations. In one experiment, for instance, he synchronized pulsed microwaves with the myocardial rhythm of a frog, whereupon its heart stopped. Stimulating the hypothalamus of cats and dogs with microwaves powerfully effected emotions.

Frey was reluctant to experiment on humans for ethical reasons. But Pandora operatives did not balk at irradiating human subjects. Under CIA auspices, Dr. Dietrich Beischer exposed approximately 7,000 naval crewmen to dangerous levels of microwaves at the Naval Aerospace Research Laboratory in Pensacola, Florida. Data on exposure limits, Beischer justified, could be obtained in no other way, given the “exquisitely complex and dynamic nature of the human organism.”

An “official” halt to Pandora was called in 1970, but classified, RF-mind-control testing had become a military priority. A simple, pulsed microwave beam outperformed drugs, ECT, torture and brain surgery as a means of behavior modification. By the late 1960s, CIA scientists had achieved direct communication between brain and computer, and had demonstrated in the laboratory that computer-assisted automatic learning was possible by pinpointing neuron clusters in the brain with radio signals. Microwaves easily penetrated the brain’s protective shields of bone, ligament and membrane. Brain waves could be unscrambled and deciphered, recorded and beamed to another person—creating artificial two-way mental communication.

At Walter Reed Army Hospital of Research in 1973, Dr. Joseph Sharp, strapped inside an isolation chamber, heard “words” beamed at him in a pulsed-microwave audiogram. (An audiogram is a computerized analog of the spoken voice.) ARPA’s Robert O. Becker foresaw in the experiment “obvious applications in covert operations.” Becker imagined a barrage of “voices” driving an enemy insane, and post-hypnotic suggestion radioed to a programmed assassin, directing him to kill.

According to Naval Captain Paul Tyler in a 1976 essay, “The Electromagnetic Spectrum in Low-Intensity Conflict,” a “speed-of-light weapons effect” could be achieved with “the passage of approximately 100 milliamperes [of directed frequency] through the myocardium, [leading] to cardiac standstill and death.” In other words, electromagnetic devices with stun or kill settings could theoretically wipe out entire armies—and cities. The patent for just such a “death-ray” device, according to officials of the McFarlane Corporation, an independent research and development firm, was pirated from them in 1965 by NASA. The theft was reported in hearings before the House subcommittee on DOD appropriations, chaired by Representative George Mahon (D-Texas). According to McFarlane company literature, the invention—termed a Modulated Electron-Gun X-Ray Nuclear Booster—could be adapted to “communications, remote control and guidance systems, electromagnetic radiation telemetering and death-ray applications.”

Was the technology tested at home on private citizens? In March 1978, the city of Eugene, Oregon, found itself inundated with microwave radiation. The Oregon Journal reported: “Mysterious Radio Signals Causing Concern in Oregon.” Federal government specialists blamed the Soviets, but the Federal Communications Commission concluded that the signal—recorded throughout the state of Oregon—came from a Navy transmitter in California.

Oregonians statewide complained of headaches, fatigue, inability to sleep, reddening of the skin, anxiety, “clicks” in the head and a “buzz” harmonizing with a high-pitched wail. Canadian researcher Andrew Michrowski wrote to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on September 19, 1978, citing a Pacific Northwest Center for Non-Ionizing Radiation study that found the signals “psychoactive” and “very strongly suggestive of achieving the objective of brain control.”
Clearly, breaching the ultimate stronghold of privacy—the mind—has been accomplished. If the U.S. government plans to do the thinking for all Americans, the days of freedom, liberty and justice—and human identity itself—appear to be numbered.

http://mcrais.googlepages.com/voices.htm

Mind Control on Way, Scientist Warns; Science Urged to Be Prepared (NYT 1965)

Mind Control on Way, Scientist Warns; Mind Control by Drugs Is Seen; Science Urged to Be Prepared

By HAROLD M. SCHMECK Jr. Special to The New York Times

December 28, 1965, Tuesday

Page 1, 949 words

BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 27 — Scientists must start thinking now about the possibilities of mind control that their research may soon make possible, the chairman of a symposium on the brain said today.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70C1FFB3B591B7A93CAAB1789D95F418685F9

via: Hearing “Voices” by Alex Constantine (Hustler 1/1994)

Mind Games (WaPo 2007)

New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.

IF HARLAN GIRARD IS CRAZY, HE DOESN’T ACT THE PART. He is standing just where he said he would be, below the Philadelphia train station’s World War II memorial — a soaring statue of a winged angel embracing a fallen combatant, as if lifting him to heaven. Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. He looks like a local businessman dressed for a casual Friday — a local businessman with a wickedly dark sense of humor, which had become apparent when he said to look for him beneath “the angel sodomizing a dead soldier.” At 70, he appears robust and healthy — not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking. He is also carrying a bag.

Girard’s description of himself is matter-of-fact, until he explains what’s in the bag: documents he believes prove that the government is attempting to control his mind. He carries that black, weathered bag everywhere he goes. “Every time I go out, I’m prepared to come home and find everything is stolen,” he says.

The bag aside, Girard appears intelligent and coherent. At a table in front of Dunkin’ Donuts inside the train station, Girard opens the bag and pulls out a thick stack of documents, carefully labeled and sorted with yellow sticky notes bearing neat block print. The documents are an authentic-looking mix of news stories, articles culled from military journals and even some declassified national security documents that do seem to show that the U.S. government has attempted to develop weapons that send voices into people’s heads.

“It’s undeniable that the technology exists,” Girard says, “but if you go to the police and say, ‘I’m hearing voices,’ they’re going to lock you up for psychiatric evaluation.”

The thing that’s missing from his bag — the lack of which makes it hard to prove he isn’t crazy — is even a single document that would buttress the implausible notion that the government is currently targeting a large group of American citizens with mind-control technology. The only direct evidence for that, Girard admits, lies with alleged victims such as himself.

And of those, there are many.

IT’S 9:01 P.M. WHEN THE FIRST PERSON SPEAKS during the Saturday conference call.

Unsure whether anyone else is on the line yet, the female caller throws out the first question: “You got gang stalking or V2K?” she asks no one in particular.

There’s a short, uncomfortable pause.

“V2K, really bad. 24-7,” a man replies.

“Gang stalking,” another woman says.

“Oh, yeah, join the club,” yet another man replies.

The members of this confessional “club” are not your usual victims. This isn’t a group for alcoholics, drug addicts or survivors of childhood abuse; the people connecting on the call are self-described victims of mind control — people who believe they have been targeted by a secret government program that tracks them around the clock, using technology to probe and control their minds.

The callers frequently refer to themselves as TIs, which is short for Targeted Individuals, and talk about V2K — the official military abbreviation stands for “voice to skull” and denotes weapons that beam voices or sounds into the head. In their esoteric lexicon, “gang stalking” refers to the belief that they are being followed and harassed: by neighbors, strangers or colleagues who are agents for the government.

A few more “hellos” are exchanged, interrupted by beeps signaling late arrivals: Bill from Columbus, Barbara from Philadelphia, Jim from California and a dozen or so others.

Derrick Robinson, the conference call moderator, calls order.

“It’s five after 9,” says Robinson, with the sweetly reasonable intonation of a late-night radio host. “Maybe we should go ahead and start.”

THE IDEA OF A GROUP OF PEOPLE CONVINCED THEY ARE TARGETED BY WEAPONS that can invade their minds has become a cultural joke, shorthanded by the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams. “Tinfoil hat,” says Wikipedia, has become “a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists.”

In 2005, a group of MIT students conducted a formal study using aluminum foil and radio signals. Their surprising finding: Tinfoil hats may actually amplify radio frequency signals. Of course, the tech students meant the study as a joke.

But during the Saturday conference call, the subject of aluminum foil is deadly serious. The MIT study had prompted renewed debate; while a few TIs realized it was a joke at their expense, some saw the findings as an explanation for why tinfoil didn’t seem to stop the voices. Others vouched for the material.

“Tinfoil helps tremendously,” reports one conference call participant, who describes wrapping it around her body underneath her clothing.

“Where do you put the tinfoil?” a man asks.

“Anywhere, everywhere,” she replies. “I even put it in a hat.”

A TI in an online mind-control forum recommends a Web site called “Block EMF” (as in electromagnetic frequencies), which advertises a full line of clothing, including aluminum-lined boxer shorts described as a “sheer, comfortable undergarment you can wear over your regular one to shield yourself from power lines and computer electric fields, and microwave, radar, and TV radiation.” Similarly, a tinfoil hat disguised as a regular baseball cap is “smart and subtle.”

For all the scorn, the ranks of victims — or people who believe they are victims — are speaking up. In the course of the evening, there are as many as 40 clicks from people joining the call, and much larger numbers participate in the online forum, which has 143 members. A note there mentioning interest from a journalist prompted more than 200 e-mail responses.

Until recently, people who believe the government is beaming voices into their heads would have added social isolation to their catalogue of woes. But now, many have discovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of others just like them all over the world. Web sites dedicated to electronic harassment and gang stalking have popped up in India, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Russia and elsewhere. Victims have begun to host support meetings in major cities, including Washington. Favorite topics at the meetings include lessons on how to build shields (the proverbial tinfoil hats), media and PR training, and possible legal strategies for outlawing mind control.

The biggest hurdle for TIs is getting people to take their concerns seriously. A proposal made in 2001 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to ban “psychotronic weapons” (another common term for mind-control technology) was hailed by TIs as a great step forward. But the bill was widely derided by bloggers and columnists and quickly dropped.

Doug Gordon, Kucinich’s spokesman, would not discuss mind control other than to say the proposal was part of broader legislation outlawing weapons in space. The bill was later reintroduced, minus the mind control. “It was not the concentration of the legislation, which is why it was tightened up and redrafted,” was all Gordon would say.

Unable to garner much support from their elected representatives, TIs have started their own PR campaign. And so, last spring, the Saturday conference calls centered on plans to hold a rally in Washington. A 2005 attempt at a rally drew a few dozen people and was ultimately rained out; the TIs were determined to make another go of it. Conversations focused around designing T-shirts, setting up congressional appointments, fundraising, creating a new Web site and formalizing a slogan. After some debate over whether to focus on gang stalking or mind control, the group came up with a compromise slogan that covered both: “Freedom From Covert Surveillance and Electronic Harassment.”

Conference call moderator Robinson, who says his gang stalking began when he worked at the National Security Agency in the 1980s, offers his assessment of the group’s prospects: Maybe this rally wouldn’t produce much press, but it’s a first step. “I see this as a movement,” he says. “We’re picking up people all the time.”

HARLAN GIRARD SAYS HIS PROBLEMS BEGAN IN 1983, while he was a real estate developer in Los Angeles. The harassment was subtle at first: One day a woman pulled up in a car, wagged her finger at him, then sped away; he saw people running underneath his window at night; he noticed some of his neighbors seemed to be watching him; he heard someone moving in the crawl space under his apartment at night.

Girard sought advice from this then-girlfriend, a practicing psychologist, whom he declines to identify. He says she told him, “Nobody can become psychotic in their late 40s.” She said he didn’t seem to manifest other symptoms of psychotic behavior — he dressed well, paid his bills — and, besides his claims of surveillance, which sounded paranoid, he behaved normally. “People who are psychotic are socially isolated,” he recalls her saying.

After a few months, Girard says, the harassment abruptly stopped. But the respite didn’t last. In 1984, appropriately enough, things got seriously weird. He’d left his real estate career to return to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was studying for a master’s degree in landscape architecture. He harbored dreams of designing parks and public spaces. Then, he says, he began to hear voices. Girard could distinguish several different male voices, which came complete with a mental image of how the voices were being generated: from a recording studio, with “four slops sitting around a card table drinking beer,” he says.

The voices were crass but also strangely courteous, addressing him as “Mr. Girard.”

They taunted him. They asked him if he thought he was normal; they suggested he was going crazy. They insulted his classmates: When an overweight student showed up for a field trip in a white raincoat, they said, “Hey, Mr. Girard, doesn’t she look like a refrigerator?”

Six months after the voices began, they had another question for him: “Mr. Girard, Mr. Girard. Why aren’t you dead yet?” At first, he recalls, the voices would speak just two or three times a day, but it escalated into a near-constant cacophony, often accompanied by severe pain all over his body — which Girard now attributes to directed-energy weapons that can shoot invisible beams.

The voices even suggested how he could figure out what was happening to him. He says they told him to go to the electrical engineering department to “tell them you’re writing science fiction and you don’t want to write anything inconsistent with physical reality. Then tell them exactly what has happened.”

Girard went and got some rudimentary explanations of how technology could explain some of the things he was describing.

“Finally, I said: ‘Look, I must come to the point, because I need answers. This is happening to me; it’s not science fiction.'” They laughed.

He got the same response from friends, he says. “They regarded me as crazy, which is a humiliating experience.”

When asked why he didn’t consult a doctor about the voices and the pain, he says, “I don’t dare start talking to people because of the potential stigma of it all. I don’t want to be treated differently. Here I was in Philadelphia. Something was going on, I don’t know any doctors . . . I know somebody’s doing something to me.”

It was a struggle to graduate, he says, but he was determined, and he persevered. In 1988, the same year he finished his degree, his father died, leaving Girard an inheritance large enough that he did not have to work.

So, instead of becoming a landscape architect, Girard began a full-time investigation of what was happening to him, often traveling to Washington in pursuit of government documents relating to mind control. He put an ad in a magazine seeking other victims. Only a few people responded. But over the years, as he met more and more people like himself, he grew convinced that he was part of what he calls an “electronic concentration camp.”

What he was finding on his research trips also buttressed his belief: Girard learned that in the 1950s, the CIA had drugged unwitting victims with LSD as part of a rogue mind-control experiment called MK-ULTRA. He came across references to the CIA seeking to influence the mind with electromagnetic fields. Then he found references in an academic research book to work that military researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had done in the 1970s with pulsed microwaves to transmit words that a subject would hear in his head. Elsewhere, he came across references to attempts to use electromagnetic energy, sound waves or microwave beams to cause non-lethal pain to the body. For every symptom he experienced, he believed he found references to a weapon that could cause it.

How much of the research Girard cites checks out?

Concerns about microwaves and mind control date to the 1960s, when the U.S. government discovered that its embassy in Moscow was being bombarded by low-level electromagnetic radiation. In 1965, according to declassified Defense Department documents, the Pentagon, at the behest of the White House, launched Project Pandora, top-secret research to explore the behavioral and biological effects of low-level microwaves. For approximately four years, the Pentagon conducted secret research: zapping monkeys; exposing unwitting sailors to microwave radiation; and conducting a host of other unusual experiments (a sub-project of Project Pandora was titled Project Bizarre). The results were mixed, and the program was plagued by disagreements and scientific squabbles. The “Moscow signal,” as it was called, was eventually attributed to eavesdropping, not mind control, and Pandora ended in 1970. And with it, the military’s research into so-called non-thermal microwave effects seemed to die out, at least in the unclassified realm.

But there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person’s head. “The signal can be a ‘message from God’ that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender,” the author concluded.

In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone’s head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory’s directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab’s policy not to comment on its microwave work.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed for this article, the Air Force released unclassified documents surrounding that 2002 patent — records that note that the patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. Research appeared to continue at least through 2002. Where this work has gone since is unclear — the research laboratory, citing classification, refused to discuss it or release other materials.

The official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, tagged microwave attacks against the human brain as part of future warfare in a 2001 presentation to the National Defense Industrial Association about “Future Strategic Issues.”

“That work is exceedingly sensitive” and unlikely to be reported in any unclassified documents, he says.

Meanwhile, the military’s use of weapons that employ electromagnetic radiation to create pain is well-known, as are some of the limitations of such weapons. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one element of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagnetic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. So, yes, there is technology designed to beam painful invisible rays at humans, but the weapon seems to fall far short of what could account for many of the TIs’ symptoms. While its exact range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, such as aluminum. Considering the size of the full-scale weapon, which resembles a satellite dish, and its operational limitations, the ability of the government or anyone else to shoot beams at hundreds of people — on city streets, into their homes and while they travel in cars and planes — is beyond improbable.

But, given the history of America’s clandestine research, it’s reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.

Girard, for his part, believes these weapons were not only developed but were also tested on him more than 20 years ago.

What would the government gain by torturing him? Again, Girard found what he believed to be an explanation, or at least a precedent: During the Cold War, the government conducted radiation experiments on scores of unwitting victims, essentially using them as human guinea pigs. Girard came to believe that he, too, was a walking experiment.

Not that Girard thinks his selection was totally random: He believes he was targeted because of a disparaging remark he made to a Republican fundraiser about George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s. Later, Girard says, the voices confirmed his suspicion.

“One night I was going to bed; the usual drivel was going on,” he says. “The constant stream of drivel. I was just about to go to bed, and a voice says: ‘Mr. Girard, do you know who was in our studio with us? That was George Bush, vice president of the United States.'”

GIRARD’S STORY, HOWEVER STRANGE, reflects what TIs around the world report: a chance encounter with a government agency or official, followed by surveillance and gang stalking, and then, in many cases, voices, and pain similar to electric shocks. Some in the community have taken it upon themselves to document as many cases as possible. One TI from California conducted about 50 interviews, narrowing the symptoms down to several major areas: “ringing in the ears,” “manipulation of body parts,” “hearing voices,” “piercing sensation on skin,” “sinus problems” and “sexual attacks.” In fact, the TI continued, “many report the sensation of having their genitalia manipulated.”

Both male and female TIs report a variety of “attacks” to their sexual organs. “My testicles became so sore I could barely walk,” Girard says of his early experiences. Others, however, report the attacks in the form of sexual stimulation, including one TI who claims he dropped out of the seminary after constant sexual stimulation by directed-energy weapons. Susan Sayler, a TI in San Diego, says many women among the TIs suffer from attacks to their sexual organs but are often embarrassed to talk about it with outsiders.

“It’s sporadic, you just never know when it will happen,” she says. “A lot of the women say it’s as soon as you lay down in bed — that’s when you would get hit the worst. It happened to me as I was driving, at odd times.”

What made her think it was an electronic attack and not just in her head? “There was no sexual attraction to a man when it would happen. That’s what was wrong. It did not feel like a muscle spasm or whatever,” she says. “It’s so . . . electronic.”

Gloria Naylor, a renowned African American writer, seems to defy many of the stereotypes of someone who believes in mind control. A winner of the National Book Award, Naylor is best known for her acclaimed novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which described a group of women living in a poor urban neighborhood and was later made into a miniseries by Oprah Winfrey.

But in 2005, she published a lesser-known work, 1996, a semi-autobiographical book describing her experience as a TI. “I didn’t want to tell this story. It’s going to take courage. Perhaps more courage than I possess, but they’ve left me no alternatives,” Naylor writes at the beginning of her book. “I am in a battle for my mind. If I stop now, they’ll have won, and I will lose myself.” The book is coherent, if hard to believe. It’s also marked by disturbing passages describing how Jewish American agents were responsible for Naylor’s surveillance. “Of the many cars that kept coming and going down my road, most were driven by Jews,” she writes in the book. When asked about that passage in a recent interview, she defended her logic: Being from New York, she claimed, she can recognize Jews.

Naylor lives on a quiet street in Brooklyn in a majestic brownstone with an interior featuring intricate woodwork and tasteful decorations that attest to a successful literary career. She speaks about her situation calmly, occasionally laughing at her own predicament and her struggle with what she originally thought was mental illness. “I would observe myself,” she explains. “I would lie in bed while the conversations were going on, and I’d ask: Maybe it is schizophrenia?”

Like Girard, Naylor describes what she calls “street theater” — incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement — like mimes on a street.

Voices similar to those in Girard’s case followed — taunting voices cursing her, telling her she was stupid, that she couldn’t write. Expletive-laced language filled her head. Naylor sought help from a psychiatrist and received a prescription for an antipsychotic drug. But the medication failed to stop the voices, she says, which only added to her conviction that the harassment was real.

For almost four years, Naylor says, the voices prevented her from writing. In 2000, she says, around the time she discovered the mind-control forums, the voices stopped and the surveillance tapered off. It was then that she began writing 1996 as a “catharsis.”

Colleagues urged Naylor not to publish the book, saying she would destroy her reputation. But she did publish, albeit with a small publishing house. The book was generally ignored by critics but embraced by TIs.

Naylor is not the first writer to describe such a personal descent. Evelyn Waugh, one of the great novelists of the 20th century, details similar experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh’s book, published in 1957, has eerie similarities to Naylor’s.

Embarking on a recuperative cruise, Pinfold begins to hear voices on the ship that he believes are part of a wireless system capable of broadcasting into his head; he believes the instigator recruited fellow passengers to act as operatives; and he describes “performances” put on by passengers directed at him yet meant to look innocuous to others.

Waugh wrote his book several years after recovering from a similar episode and realizing that the voices and paranoia were the result of drug-induced hallucinations.

Naylor, who hasn’t written a book since 1996, is now back at work on an historical novel she hopes will return her to the literary mainstream. She remains convinced that she was targeted by mind control. The many echoes of her ordeal she sees on the mind-control forums reassure her she’s not crazy, she says.

Of course, some of the things she sees on the forum do strike her as crazy. “But who I am to say?” she says. “Maybe I sound crazy to somebody else.”

SOME TIS, SUCH AS ED MOORE, A YOUNG MEDICAL DOCTOR, take a slightly more skeptical approach. He criticizes what he calls the “wacky claims” of TIs who blame various government agencies or groups of people without any proof. “I have yet to see a claim of who is behind this that has any data to support it,” he writes.

Nonetheless, Moore still believes the voices in his head are the result of mind control and that the U.S. government is the most likely culprit. Moore started hearing voices in 2003, just as he completed his medical residency in anesthesiology; he was pulling an all-nighter studying for board exams when he heard voices coming from a nearby house commenting on him, on his abilities as a doctor, on his sanity. At first, he thought he was simply overhearing conversations through walls (much as Waugh’s fictional alter ego first thought), but when no one else could hear the voices, he realized they were in his head. Moore went through a traumatic two years, including hospitalization for depression with auditory hallucinations.

“One tries to convince friends and family that you are being electronically harassed with voices that only you can hear,” he writes in an e-mail. “You learn to stop doing that. They don’t believe you, and they become sad and concerned, and it amplifies your own depression when you have voices screaming at you and your friends and family looking at you as a helpless, sick, mentally unbalanced wreck.”

He says he grew frustrated with anti-psychotic medications meant to stop the voices, both because the treatments didn’t work and because psychiatrists showed no interest in what the voices were telling him. He began to look for some other way to cope.

“In March of 2005, I started looking up support groups on the Internet,” he wrote. “My wife would cry when she would see these sites, knowing I still heard voices, but I did not know what else to do.” In 2006, he says, his wife, who had stood by him for three years, filed for divorce.

Moore, like other TIs, is cautious about sharing details of his life. He worries about looking foolish to friends and colleagues — but he says that risk is ultimately worthwhile if he can bring attention to the issue.

With his father’s financial help, Moore is now studying for an electrical engineering degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio, hoping to prove that V2K, the technology to send voices into people’s heads, is real. Being in school, around other people, helps him cope, he writes, but the voices continue to taunt him.

Recently, he says, they told him: “We’ll never stop [messing] with you.”

A WEEK BEFORE THE TIS RALLY ON THE NATIONAL MALL, John Alexander, one of the people whom Harlan Girard holds personally responsible for the voices in his head, is at a Chili’s restaurant in Crystal City explaining over a Philly cheese steak and fries why the United States needs mind-control weapons.

A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, Alexander went on to a number of national security jobs, and rubbed shoulders with prominent military and political leaders. Long known for taking an interest in exotic weapons, his 1980 article, “The New Mental Battlefield,” published in the Army journal Military Review, is cited by self-described victims as proof of his complicity in mind control. Now retired from the government and living in Las Vegas, Alexander continues to advise the military. He is in the Washington area that day for an official meeting.

Beneath a shock of white hair is the mind of a self-styled military thinker. Alexander belongs to a particular set of Pentagon advisers who consider themselves defense intellectuals, focusing on big-picture issues, future threats and new capabilities. Alexander’s career led him from work on sticky foam that would stop an enemy in his or her tracks to dalliances in paranormal studies and psychics, which he still defends as operationally useful.

In an earlier phone conversation, Alexander said that in the 1990s, when he took part in briefings at the CIA, there was never any talk of “mind control, or mind-altering drugs or technologies, or anything like that.”

According to Alexander, the military and intelligence agencies were still scared by the excesses of MK-ULTRA, the infamous CIA program that involved, in part, slipping LSD to unsuspecting victims. “Until recently, anything that smacked of [mind control] was extremely dangerous” because Congress would simply take the money away, he said.

Alexander acknowledged that “there were some abuses that took place,” but added that, on the whole, “I would argue we threw the baby out with the bath water.”

But September 11, 2001, changed the mood in Washington, and some in the national security community are again expressing interest in mind control, particularly a younger generation of officials who weren’t around for MK-ULTRA. “It’s interesting, that it’s coming back,” Alexander observed.

While Alexander scoffs at the notion that he is somehow part of an elaborate plot to control people’s minds, he acknowledges support for learning how to tap into a potential enemy’s brain. He gives as an example the possible use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, for lie detection. “Brain mapping” with fMRI theoretically could allow interrogators to know when someone is lying by watching for activity in particular parts of the brain. For interrogating terrorists, fMRI could come in handy, Alexander suggests. But any conceivable use of the technique would fall far short of the kind of mind-reading TIs complain about.

Alexander also is intrigued by the possibility of using electronic means to modify behavior. The dilemma of the war on terrorism, he notes, is that it never ends. So what do you do with enemies, such as those at Guantanamo: keep them there forever? That’s impractical. Behavior modification could be an alternative, he says.

“Maybe I can fix you, or electronically neuter you, so it’s safe to release you into society, so you won’t come back and kill me,” Alexander says. It’s only a matter of time before technology allows that scenario to come true, he continues. “We’re now getting to where we can do that.” He pauses for a moment to take a bite of his sandwich. “Where does that fall in the ethics spectrum? That’s a really tough question.”

When Alexander encounters a query he doesn’t want to answer, such as one about the ethics of mind control, he smiles and raises his hands level to his chest, as if balancing two imaginary weights. In one hand is mind control and the sanctity of free thought — and in the other hand, a tad higher — is the war on terrorism.

But none of this has anything to do with the TIs, he says. “Just because things are secret, people tend to extrapolate. Common sense does not prevail, and even when you point out huge leaps in logic that just cannot be true, they are not dissuaded.”

WHAT IS IT THAT BRINGS SOMEONE, EVEN AN INTELLIGENT PERSON, to ascribe the experience of hearing disembodied voices to government weapons?

In her book, Abducted, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy examines a group that has striking parallels to the TIs: people who believe they’ve been kidnapped by aliens. The similarities are often uncanny: Would-be abductees describe strange pains, and feelings of being watched or targeted. And although the alleged abductees don’t generally have auditory hallucinations, they do sometimes believe that their thoughts are controlled by aliens, or that they’ve been implanted with advanced technology.

(On the online forum, some TIs posted vociferous objections to the parallel, concerned that the public finds UFOs even weirder than mind control. “It will keep us all marginalized and discredited,” one griped.)

Clancy argues that the main reason people believe they’ve been abducted by aliens is that it provides them with a compelling narrative to explain their perception that strange things have happened to them, such as marks on their bodies (marks others would simply dismiss as bruises), stimulation to their sexual organs (as the TIs describe) or feelings of paranoia. “It’s not just an explanation for your problems; it’s a source of meaning for your life,” Clancy says.

In the case of TIs, mind-control weapons are an explanation for the voices they hear in their head. Socrates heard a voice and thought it was a demon; Joan of Arc heard voices from God. As one TI noted in an e-mail: “Each person undergoing this harassment is looking for the solution to the problem. Each person analyzes it through his or her own particular spectrum of beliefs. If you are a scientific-minded person, then you will probably analyze the situation from that perspective and conclude it must be done with some kind of electronic devices. If you are a religious person, you will see it as a struggle between the elements of whatever religion you believe in. If you are maybe, perhaps more eccentric, you may think that it is alien in nature.”

Or, if you happen to live in the United States in the early 21st century, you may fear the growing power of the NSA, CIA and FBI.

Being a victim of government surveillance is also, arguably, better than being insane. In Waugh’s novella based on his own painful experience, when Pinfold concludes that hidden technology is being used to infiltrate his brain, he “felt nothing but gratitude in his discovery.” Why? “He might be unpopular; he might be ridiculous; but he was not mad.”

Ralph Hoffman, a professor of psychiatry at Yale who has studied auditory hallucinations, regularly sees people who believe the voices are a part of government harassment (others believe they are God, dead relatives or even ex-girlfriends). Not all people who hear voices are schizophrenic, he says, noting that people can hear voices episodically in highly emotional states. What exactly causes these voices is still unknown, but one thing is certain: People who think the voices are caused by some external force are rarely dissuaded from their delusional belief, he says. “These are highly emotional and gripping experiences that are so compelling for them that ordinary reality seems bland.”

Perhaps because the experience is so vivid, he says, even some of those who improve through treatment merely decide the medical regimen somehow helped protect their brain from government weapons.

Scott Temple, a professor of psychiatry at Penn State University who has been involved in two recent studies of auditory hallucinations, notes that those who suffer such hallucinations frequently lack insight into their illness. Even among those who do understand they are sick, “that awareness comes and goes,” he says. “People feel overwhelmed, and the delusional interpretations return.”

BACK AT THE PHILADELPHIA TRAIN STATION, Girard seems more agitated. In a meeting the week before, his “handlers” had spoken to him only briefly — they weren’t in the right position to attack him, Girard surmises, based on the lack of voices. Today, his conversation jumps more rapidly from one subject to the next: victims of radiation experiments, his hatred of George H.W. Bush, MK-ULTRA, his personal experiences.

Asked about his studies at Penn, he replies by talking about his problems with reading: “I told you, everything I write they dictate to me,” he says, referring again to the voices. “When I read, they’re reading to me. My eyes go across; they’re moving my eyes down the line. They’re reading it to me. When I close the book, I can’t remember a thing I read. That’s why they do it.”

The week before, Girard had pointed to only one person who appeared suspicious to him — a young African American man reading a book; this time, however, he hears more voices, which leads him to believe the station is crawling with agents.

“Let’s change our location,” Girard says after a while. “I’m sure they have 40 or 50 people in here today. I escaped their surveillance last time — they won’t let that happen again.”

Asked to explain the connection between mind control and the University of Pennsylvania, which Girard alleges is involved in the conspiracy, he begins to talk about defense contractors located near the Philadelphia campus: “General Electric was right next to the parking garage; General Electric Space Systems occupies a huge building right over there. From that building, you could see into the studio where I was doing my work most of the time. I asked somebody what they were doing there. You know, it had to do with computers. GE Space Systems. They were supposed to be tracking missile debris from this location . . . pardon me. What was your question again?”

Yet many parts of Girard’s life seem to reflect that of any affluent 70-year-old bachelor. He travels frequently to France for extended vacations and takes part in French cultural activities in Philadelphia. He has set up a travel scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the name of his late mother, who attended school there (he changed his last name 27 years ago for “personal reasons”), and he travels to meet the students who benefit from the fund. And while the bulk of his time is spent on his research and writing about mind control, he has other interests. He follows politics and describes outings with friends and family members with whom he doesn’t talk about mind control, knowing they would view it skeptically.

Girard acknowledges that some of his experiences mirror symptoms of schizophrenia, but asked if he ever worried that the voices might in fact be caused by mental illness, he answers sharply with one word: “No.”

How, then, does he know the voices are real?

“How do you know you know anything?” Girard replies. “How do you know I exist? How do you know this isn’t a dream you’re having, from which you’ll wake up in a few minutes? I suppose that analogy is the closest thing: You know when you have a dream. Sometimes it could be perfectly lucid, but you know it’s a dream.”

The very “realness” of the voices is the issue — how do you disbelieve something you perceive as real? That’s precisely what Hoffman, the Yale psychiatrist, points out: So lucid are the voices that the sufferers — regardless of their educational level or self-awareness — are unable to see them as anything but real. “One thing I can assure you,” Hoffman says, “is that for them, it feels real.”

IT LOOKS ALMOST LIKE ANY OTHER SMALL POLITICAL RALLY IN WASHINGTON. Posters adorn the gate on the southwest side of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, as attendees set up a table with press materials, while volunteers test a loudspeaker and set out coolers filled with bottled water. The sun is out, the weather is perfect, and an eclectic collection of people from across the country has gathered to protest mind control.

There is not a tinfoil hat to be seen. Only the posters and paraphernalia hint at the unusual. “Stop USA electronic harassment,” urges one poster. “Directed Energy Assaults,” reads another. Smaller signs in the shape of tombstones say, “RIP MKULTRA.” The main display, set in front of the speaker’s lectern has a more extended message: “HELP STOP HI-TECH ASSAULT PSYCHOTRONIC TORTURE.”

About 35 TIs show up for the June rally, in addition to a few friends and family members. Speakers alternate between giving personal testimonials and descriptions of research into mind-control technology. Most of the gawkers at the rally are foreign tourists. A few hecklers snicker at the signs, but mostly people are either confused or indifferent. The articles on mind control at the table — from mainstream news magazines — go untouched.

“How can you expect people to get worked up over this if they don’t care about eavesdropping or eminent domain?” one man challenges after stopping to flip through the literature. Mary Ann Stratton, who is manning the table, merely shrugs and smiles sadly. There is no answer: Everyone at the rally acknowledges it is an uphill battle.

In general, the outlook for TIs is not good; many lose their jobs, houses and family. Depression is common. But for many at the rally, experiencing the community of mind-control victims seems to help. One TI, a man who had been a rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard before voices in his head sent him on a downward spiral, expressed the solace he found among fellow TIs in a long e-mail to another TI: “I think that the only people that can help are people going through the same thing. Everyone else will not believe you, or they are possibly involved.”

In the end, though, nothing could help him enough. In August 2006, he would commit suicide.

But at least for the day, the rally is boosting TI spirits. Girard, in what for him is an ebullient mood, takes the microphone. A small crowd of tourists gathers at the sidelines, listening with casual interest. With the Capitol looming behind him, he reaches the crescendo of his speech, rallying the attendees to remember an important thing: They are part of a single community.

“I’ve heard it said, ‘We can’t get anywhere because everyone’s story is different.’ We are all the same,” Girard booms. “You knew someone with the power to commit you to the electronic concentration camp system.”

Several weeks after the rally, Girard shows up for a meeting with a reporter at the stately Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he has stayed frequently over the two decades he has traveled to the capital to battle mind control. He walks in with a lit cigarette, which he apologetically puts out after a hotel employee tells him smoking isn’t allowed anymore. He is half an hour late — delayed, he says, by a meeting on Capitol Hill. Wearing a monogrammed dress shirt and tie, he looks, as always, serious and professional.

Girard declines to mention whom on Capitol Hill he’d met with, other than to say it was a congressional staffer. Embarrassment is likely a factor: Girard readily acknowledges that most people he meets with, ranging from scholars to politicians, ignore his entreaties or dismiss him as a lunatic.

Lately, his focus is on his Web site, which he sees as the culmination of nearly a quarter-century of research. When completed, it will contain more than 300 pages of documents. What next? Maybe he’ll move to France (there are victims there, too), or maybe the U.S. government will finally just kill him, he says.

Meanwhile, he is always searching for absolute proof that the government has decoded the brain. His latest interest is LifeLog, a project once funded by the Pentagon that he read about in Wired News. The article described it this way: “The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read. All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audiovisual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.”

Girard suggests that the government, using similar technology, has “catalogued” his life over the past two years — every sight and sound (Evelyn Waugh, in his mind-control book, writes about his character’s similar fear that his harassers were creating a file of his entire life).

Girard thinks the government can control his movements, inject thoughts into his head, cause him pain day and night. He believes that he will die a victim of mind control.

Is there any reason for optimism?

Girard hesitates, then asks a rhetorical question.

“Why, despite all this, why am I the same person? Why am I Harlan Girard?”

For all his anguish, be it the result of mental illness or, as Girard contends, government mind control, the voices haven’t managed to conquer the thing that makes him who he is: Call it his consciousness, his intellect or, perhaps, his soul.

“That’s what they don’t yet have,” he says. After 22 years, “I’m still me.”

Sharon Weinberger
The Washington Post
Sunday, January 14, 2007; W22

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011001399.html

Sharon Weinberger is a Washington writer and author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Tuesday at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

Mind Games

A Voice Only You Can Hear: DARPA’s Sonic Projector

Imagine a weapon that creates sound that only you can hear. Science fiction? No, this is one area that has a very solid basis in reality. The Air Force has experimented with microwaves that create sounds in people’s head (which they’ve called a possible psychological warfare tool), and American Technologies can “beam” sounds to specific targets with their patented HyperSound (and yes, I’ve heard/seen them demonstrate the speakers, and they are shockingly effective).

Sound Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is jumping on the bandwagon with their new “Sonic Projector” program:

The goal of the Sonic Projector program is to provide Special Forces with a method of surreptitious audio communication at distances over 1 km. Sonic Projector technology is based on the non-linear interaction of sound in air translating an ultrasonic signal into audible sound. The Sonic Projector will be designed to be a man-deployable system, using high power acoustic transducer technology and signal processing algorithms which result in no, or unintelligible, sound everywhere but at the intended target. The Sonic Projector system could be used to conceal communications for special operations forces and hostage rescue missions, and to disrupt enemy activities.

Sharon Weinberger
Wired Blog
June 05, 2007

Court Recognizes Electronic Harassment: Documents from the Walbert Case

click to enlarge

Letter from State Representative James Guest (R-MO)

JAMES O. GUEST
STATE REPRESENTATIVE
DISTRICT ADDRESS

P.O. BOX 412
KING CITY, MO 64463
Tele: 660-535-6664

To Whom It May Concern:

I have worked for 3 years with Microwave and Electronic Harassment victims throughout the US and overseas. It is hard for others to understand the technology that is being used to destroy people’s lives. I know James because he contacted me for help. James has worked to find proof of what has happened to him.

Many victims try hard to get help from professional doctors to help find devices such as Veri-Chip. I would request that you and those who can make a difference would help James and others to find answers.
5th District State Representative

Non-Lethality: John B. Alexander, The Pentagon’s Penguin (Lobster 1993)

The following article which appeared in the U.K. magazine, LOBSTER, in June 1993, is reproduced at the request of the author. (LOBSTER magazine, which specializes in intelligence and conspiracy matters, is published twice yearly.)

’Non-Lethality: John B. Alexander, The Pentagon’s Penguin’, was republished in Nexus (October/November, 1993) as ’Psychic Warfare and Non-Lethal Weapons’ under Henry Azadehdel’s ’hobby’ name of Armen Victorian On April 22, 1993, both BBC1 and BBC2 showed on their main evening news bulletins a rather lengthy piece concerning America’s latest development in weaponry – the non-lethal weapons concept. David Shukman, BBC Defense Correspondent interviewed (Retired) U.S. Army Colonel John B. Alexander and Janet Morris, two of the main proponents of the concept (1). The concept of non-lethal weapons is not new. Non-lethal weapons have been used by the intelligence, police and defense establishments in the past (2).

Several western governments have used a variety of non-lethal weapons in a more discreet and covert manner. It seems that the U.S. government is about to take the first step towards their open use.

The current interest in the concept of non-lethal weapons began about a decade ago with John Alexander. In December 1980 he published an article in the U.S. Army’s journal, MILITARY REVIEW, “The New Mental Battlefield,” referring to claims that telepathy could be used to interfere with the brain’s electrical activity. This caught the attention of senior Army generals who encouraged him to pursue what they termed “soft option kill” technologies.

After retiring from the Army in 1988, Alexander joined the Los Alamos National Laboratories and began working with Janet Morris, the Research Director of the U.S. Global Strategy Council (USGSC), chaired by Dr Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA (3). I examine the background of Janet Morris and John Alexander in more detail below.

Throughout 1990 the USGSC lobbied the main national laboratories, major defense contractors and industries, retired senior military and intelligence officers. The result was the creation of a Non-lethality Policy Review Group, led by Major General Chris S. Adams, USAF (retd.) former Chief of Staff, Strategic Air Command (4). They already have the support of Senator Sam Nunn, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. According to Janet Morris, the military attaché at the Russian Embassy has contacted USGSC about the possibility of converting military hardware to a non-lethal capability.

In 1991 Janet Morris issued a number of papers giving more detailed information about USGSC’s concept of non-lethal weapons (5). Shortly after, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command at Fort Monroe, VA, published a detailed draft report on the subject titled “Operations Concept for Disabling Measures.” The report included over twenty projects in which John Alexander is currently involved at the Los Alamos national Laboratories.

In a memorandum dated April 10, 1991, titled “Do we need a Non-lethal Defense initiative?” Paul Wolfwitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, wrote to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney,

“A U.S. lead in non-lethal technologies will increase our options and reinforce our position in the post-Cold War world. Our Research and Development efforts must be increased.”

HOW LETHAL IS NON-LETHAL?

To support their non-lethal weapons concept, Janet Morris argues that while,

“war will always be terrible… a world power deserving its reputation for humane action should pioneer the principles of non-lethal defense (6).” In “Defining a non-lethal strategy,” she seeks to establish a doctrine for the use of non-lethal weapons by the U.S. in crisis “at home or abroad in a life serving fashion.”

She totally disregards the offensive, lethal aspects inherent in some of the weapons in question, or their misuse, should they become available to “rogue” nations. Despite her arguments that non-lethal weapons should serve the U.S.’s interests,

“at home and abroad by projecting power without indiscriminately taking lives or destroying property (7),” she admits that “casualties cannot be avoided (8).”

Closer examination of the types of weapons to be used as non-lethal invalidates her assertions about their non-lethality. According to her white paper, the areas where non-lethal weapons could be useful are,

“regional and low intensity conflict (adventurism, insurgency, ethnic violence, terrorism, narco- trafficking, domestic crime) (9).”

She believes that,

“by identifying and requiring a new category of non-lethal weapons, tactics and strategic planning” the U.S. can reshape its military capability, “to meet the already identifiable threats” that they might face in a multipolar world “where American interests are globalized and American presence widespread (10).”

THE POTENTIAL INVENTORY

Janet Morris’ “White Paper” recommends “two types of life-conserving technologies”:

ANTI-MATERIAL NON-LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES

To destroy or impair electronics, or in other ways stop mechanical systems from functioning. Amongst current technologies from which this category of non- lethal weapons would or could be chosen are:

Chemical and biological weapons for their anti-materiel agents “which do not significantly endanger life or the environment, or anti-personnel agents which have no permanent effects (11).”

Laser blinding systems to incapacitate the electronic sensors, or optics, i.e. light detection and ranging. Already the Army Infantry School is developing a one-man portable and operated laser weapons system known as the Infantry Self-Defense System. The U.S. Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineer Center (ARDEC), is also engaged in the development of non-lethal weapons under their program called “Low Collateral Damage Munitions” (LCDM). The LCDM is trying to develop technologies leading to weapons capable of dazzling and incapacitating missiles, armored vehicles and personnel.

Non-lethal electromagnetic technologies.

Non-nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse weapons (12). As General Norman Schwartzkopf has told the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, one such weapons stationed in space with a wide-area-pulse capacity has the ability to fry enemy electronics. But what would be the fate of enemy personnel in such a scenario? In a join project with the Los Alamos National Laboratories and with technical support from the Army’s Harry Diamond Laboratories, ARDEC are developing High Power Microwave (HPM) Projectiles. According to ARDEC, the Diamond lab has already “completed a radio frequency effects analysis on a representative target set” for (HPM).

Among the chemical agents, so-called super caustics – “Millions of times more caustic than hydrofluoric acid (13)” – are prime candidates. An artillery round could deliver jellied super-acids which could destroy the optics of heavily armored vehicles or tanks, vision blocks or glass, and “could be used to silently destroy key weapons systems (14).”

On less lethal aspects the use of net-like entanglements for SEAL teams, or “stealthy” metal boats with low or no radar signature, “for night actions, or any sea borne or come-ashore stealthy scenario” are under consideration (15). More colorful concepts are the use of chemical metal embitterment, often called liquid metal embitterment and anti-materiel polymers which would be used in aerosol dispersal systems, spreading chemical adhesives or lubricants (i.e. Teflon-based lubricants) on enemy equipment from a distance.

ANTI-PERSONNEL NON-LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES

Hand-held lasers which are meant “to dazzle,” could also cause the eyeball to explode and to blind the target.

Isotropic radiators – explosively driven munitions, capable of generating very bright omni-directional light, with similar effects to laser guns.
*
High-power microwaves (HPM) – U.S. Special Operations command already has that capability within their grasp as a portable microwave weapon (16). As Myron L. Wolbarsht, a Duke University opthalamist and expert in laser weapons stated:

“U.S. Special Forces can quietly cut enemy communications but also can cook internal organs (17).”

Another candidate is Infrasound – acoustic beams. In conjunction with the Scientific Applications and Research Associates (SARA) of Huntingdon, California, ARDEC and Los Alamos laboratories are busy “developing a high power, very low frequency acoustic beam weapons.” They are also looking into methods of projecting non-diffracting (i.e. non-penetrating) high frequency acoustic bullets. ARDEC scientists are also looking into methods of using pulsed chemical lasers. This class of lasers could project,

“a hot, high pressure plasma in the air in front of a target surface, creating a blast wave that will result in variable but controlled effects on materiel and personnel.”

Infrasound. Already some governments have used it as a means of crowd control – e.g. France.

Very low frequency (VLF) sound (20-35 KHz), or low-frequency RF modulations can cause nausea, vomiting and abdominal pains.

“Some very low frequency sound generators, in certain frequency ranges, can cause the disruption of human organs and, at high power levels, can crumble masonry (18).”

The CIA had a similar program in 1978 called Operation Pique, which included bouncing radio or microwave signals off the ionosphere to affect mental functions of people in selected areas, including Eastern European nuclear installations (19).

JOHN ALEXANDER

The entire non-lethal weapon concept opens up a new Pandora’s Box of unknown consequences. The main personality behind it is retired Colonel John B. Alexander. Born in New York in 1937, he spent part of his career as a Commander of Green Berets Special Forces in Vietnam, led Cambodian mercenaries behind enemy lines, and took part in a number of clandestine programs, including Phoenix. He currently holds the post of Director of Non-lethal Programs in the Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Alexander obtained a BaS from the University of Nebraska and an MA from Pepperdine University. In 1980 he was awarded a PhD from Walden University (20) for his thesis “To determine whether or not significant changes in spirituality occur in persons who attended a Kubler-Ross life/death transition workshop during the period June through February 1979.” His dissertation committee was chaired by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.

He has long been interested in what used to be regarded as “fringe” areas. In 1971, while a Captain in the infantry at Schofield Barracks, Honolulu, he was diving in the Bemini Islands looking for the lost continent of Atlantis. He was an official representative for the Silva mind control organization and a lecturer on Precataclysmic Civilizations (21).

Alexander is also a past President and a Board member of the International Association for Near Death Studies; and, with his former wife, Jan Northup, he helped Dr C.B. Scott Jones perform ESP experiments with dolphins (22).

PSI-TECH

Retired Major General Albert N. Stubblebine (Former Director of U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command) and Alexander are on the board of a “remote viewing” company called PSI-TECH. The company also employs Major Edward Dames (ex Defense Intelligence Agency), Major David Morehouse (ex 82nd Airborne Division), and Ron Blackburn (former microwave scientist and specialist at Kirkland Air Force Base).

PSI-TECH has received several government contracts. For example, during the Gulf War crisis the Department for Defense asked it to use remote viewing to locate Saddam’s Scud missiles sites. Last year (1992) the FBI sought PSI-TECH’s assistance to locate a kidnapped Exxon executive (23).

With Major Richard Groller and Janet Morris as his co-authors, Alexander published THE WARRIOR’S EDGE in 1990 (24). The book describes in detail various unconventional methods which would enable the practitioner to acquire “human excellence and optimum performance” and thereby become an invincible warrior (25). The purpose of the book is “to unlock the door to the extraordinary human potentials inherent in each of us. To do this, we, like governments around the world , must take a fresh look at non-traditional methods of affecting reality. We must raise human consciousness of the potential power of the individual body/mind system – the power to manipulate reality. We must be willing to retake control of our past, present, and ultimately, our future (26).”

Alexander is a friend of Vice President Al Gore Jnr, their relationship dating back to 1983 when Gore was in Alexander’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP “presented to selected general officers and Senior Executive Service members (27)” a set of techniques to modify behavior patterns (28). Among the first generals to take the course was the then Lieutenant General Maxwell Thurman, who later went on to receive his fourth star and become Vice-Chief of Staff at the Army and Commander Southern Command (29). Among other senior participants were Tom Downey and Major General Stubblebine, former Director of the Army Intelligence Security Command.

“In 1983, the Jedi master (from the Star Wars movie – author) provided an image and a name for the Jei Project (30).”

Jedi Project’s aim was to seek and “construct teachable models of behaviorable/physical excellence using unconventional means (31).” According to Alexander the Jedi Project was to be a follow-up to Neuro-Linguistic Programming skills. By using the influence of friends such as Major General Stubblebine, who was then head of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, he managed to fund Jedi. In reality the concept was old hat, re-christened by Alexander.

The original idea which was to show how “human will power and human concentration affect performance more than any other single factor (32)” using NLP skills, was the brainchild of three independent people; Fritz Erikson, a Gestalt therapist, Virginia Satir, a family therapist and Erick Erickson, a hypnotist.

JANET MORRIS

Janet Morris, co-author of THE WARRIOR’S EDGE, is best known as a science fiction writer but has been a member of the New York Academy of Sciences since 1980 and is a member of the Association for Electronic Defense. She is also the Research Director of the U.S. Global Strategy Council (USGSC). She was initiated into the Japanese art of bioenergetics, Joh-re, the Indonesian brotherhood of Subud, and graduated from the Silva course in advanced mind control.

She has been conducting remote viewing experiments for fifteen years. She worked on a research project investigating the effects of mind on probability in computer systems. Her husband, Robert Morris, is a former judge and a key member of the American Security Council (33).

In a recent telephone conversation with the author (34), Janet Morris confirmed John Alexander’s involvement in mind control and psychotronic projects in the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Alexander and his team have recently been working with Dr Igor Smirnov, a psychologist from the Moscow Institute of Psychocorrelations. They were invited to the U.S. after Janet Morris’ visit to Russia in 1991.

There she was shown the technique which was pioneered by the Russian Department of Psycho-Correction at Moscow Medical Academy. The Russians employ a technique to electronically analyze the human mind in order to influence it. They input subliminal command messages, using key words transmitted in “white noise” or music (35). Using an infrasound very low frequency-type transmission, the acoustic psycho-correction message is transmitted via bone conduction – ear plugs would not restrict the message.

To do that would require an entire body protection system. According to the Russians the subliminal messages by-pass the conscious level and are effective almost immediately.

C.B. SCOTT JONES

Jones is the former assistant to Senator Clairborne Pell (Democrat, Rhode Island). Scott Jones was a member of U.S. Naval Intelligence for 15 years, as well as Assistant Naval Attaché, New Delhi, India, in the 1960s. Jones has briefed the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and has testified before House and Senate Committees on intelligence matters.

After the navy he, “worked in the private sector research and development community involved in the U.S. government sponsored projects for the Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.”

He has been head of the Rockefeller Foundation for some time and chairs the American Society for Psychical Research (36).

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Alexander and C.B. Jones are members of the AVIARY, a group of intelligence and Department of Defense officers and scientists with a brief to discredit any serious research in the UFO field. Each member of the Aviary bears a bird’s name. Jones is FALCON, John Alexander is PENGUIN.

One of their agents; a UFO researcher known as William Moore, who was introduced to John Alexander at a party in 1987 by Scott Jones, confessed in front of an audience at a conference held by the MUTUAL UFO NETWORK (MUFON) on July 1, 1989, in Las Vegas, how he was promised inside information by the senior members of the AVIARY in return for his obedience and service to them. He participated in the propagation and dissemination of disinformation fed to him by various members of the AVIARY.

He also confessed how he was instructed to target one particular individual, an electronics expert, Dr Paul Bennewitz, who had accumulated some UFO film footage and electronic signals which were taking place in 1980 over the Menzano Weapons Storage areas, at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. As a result of Moore’s involvement, coupled with some surreptitious entries and psychological techniques, Bennewitz ended up in a psychiatric hospital.

Just before the publication of my first paper unmasking two members of the AVIARY (37) I was visited by two of their members (MORNING DOVE and HAWK) who had travelled to the U.K. with a message from the senior ranks advising me not to go ahead with my expose. I rejected the proposal.

Immediately after the publication of that paper, and with the full knowledge that myself and a handful of colleagues knew the true identities of their members, John B. Alexander confessed that he was indeed a member of the AVIARY, nicknamed PENGUIN. The accuracy of our information was further confirmed to me by yet another member of the AVIARY, Ron Pandolphi, PELICAN. Pandolphi is a PhD in physics and works at the Rocket and Missile section of the Office of the Deputy Director of Science and Technology, CIA.

In his book, OUT THERE (38), the NEW YORK TIMES journalist Howard Blum refers to “a UFO Working Group” within the Defense Intelligence Agency. Despite DIA’s repeated denials (39), the existence of this working group has been confirmed to me by more than one member of the group itself, including an independent source in the Office of Naval Intelligence.

The majority of the group’s members are senior members of the AVIARY:

Dr Christopher Green (BLUEJAY) from the CIA (40)

Harold Puthoff (OWL) ex-NSA

Dr Jack Verona (RAVEN) (DoD, one of the initiators of the DIA’s Sleeping Beauty project which aimed to achieve battlefield superiority using mind-altering electromagnetic weaponry)

John Alexander (PENGUIN)

Ron Pandolphi (PELICAN)

The mysterious “Col. Harold E. Phillips” who appears in Blum’s OUT THERE is none other than John B. Alexander.

John Alexander’s position as the Program Manager for Contingency Missions of Conventional Defense Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratories, enabled him to exploit the Department of Defense’s Project RELIANCE “which encourages a search for all possible sources of existing and incipient technologies before developing new technology in-house (41)” to tap into a wide range of exotic topics, sometimes using defense contractors, e.g. McDonnel Douglas Aerospace.

I have several reports, some of which were compiled before his departure to the Los Alamos National Laboratories when he was with Army Intelligence, which show Alexander’s keen interest in any and every exotic subject:

UFOs

ESP

psychotronics

anti-gravity devices

near death experiments

psychology warfare
]
non-lethal weaponry

John Alexander utilizes the bank of information he has accumulated to try to develop psychotronic, psychological and mind weaponry. He began thinking about non-lethal weapons a decade ago in his paper “The New Mental Battlefield.” He seems to want to become a “Master.”

If he ever succeeds in this ambition the rest of us ordinary mortals had better watch out.

NOTES:

1. Letter dated 2 April, 1993, to author from Mrs Victoria Alexander.
2. The U.S. Army Chemical and Military Police used “Novel Effect Weapons” against the women protesters at the Greenham Common Base.
3. The United States Global Strategy Council is an independent think tank, incorporated in 1981. It focuses on long-range strategic issues. The founding members were Clare Boothe Luce, General Maxwell Taylor, General Albert Wedemeyer, Dr Ray Cline (Co-chair), Jeane Kirkpatrick (Co-chair), Morris Leibman, Henry luce III, J. William Middendorf II, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer USN (retd), General Richard Stillwell (retd), Dr Michael A. Daniles (President), Dr Dalton A. West (Executive Vice President). Its Research Directors were Dr Yona Alexander, Dr Roger Fontaine, Robert L. Katula and Janet Morris.
4. NONLETHAlITY: DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL POLICY AND EMPLOYING NONLETHAL MEANS IN A NEW STATEGIC ERA – a Project of the U.S. Global Strategy Council, 1991, p.4. Other staff members of the USGSC are Steve Trevino, Dr John B. Alexander and Chris Morris.
5. The USGSC has issued a wide variety of papers on the Nonlethal Weapons Concept. For example, IN SEARCH OF NONLETHAL STRATEGY (Janet Morris); NONLETHALITY: A GLOBAL STRATEGY – WHITE PAPER; NONLETHALITY BRIEFING SUPPLEMENT No.1; and NONLETHALITY IN THE OPERATIONAL CONTINUUM.
6. IN SEARCH OF A NONLETHAL STRATEGY, Janet Morris, p.1.
7. NONLETHALITY: A GLOBAL STRATEGY – WHITE PAPER, p.3. 8. IN SEARCH OF… P.3.
9. In the recent cult siege in Waco, Texas, a “nonlethal” technique, projecting sublimal messages, was used to influence David Kuresh – without effect.
10. NONLETHALITY: A GLOBAL STRATEGY – WHITE PAPER, p.2.
11. The computer data base compiled during the CIA/Army’s Project OFTEN, examining several thousand chemical compounds, during 1976-1973, is a most likely candidate for any chemical agents for nonlethal weapons.
12. The British MoD is already developing a “microwave bomb.” Work on the weapon is going on at the Defence Research Agency at Farnborough, Hampshire. See SUNDAY TELEGRAPH September 27, 1992, partly reproduced in LOBSTER 24, p.14. The Royal Navy is already in possession of laser weapons which dazzle aircraft pilots. The Red Cross has called for them to be banned under the Geneva Convention because could permanently blind.
13. IN SEARCH OF A NONLETHAL STRATEGY, p.13.
14. Ibid.
15. The U.S. Navy, through its Project SEA SHADOW, has already developed a stealth boat. Like the Lockheed F117A, stealth fighter, it leaves no radar signature – BBC, Newsround, April 28, 1993.
16. Taped conversation with Janet Morris, March 1, 1993.
17. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, January 4, 1993.
18. IN SEARCH OF A NONLETHAL STRATEGY, p. 14.
19. REMOTE CONTROL TECHNOLOGY, Anna Keeler (FULL DISCLOSURE, Ann Arbor, U.S.A., 1989) p.11.
20. Walden University, 801 Anchor Road Drive, Naples, Fl. 33904, U.S.A. Walden University considers itself a non-traditional university and does not offer any undergraduate courses to its students.
21. Brad Steiger, MYSTERIES OF SPACE AND TIME (Prentice Hall, Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey) pp.72 and 3. The U.S. Army Command and General College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, issued this on Alexander’s career: “Colonel John B. Alexander, U.S. Army Retired, manages Antimateriel Technology at Los Alamos National Laboratories, Los Alamos, New Mexico. His military assignments included; Advanced Systems Concepts Office, Laboratory Command; manager, Technology Integration Office, Army Material Command; assistant deputy chief of staff, Technology Planning and Management, Army Material Command; and chief, Advanced Human Technology, Intelligence and Security Command.”
22. Taped telephone conversation with Dr Scott Jones, August 17, 1992.
23. Taped telephone conversation with Maj. Edward Dames, June 27, 1992; and THE BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, December 1992, p.6.
24. THE WARRIOR’S EDGE, Col. John B. Alexander, Maj. Richard Groller and Janet Morris, (William Morrow Inc., New York, 1990).
25. Ibid. p.9.
26. Ibid. pp.9 and 10.
27. Ibid p.47.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid. pp.72 and 3.
31. Ibid. p.12.
32. Ibid. p. 13.
33. The American Security Council (ASC) Box 8, Boston, Virginia 22713, USA. ASC is militarist, anti-communist and right-wing. Formed in the mid 1950s, the Council acts as a right-wing think tank on foreign policy and lobbies for the expansion and strengthening of U.S. military forces. In 1985 the ASC had 330,000 members. See, for example, the entry for the ASC in THE RADICAL RIGHT: A WORLD DIRECTORY, compiled by Ciaran O Maolain (Longman, London 1987).
34. Taped telephone conversation with Janet Morris, March 1, 1993.
35. In 1989 a U.S. Department of Defense consultant and contractor explained to the author how he was asked to examine the possibility of devising operational methods of transmitting subliminal messages through the TV screen.
36. “Will the Real Scott Jones please stand up?” – unpublished paper by George Hansen and Robert Durant, February 20, 1990, pp.4 and 5.
37. “The Birds” Armen Victorian, in U.K. UFO Magazine, Vol.11 No.3, July/August 1992, pp 4-7.
38. OUT THERE, Howard Blum (Simon and Schuster, London 1990) pp.44, 46-51, 55-57.
39. DIA’s letters to author dated July 12, 1991, July 8, 1992 and December 18, 1992.

40. Dr Chistopher “Kit” Green, BLUEJAY, has admitted that the CIA has compiled over 30,000 files on UFOs, 200 of which are extremely interesting. Green was a key CIA member in examining the UFO problem for several years

41. Los Alamos National Laboratory, Institutional Plan Fiscal Year 1992 – Fiscal Year 1997, p.14.

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_mindcon09.htm

Star Wars Lasers Able to Incinerate Cities (Los Angeles Times 1986)

Consequences of Resulting Massive Firestorms Called as Disastrous as Those of ‘Nuclear Winter’

Laser weapons being developed as part of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative could more easily be used to incinerate enemy cities than to protect the United States against Soviet missiles, according to an article in the current issue of a leading physics magazine and a separate study being circulated among government weapons scientists.

Many advocates of the “Star Wars” defense systems hope lasers fired down from space stations or shot up from the Earth and reflected off space-based mirrors onto targets below may one day be part of a defensive shield against enemy missiles. But new analysis suggests that high-intensity laser light from such weapons could also be used offensively to unleash massive firestorms, possibly producing an environmental disaster similar to a “nuclear winter.”

Non-Nuclear Armageddon

The study, which was produced by R&D Associates, an influential defense think tank based in Marina del Rey, cites data indicating that, “in a matter of hours, a laser defense system powerful enough to cope with the ballistic missile threat can also destroy the enemy’s major cities by fire. The attack would proceed city by city, the attack time for each city being only a matter of minutes. Not nuclear destruction, but Armageddon all the same.

Lasers “have the potential of initiating massive urban fires and even of destroying the enemy’s major cities by fire in a matter of hours,” according to the article by Caroline L. Herzenberg, a government physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.

“Such mass fires might be expected to generate smoke in amounts comparable to the amounts generated in some major nuclear exchange scenarios,” the article in the current issue of Physics and Society, a publication of the American Physical Society, warned. This could cause “a climatic catastrophe similar to ‘nuclear winter,'” a reference to the disastrous lowering of the Earth’s temperature many scientists believe would result from a nuclear war.

The R&D study does not mention a “nuclear winter” but does stress that lasers are not intrinsically defensive weapons and can be used offensively to start massive fires.

“The lasers can be employed in a manner not contemplated by the (Strategic Defense Initiative),” caution Albert L. Latter and Ernest A. Martinelli, who wrote the eight-page R&D Associates study and are highly regarded advocates of a stronger U.S. defense. “Specifically, they can be targeted against the same entities they were designed to protect: the cities.

“After spending hundreds of billions of dollars, we would be back where we started from: deterrence by retaliation. Our cities would be hostage to lasers instead of nuclear weapons,” the report said.

President Reagan has offered ultimately to share “Star Wars” technology with the Soviet Union. But the R&D Associates report suggests that such weapons in the hands of the Soviets might prove menacing: “A Soviet laser weapon system . . . powerful enough to defend against the U.S. ballistic missile threat can incinerate our cities without warning on a time scale of minutes-per-city; minutes to hours for the whole country. To deter such an attack, the U.S. could only threaten to retaliate.”

The authors suggested that laser weapons might also be used against Soviet conventional forces. “For those who have advocated limited nuclear options against the Soviet Union itself, limited laser options would produce less collateral damage and be just as effective otherwise,” they wrote.

The danger of laser-induced fires had not been much noticed by critics or proponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative until the appearance of the article and the R&D study. When asked to comment, a Strategic Defense Initiative spokeswoman stated on a non-attribution basis after checking with other officials that “lasers could start fires.” But she added that “this is not a problem that we are addressing at this time. It is not the intention of (the Strategic Defense Initiative) to start fires. This is an anti-ballistic (missile) program.”

She denied also that lasers designed for defense could be used as offensive weapons. “They would have to be designed differently to cause fires,” she said.

However, in an interview Friday, Herzenberg, the author of the physics magazine article, responded that “all you need is to dump enough energy on something and, if it’s flammable, it will go up. The free electron laser, the excimer laser, and the deuterium fluoride chemical laser (which are the subjects of current research) all can go through the atmosphere and cause fires.”

The free electron laser is being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory here. However, lab spokesman Norris Smith said that “the lab will have no comment” on the matter.

Theodore A. Postol, until recently adviser on nuclear weapons to the chief of naval operations and an expert on the implications of firestorms, said: “If you were attempting to set fires with an optical laser that was already sufficiently powerful to attack hardened ICBM boosters, there is no question that such a device could also be used to create mass fires of enormous scale and ferocity—mass urban fires potentially larger and more intense than those created by the great incendiary raids on Hamburg and Dresden in World War II.”

http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20and%20Notes/Star%20Wars%20Lasers.html

Los Angeles Times
12 January 1986- front page