Jacques Vallee On Mind Control
My friend Miles Lewis pointed me to a recent essay at Boing Boing by ufomystic hero Jacques Vallee, but after reading it, I’m divided on what to think.
In essence, Vallee makes the case that so-called mind-control drugs never worked effectively, and the evidence for this is that the United States has resorted to old-fashioned torture in interrogations of terrorist suspects.
In 1979, author John Marks concluded that the CIA had searched for years in vain for methods of mind control. In his book The Search For The Manchurian Candidate, he wrote that nothing he uncovered in his research on the CIA indicated a fool-proof method of either controlling people against their will or extracting information that would not be given voluntarily, at least with machines or drugs. This was not something the conspiracy crowd wanted to hear.
Mind-altering drugs would probably be used as a tool by trained (read: tight-lipped) interrogators, and would probably not be publicized as abuses of Abu-Ghraib, which were widespread and committed for the most part by regular Army personnel.
In a sense, this parallels the UFO subject. If the government is keeping any information they have on the reality of ETs or other aspects of extra-human intelligence, they could just as easily control public awareness of mind-control technology. The deepest secrets may not be fool-proof or complete, but it may be valuable enough to be worth the effort of covering up what little is known.
Some of us really want to think that a ruling elite really do know everything and have total control over our lives and thoughts. I tend to think that if that was the case, we’d be living in a version of Orwell’s nightmare already. The fact that we can discuss this is evidence enough that at least some people are in general control of their thoughts and lives. The problem for a “ruling elite” is if too many of us start to think too much, and act on those thoughts. The more crazy the world become however, the more “crazy” ideas start to sound better to more people.
For those who can make a difference if they so choose, a full belly, entertainment, and general freedom of travel keeps most threats to the status quo in check. The best defense is awareness. Dr. Vallee’s essay can be taken as a sort of back-handed comfort, or we can take it under advisement.
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Dec 11 2009 
December 11th, 2009 at 2:30 am
The kind of culture you describe is similar to what Bertram Gross called “friendly fascism”, which is, of course, a version of Orwell’s mightmare.
But happy as I am to read anything new by Jacques Vallee, I’ll forgive his dismissal of the LSD experience as a colorful delusion. I suspect that LSD reality trumps whatever trivial detail the torturers expect to elicit.
But it does seem that Dr. Vallee could stand a review of the history of mind control. MKULTRA, for instance, began as a means to try to figure out how the North Koreans got shot-down American pilots to denounce the US war effort.
It’s still an unsettled bit of business. Did these pilots “confess” under torture to true things or did they make it up to appease the torturers? For a fuller examination of the issue, go here:
http://www.umsl.edu/~thomaskp/schwab.htm
As far as I know, the water boarding torture led to actionable intelligence. More potent approaches may have been less effective, producing nothing but unintelligible “truths” from the victims’ psyches.
December 11th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Strange sychronicities, anyhow. I was
doing my weekely read-though of topics
at The Straight Dope and came
across an article on ‘truth serum’
which said essentially the same thing-
not effective enough, consistently
enough, to be worthwhile.
December 12th, 2009 at 4:18 am
It’s a question of “breaking the will” to get the truth. The comments on Vallee’s article has some interesting links about how the Harvard LSD CIA experiments by Dr. Murray enabled him to be a “nervous breakdown artist.” Then the “scopalamine” drug is mentioned — which is native to Colombia and Ecuador. People willingly give over their bank account numbers after being slipped scopalamine — and even better there’s no memory recorded.
Still sensory deprivation is the most powerful technique to break the will and ironically the “most” legal, as this article excerpt from 2007 Salon notes:
“Sensory deprivation, as CIA research and other agency interrogation materials demonstrate, is a remarkably simple concept. It can be inflicted by immobilizing individuals in small, soundproof rooms and fitting them with blacked-out goggles and earmuffs. “The first thing that happens is extraordinary hallucinations akin to mescaline,” explained McCoy. “I mean extreme hallucinations” of sight and sound. It is followed, in some cases within just two days, by what McCoy called a ‘breakdown akin to psychosis.’
It is therefore as insidious as some forms of obviously abusive coercion that are likely to be forbidden under the new CIA rules, like waterboarding, the technique of strapping a subject to a board with his feet raised and pouring water on his face to produce a sensation of imminent death. Legally, however, sensory deprivation is more nebulous than physical abuse, and that is what worries human rights advocates.”
December 12th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Vallee brings up a good, that clearly none of the alleged mind control technologies work — LSD, MKULTRA, truth serums, sensory deprivation, lie detectors, remote viewing — otherwise our government would have used those techniques instead of the primitive, inhumane, and inefficient torture techniques used at Abu-Ghraib. As far as this applies to UFOs, Vallee is also absolutely correct. I mean, the same organization that was responsible for the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall surprise, Gary Powers and the U-2 incident, agents wearing official CIA jackets with CIA logos on when helping rebels “secretly” mine the harbor in Nicaragua, failing to anticipate Chinese intervention in the Korean War, telling us how ’strong’ the USSR was and how we had to arm ourselves against them right up to the day they “suddenly and without warning” fell apart, aided drug cartels in SE Asia and Central America all in the name of ‘fighting communism’, knowingly feed faulty information to the White House and the Pentagon from double agents who were working for the USSR, and mistaking Cream trucks for Mobile Biological Warfare Factories in Iraq to justify the invasion of Iraq at the beginning of Gulf War II, then it would take no small leap of imagination to visualize the CIA not being competent enough to keep any information on the reality of ETs secret. You would have to be extremely gullible and ignorant to believe otherwise.
December 12th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Jose Padilla wasn’t at Abu-Ghraib but he does claim he had a truth serum used on him — he thinks it was LSD.
We don’t really know what happened at Abu-Ghraib because the CIA had their own torture program there separate from the Army, as the below article excerpt from the Catholic Reporter explains:
“It also states that CIA officers held Ghost Detainees — including an Iraqi citizen later found dead in a shower, handcuffed with a sandbag over his head, and three Saudi national medical personnel working for the coalition in Iraq who were held under false names. The Army allowed the CIA to imprison unidentified and unaccounted-for detainees, thereby circumventing the reporting requirements under the Geneva Conventions.”
December 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
“Jose Padilla…claim[s] he had a truth serum used on him”
Is that a documented fact or an unsubstantiated claim?
“We don’t really know what happened at Abu-Ghraib”
Yes we most certainly do. It was well documented what happened there. As for anything else that might have allegedly happened there, it wasn’t well documented, and you can’t use absence of evidence as evidence of existence.
December 13th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Sage maybe if you want a “substantiated” claim you should ask the “rebels” of Central America?
Read Noam Chomsky’s “Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume 1: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism.”
Plenty of substantiation about CIA genocide in the Western Hemisphere — long before any truth serum needed to be debated about.
December 13th, 2009 at 11:51 am
The point here (and with a lot of issues in the ufo/ paranormal/ conspiracy arena) is that people will tend to take a view which supports their preconceptions. If there is a credible explanation (of any degree) from officialdom, some will say that the account is accurate. Others will say that there is not enough evidence or something is being covered up. It’s just more interesting to guess that we are not being told the whole story, even if we are.
I recall the quote from two former intel employees I talked with earlier this year who said that no one in government tells the whole truth. Ever.
As I wrote at the end of the post, take it under advisement.
December 13th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
“Maybe…you should ask the ‘rebels’ of Central America?”
Have you asked them for yourself? I didn’t think so so that is hearsay, not reality.
Read Noam Chomsky’s ‘Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume 1: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism’
Again, if truth serums exist and are so good, why doesn’t anyone ever use them?
“Plenty of substantiation about CIA genocide…”
Genocide has nothing to do with the alleged reality of a truth serum.
December 13th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
“The point here…is that people will tend to take a view which supports their preconceptions”
Is that a fact or confabulation?
“It’s just more interesting to guess that we are not being told the whole story, even if we are…I recall the quote from two former intel employees I talked with earlier this year who said that no one in government tells the whole truth. Ever”
So what? That is no license to make up stuff out of thin air and then believe in it.
Discussing UFOs is little different then discussing religion, but at least in the case of religion, we know for a fact that there is no such thing as the paranormal, and since any belief in a God or Gods requires that one first assume the existence of the paranormal, we know for a fact that there are no God or Gods. UFOs are not so easy to dismiss but if UFOs are so real, why is that UFOs require far more faith than is required for a belief in a God or Gods?
December 13th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
“Have you asked them for yourself? I didn’t think so so that is hearsay, not reality.”
Sage yes I HAVE asked them myself! I studied a college semester in Costa Rica in 1992 and interviewed a “Tico” who was a Contra “rebel.” I also confronted the USAID about them being a CIA front. My brother-in-law was in the army in El Salvador and personally saw the CIA loading cocaine onto military plans at a military base, again as part of the “rebel” war.
Sage your comments about genocide and truth serum ignore the obvious connections between the two in CIA genocide which happens under black-ops. Here’s another example for an online article:
“Even less well remembered is one mission in the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam in July of 1968. A team of CIA psychologists set up shop at Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon, where NLF suspects were being held after Phoenix Program round-ups. The psychologists performed a variety of experiments on the prisoners. In one, three prisoners were anaesthetized; their skulls were opened and electrodes implanted by CIA doctors into different parts of their brains. The prisoners were revived, placed in a room with knives and the electrodes in the brains activated by the psychiatrists, who were covertly observing them. The hope was that they could be prompted in this manner to attack each other. The experiments failed. The electrodes were removed, the patients were shot and their bodies burned.”
December 14th, 2009 at 8:06 am
As you recall from your Octopus reading, Drew, an early version of PROMIS drove Operation Phoenix. You might also remember this guy from The Octopus:
Dec 13, 2009 2:42 pm US/Pacific
Suspect In 1981 Tribal Murders Booked
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) ―
James “Jimmy” Hughes, 52, was flown from Miami, Fla. to California on Dec. 13, 2009, by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.
* Hit Job: 1981 Triple Indian Reservation Murder
(10/2/2009)
* Riverside DA Related To Murder Suspect Leaves Case
(10/2/2009)
A former tribal security official-turned-preacher accused of killing a Cabazon tribal leader and two friends in 1981 has been extradited and is behind bars in Riverside County.
Sheriff’s Det. John Powers says James “Jimmy” Hughes was booked Saturday and jailed in Riverside.
Hughes faces three counts of murder and a count of conspiracy for allegedly killing Fred Alvarez to prevent him from exposing illegal reservation activities.
Hughes was arrested in September in Miami as he sat on a Honduras-bound plane. Earlier this month, a Florida judge ordered his extradition to California.
He is scheduled to appear in Superior Court Dec. 17.
(28 years for the law arm of the law to disentangle from the long tentacles of the Octopus! — kt)
December 14th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
“Yes I HAVE asked them myself!”
1) No you haven’t, you asked one person
2) That wouldn’t be science, that would be hearsay
“Your comments about genocide and truth serum ignore the obvious connections between the two in CIA genocide which happens under black-ops”
That’s because there obviously is no connection. That is just say so on your part, instead of stating a fact.
“The experiments failed”
My point exactly, hence the reason an actual truth serum has yet to be discovered.