The remote viewing stuff was a bit silly, but the MKUltra stuff included a lot of very unethical human experimentation. These two things are not really in the same category in terms of scandal.
And of course it served as the template for how to deal with the Abu Ghraib fallout:
Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known.
That is an absolute bombshell of a story and I'd guess that the vast majority of people have never heard of it but would be horrified if they did. It sounds like they even blackmailed the people.
This is one of those moments when I started to feel shock and horror shifting towards disbelief, and then remembered that this is the CIA and of course they did stuff like that because who would stop them?
One of those little examples of how journalism really is one of the last bulwarks between the country we want to think we are and the country we very easily could be.
The Church committee[1] in '75 did some good work to reign in the worst of the intelligence communities work. Most of that has been undone by now though.
The CIA's work on LSD wasn't the worst thing going on and - surprisingly to me - the intelligence agencies were far from the worst. Eg, there was a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher who injected live cancer cells into unwitting humans through out the 1950s and 60s[2]. Or in 1952 a Detroit Hospital administered radioactive iodine to premature babies, and fed it via a tube to healthy non-premature babies. Or the doctor who administered 100 or more rads of radiation after forging consent forms.
Highly recommend Tom O'Neill's 'CHAOS' for some of the new details he dug up on MKULTRA. The rumor mill has it that he is working on a new book exploring its potential ties to the RFK assassination, the Grateful Dead, and the Jonestown massacre.
The fringes of this material gets wild and significantly less credible really fast. It is very important to stick to the hard facts when dealing with government wrongdoing or you open yourself up to the “conspiracy theory” thought stopper charge.
Wild conspiracy theories help cover up actual conspiracy and malfeasance.
The stuff you are referencing is definitely not impossible, but it’s unproven and likely unprovable and is mixed in with a lot of trash. We have enough documented stuff about the government meddling with the counterculture (e.g. COINTELPRO) that we don’t need to make shit up or chase phantoms.
> Wild conspiracy theories help cover up actual conspiracy and malfeasance.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you believe the principal actors in the publicly known and acknowledged aspects of MKULTRA were not held to account because of 'wild conspiracy theories' which had little traction outside fringe newsletters in the 1970s when MKULTRA came to some semblance of public light? Do you believe the general public would be more aware and educated about these abuses if not for the existence of those theories?
Everyone already knows the standard narrative line that "MKULTRA was a temporary, discontinued, and largely unsuccessful program, which like COINTELPRO was ended (we promise!) when documentary evidence of it was brought to light." I don't see how informed, fact-based speculation that there may be more to it than that does anything to 'cover up' or absolve the people involved.
'The Men Who Stare at Goats' points out that the whole "haha they're making them listen to the Barney song, that drives me crazy when my kids make me put it on too!" was probably a cover for more sinister interrogation or even mind control techniques being explored with music blasted at prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Surely just a coincidence that the cult leader of ISIS was at that same prison ....
There was actually some truth to remote viewing working in very specific scenarios. Operationally is a different story though.
The studies, Ganzfeld experiments, said once you learn if you were right or not, your skill improves a little. For some reason young students from Julliard had the highest scores.
The test was 4 possible pictures iirc and you must guess the picture another person is looking at.
In a meta-analysis over 25 Ganzfeld experiments, where the design enabled the test subject to guess right in 25 percent of the cases, the overall hit rate was 37 percent. The odds for this to happen by chance is about a trillion to one, clearly showing that there has to exist something else than coincidence that enables the test subjects to perceive the telepathically transferred image. When artistically gifted musicians from the Julliard School in New York City were tested, they were even able to produce a hit rate as remarkable as 75 percent. [24,36,44]
In a meta-analysis of 653 formal sessions and 126 nonformal sessions of remote viewing, conducted at Princeton University from 1976 to 1999, the overall results gave a significant result with odds against chance of 33 million to one that it was possible for an individual to receive sensory impressions from a distant location. [38-43]
24. Radin, D., Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, New York, United States of America, 2006.
36. Honorton, C., “Meta-analysis of psi ganzfeld Research: A Response to Hyman,” Journal of Parapsychology 49 (1985): 51–91.
1.
38. Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J., “Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 17 no. (2) (2003): 207–41.
39. Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J., “The PEAR Proposition,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 19 no. (2) (2005): 195–245.
40. Puthoff, H. E., “CIA-initiated Remote Vviewing at Stanford Research Institute,” Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies, Summer, 2001: 60–67.
41. Targ, R., “Remote-Viewing Replication: Evaluated by Concept Analysis,” Journal of Parapsychology 58 (1994): 271–84.
42. Targ, R., Limitless Mind: A guide to Remote Viewing and Transformation of Consciousness. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004.
43. Utts, J. M., An Assessment of the evidence of psychic functioning. JSE 10:3-30, 1996. Accessed October 17, 2013, http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_10_1_utts.p....
Has there been recent research on this? It'd be interesting to see if seeing the person's face matters, or how far they are, or what traits the more gifted have other than a talent for music.
Seeing faces doesn't matter, there are other ways to create an association to get on target. Distance doesn't matter. Some people are more naturally talented. But since it's relatively unknown there are probably lots of very talented people out there who have no idea they have talent.
You can check out the Applied precognition project. this group brings together many of the well-known and prominent researchers and I suppose former government practitioners. and also permits I think members of public to get involved in regular taskings.
