6/18/10  #577
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He stays up late into the night - fearful to sleep because of those who watch in the dark. They watch from the sky. The watch from the streets. They watch with the cold, glassy stare of hidden cameras. His communications are not safe. They read all that goes in, and all that goes out. His entertainment is monitored 24 hours a day. They know what TV shows he sees and which web sites on the Internet he visits. But despite all they see and do - nothing can prevent the arrival of his favorite weekly e-mail newsletter of the strange and weird. Yes that's RIGHT! Conspiracy Journal is here once again to reveal all the deep, dark secrets that THEY don't want YOU to know!

This week Conspiracy Journal brings you such ocular-piercing tales as:

- Power From Thin Air -
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle vs. Harry Houdini -
-  MK-ULTRA: The Strange Story of Sally Hartman -
-
Eight Mysterious Unsolved Sounds -
AND: Conspiracy Theories Thrive at Airports

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

~ And Now, On With The Show! ~


SPECIAL OFFER FROM CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

The Paranormal World of Sherlock Holmes
&
Revealing the Bizarre Powers of Harry Houdini




TWO INCREDIBLE BOOKS FOR ONE LOW PRICE!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world's most celebrated detective, Sherlock Holmes, was also one of the world's greatest psychic researchers!

In this profusely illustrated book, the reader will examine a collection of Spirit Photos which Doyle accepted as being legitimate. The reader will also be given the opportunity to review all the pictures in the Cottingley Fairies Series -- including the controversial, seldom viewed fifth photo.

Plus you will read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's personal paranormal Files on: The Shadow On The Screen -- Notes From A Strange Mail Bag -- The Ghost Of The Moat -- Dwellers On The Border -- A Strange Prophet -- A London Ghost -- The Half-Way House Of Matter. -- The Rift In The Veil.

Also included in this incredible package, Revealing the Bizarre Powers of Harry Houdini!

WAS HOUDINI'S FANATICAL DEBUNKING OF PSYCHICS AND MEDIUMS A SUBTERFUGE TO CONCEAL HIS OWN REMARKABLE PARANORMAL ABILITIES?

The greatest magician of all time, Harry Houdini, made it his mission to expose fraudulent spiritualist mediums by revealing their secret "tricks." But Houdini's good friend, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was certain that Houdini could read minds, dematerialize, possessed supernatural strength, and was guided by angelic forces which shielded him from harm.

Discover in these two exciting books how esoteric forces of the spirit world may have guided these two extraordinary men throughout their lives and how each man used these abilities to achieve their own separate goals.


These incredible books are now available exclusively for Conspiracy Journal subscribers at the special price of only $52.00, plus $5.00 shipping.  (YOU WON'T FIND A DEAL LIKE THIS ANYWHERE ELSE...SO GET YOUR COPIES TODAY!)

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for info on shipping costs and how to order)

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- EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN DEPARTMENT -

Power From Thin Air

Wireless technology: It is already possible to send electricity without wires. Can devices be powered using ambient radiation from existing broadcasts?

Anyone whose mobile phone has ever run out of juice—which means, these days, more than half the world’s population—will like the idea of getting electrical power out of the air. The notion is far from new. A little over a century ago, the inventor Nikola Tesla drew up ambitious plans to transmit electrical power without wires. He carried out a series of experiments in which electric lights were illuminated via electrostatic induction, by connecting them to metal sheets suspended in a strong electric field produced by a distant transmitter. In 1898 he proposed a “world system” of giant towers that would form both a global wireless communications network and a means of delivering electricity over large areas without wires.

The construction of the first such tower, the Wardenclyffe Tower, on Long Island, began in 1901. Tesla’s backers included the financier J.P. Morgan, who invested $150,000. But before the tower was completed, Morgan and the other backers pulled out. They worried that the delivery of electricity through the air could not be metered, and there would be nothing to stop people from helping themselves.

But has Tesla had the last laugh after all? Today several firms—including Fulton Innovation, eCoupled, WiTricity and Powercast—are pursuing various technologies that deliver electrical power without wires (though over shorter distances than Tesla had in mind). WiTricity has demonstrated the ability to send enough energy across a room to run a flat-screen television using its approach, called “resonant magnetic coupling”. This is different from Tesla’s approach, but the firm’s founders have acknowledged his pioneering work.

In the long run, however, it may be Morgan who is vindicated, as researchers find ways to pull power out of the air without paying for it—a technique known as “energy scavenging” or “energy harvesting”. It is already possible to power small electronic devices, such as wireless sensors installed in buildings and industrial machinery, using a dedicated microwave transmitter nearby. The sensors pick up the microwaves with an antenna and convert the signal into electrical energy. But as power requirements drop and energy-scavenging technology improves, it will become increasingly practical to power these and other devices using just “ambient” energy—the sea of existing radio waves produced by television, radio and mobile-phone transmitters.

It sounds too good to be true. “There is something magical about it,” says Joshua Smith, a principal engineer at Intel’s research centre in Seattle. But the science is sound, he says. Last year Dr Smith and Alanson Sample, a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, powered a small humidity and temperature sensor using nothing more than the energy gleaned from a television station 4.1km (2.5 miles) away. With their receiver tuned specifically to pick up signals from this one megawatt transmitter, they were able to generate 60 microwatts of power. It does not sound like much, but it was enough to power the device and demonstrate the principle. In recent weeks Dr Smith and Dr Sample, working with Scott Southwood, another researcher at the University of Washington, have built a weather sensor that measures temperature and light levels and sends a packet of data every five seconds by radio. It is entirely powered by ambient energy.

Ambient radio waves have largely been ignored as a potential power source until recently, because the power of a broadcast radio signal rapidly decreases with distance. That is not to say that radio waves cannot pack a punch from a distance. Advocates of “satellite solar power”, for example, dream of beaming gigawatts of solar power down to Earth from geostationary satellites more than 35,000km up. The same approach has been used in ground-based experiments to beam one kilowatt of power over a distance of several kilometres, notes Peter Fisher, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But ambient radiation is much weaker.

One way to address this problem is to harvest radiation from multiple sources. Last year Nokia, the world’s largest handset-maker, raised eyebrows with research showing that this approach could scavenge nearly 100 times as much energy as Dr Smith’s approach. Markku Rouvala, an engineer at Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, England, harvested as much as 5 milliwatts of power using a “wide band” receiver capable of mopping up radio signals between 500MHz and 10GHz—including radio, TV, Wi-Fi and mobile-phone signals—from nearby transmitters. It takes at least 20 milliwatts to keep a mobile phone operating in standby mode, but Nokia hopes that power scavenging might eventually deliver 50 milliwatts, enough to trickle-charge a phone.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, RCA showed off a gadget designed to harvest energy from nearby Wi-Fi transmitters, which can then be used to recharge a mobile phone. RCA says it plans to launch the device, dubbed Airnergy, later this year.

The first devices to be powered entirely by ambient energy are likely to be sensors, calculators and clocks. But the hope is that music-players, e-readers and mobile phones will eventually follow, says Dr Smith. There are other means of harvesting ambient energy, from vibrations, movement or heat. But the attraction of radio waves is that they are pretty much everywhere. It’s like recycling energy, says Dr Fisher. “It’s energy that’s around, and is not doing anything else,” he says.

Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/16295708

- GUEST AUTHOR DEPARTMENT -

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle vs. Harry Houdini

UFOs, Spiritualism and the Cult of Belief, or More Evidence
That History Repeats Itself

By Sean Casteel

If you believe there is anything new under the sun in the world of the paranormal you are decidedly wrong! The events of today are part of an ongoing list of unexplainable phenomena that have their own uncanny parallels going back a century or more, which becomes apparent when one studies the existing records from that era. There are hundreds of photos of UFOs and their occupants now (some authentic, others undoubtedly hoaxed), while from earlier times we have albums filled with spirit photos as well as unidentified orbs circling around a darkened room. Ghosts have haunted many a stately mansion.

Today, you can watch “Ghost Hunters” on cable television. There are numerous publications espousing a belief in the afterlife. The internet is filled with all sorts of “fringe” websites. Remote viewing is extremely popular, as is channeling, while in “those days” floating trumpets and slate writing were part of just about every séance. Believers and disbelievers were all over the place. Today, we have Uri Geller and the Amazing Randi fighting it out in court, exactly as Houdini and the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did on a bit more civil level in front of large audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

One might be surprised to see Doyle arguing on the side of belief in spiritualism. When one thinks of the literary legend Sherlock Holmes, the master of logical deduction and pragmatic empiricism, the notion of a supernatural explanation for the mysteries Holmes solves with a complex system of reasoning probably never enters the picture. You don’t think of Holmes as chasing down a ghost or holding the archetypical magnifying glass to better view a spirit returned from the other side.

While Holmes is without question a dealer in facts and cold hard “reality” – his very reputable reputation could not exist without it – his creator was another matter entirely.

DOYLE’S JOURNEY TO BELIEF

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a reluctant bestselling author in his time. He felt the popularity of the Sherlock Holmes character kept him from doing more serious literary work, but the public’s hunger for more of the Baker Street sleuth seemed to be endless. Doyle felt forced to continue to churn out more Holmes stories, even resurrecting him from the dead after Holmes supposedly died at the end of one of his adventures.

But Doyle himself lived in a more magical, spiritual world than his detective. For Doyle, ghosts and spirits were real, and it was possible to converse with the spirit realm, or at least to make a kind of real-world contact. How did Doyle come to such a non-empirical, some would say, credulous state of mind?

The answer to that is, quite naturally, bound up in the details of Doyle’s personal life. Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. By the time he left college in 1875, he had rejected Christianity and called himself an agnostic. He studied medicine from 1876 to 1881, and it was in this same period that he began writing short stories. His first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study In Scarlet,” was published in 1887.

After suffering, in rapid succession, the deaths of his wife, his son, his brother, two brothers-in-law and two nephews, Doyle longed to have some sort of contact with the spirits of the departed. After a séance in which he believed he had been contacted by his late son, who had died in World War One, Doyle became a leader of the spiritualist movement, defending it in lectures around the world. In some ways, Doyle was the first ghost buster, studying the subject with a scientific bent that was rare for his time.

Doyle and Houdini first met in 1920, during the magician's tour of England, and quickly became friends. Like Doyle, a true believer, the escape artist Harry Houdini was also interested in the spiritualist movement, but with an eye to disproving the claims of mediums, as Houdini felt they preyed on the emotions of grief-stricken people desperate for a word from loved ones who had crossed over.

HE WANTED TO BELIEVE

Houdini’s motivations in that regard were complex. In some ways it is reminiscent of Fox Mulder from television’s “The X-Files,” and the poster in Mulder’s office that had the words “I Want To Believe” superimposed over a UFO. Houdini also wanted to believe, but found that his efforts to put his faith in what he discovered were frustrated at every turn by obvious charlatans and fakes – or at least this is the public position he took during his career. Some would say, like certain magicians and escape artists, such as the Amazing Randi, who piggyback off the sensational claims of UFO abductees, contactees and psychics of considerable merit, Houdini was just looking for media attention he would not have gotten otherwise as a relatively obscure entertainer.

RESCUED FROM OBLIVION

Present day students of both Doyle and Houdini have fresh reason to rejoice now that Tim Beckley of Global Communications has rescued from oblivion important papers and memorabilia of these opposing friends/rivals. In fact, Beckley has actually given us a trilogy of works representing Doyle’s enthrallment with the unknown.

One of these works, The Paranormal World Of Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle First Ghost Buster And Psychic Sleuth, is brimming with updated information provided by a contemporary psychic, known as Dragonstar, and writer Tim R. Swartz. Once the reader has been brought up to date by the biographical and historical material they present, one can then dive into Doyle’s rare “The Edge Of The Unknown” manuscript, which is presented for the first time in over seventy five years. The book is a completely no-holds-barred study of spiritualism in its many forms, written with a journalistic, facts-based verve while at the same time informed by Doyle’s practiced skills as a professional writer, skills honed over many years of writing his fictional Holmes detective stories.

Doyle tackles such subjects as ghosts and apparitions and throws some of his own paranormal experiences into the reportage. It is a hugely interesting look back at the early days of parapsychology, a time that predates our own but was no less intent on finding a scientific basis for the strange encounters so many people were having with entities not of this world.

DID HOUDINI HAVE SUPERNATURAL POWERS?

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

In another volume that is part of this Doyle trilogy, one can read about Houdini’s inner struggle with spiritualism in his own words, as well as his efforts to smear some of the most respected mediums and psychics of his day. Beckley has issued a large coffee table formatted work complete with pull out color posters. Revealing The Bizarre Powers Of Harry Houdini: Psychic? Medium? Prophet? Clairvoyant? (Book & Audio CD of Houdini’s Last Séance included in package) contains both Doyle and Houdini’s personal views on a wide range of mystical topics, as well as their investigative writings on the paranormal in general. The book starts out with the knighted author attempting to prove that Houdini was himself really a charlatan of sorts. Doyle believed that Houdini was trying to cover up his own mediumistic abilities in a carefully worked out charade.

In fact, Doyle eventually came up with a theory about Houdini that bolstered his own beliefs while adding to Houdini’s already considerable mystique. Doyle published his unique take on the escape artist in an essay called “The Riddle of Houdini,” which is packaged as part of the introduction to this book. Doyle was convinced that Houdini possessed real paranormal powers, such as the ability to read minds, to dematerialize and rematerialize at another location, as well as possessing superhuman strength. In other words, Houdini wasn’t merely a master of illusion. His ability to escape from entrapments and restraints that would quite easily kill a mere mortal did not require the skill of a truly human entity but rather a kind of superman gifted with supernatural powers he refused to acknowledge publicly.

Doyle further believed that Houdini’s mission as one of the first great debunkers was intended to provide a smokescreen to cover over his preternatural powers. No one would ever think the great medium-baiter was in fact a medium himself. Doyle’s essay, in which he argues for this understanding of Houdini in exacting detail, also quotes the rabbi who spoke at Houdini’s funeral as saying, “Houdini possessed a wondrous power that he never understood, and which he never revealed to anyone in life.” Even those who worked with Houdini during his stage act were sometimes stumped, such as the Chinese conjurer who had seen Houdini perform close up several times and who repeatedly stated, “This is not a trick, it is a gift.”

Nearly one hundred years later, we still do not understand this mystery. Houdini said at one point that his works would die with him, which can be taken to mean that his feats were dependent upon powers that he alone possessed, and which could not be passed on to a successor or taught to future students of his work.

HOUDINI’S PUBLIC VERSION OF THE TRUTH

After Doyle has been given his say, Harry Houdini himself takes over center stage in this concerted effort to present both points of view. As a parenthetical aside, however, most of those who follow Houdini’s career do not realize that the biggest portion, if not all, of his books and papers on the paranormal were thought to have been craftily ghostwritten over the years by one Mr. Walter Gibson, who was Houdini’s longtime associate. Even less known is that Gibson was a firm believer in psychic phenomena and wrote several well-received books on the subject that are now hard to come by. Gibson, along with Mrs. Houdini, arranged the yearly Halloween séances in which they tried to get through to the controversial escape artist on the “other side.”

Whoever the actual writer, however, a rare treat indeed is the inclusion of Houdini’s classic “A Magician Among The Sprits,” an instructive, seemingly heartfelt effort to show how the world’s most famous mediums created their illusions and how they were able to pull the wool over the eyes of those who sincerely believed. Unfortunately, Houdini spends an inordinate amount of time smearing these individuals with half truths and accusations which would not hold up in a court of law – though some of the incidents he brings up did go before a judge in several countries.

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The stories of several mediums/adepts are included here. There were the Davenport Brothers, the fabulous Eusapia Palladino, Henry Slade and Daniel D. Home, who levitated himself out one window and into the next. There are quotes – some incredible – from the best scientists of the time, who observed what was supposed to be impossible with their own eyes.

SOME RARE BONUS PHOTOS

As part of this package, Beckley has gathered together some of the best photographic “evidence” of spirits, weird unexplainable “light” patterns (today they would be called orbs) as well as clippings and full length news stories from the day which show just how big the spiritualist movement was and why so many followed it in earnest – not unlike how UFOs have attracted such massive attention worldwide in our own time.

JOAN OF ARC SPEAKS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

Also part of the recent Global Communications Doyle bonanza is a book by a medium called Leon Denis that Doyle translated from the original French. The book, reprinted by Beckley/Global Communications, was originally called “The Mystery of Joan of Arc,” but has, as part of this timely trilogy, been released in its expanded, updated form as The Charismatic, Martyred Life Of Joan Of Arc. Denis claims that he heard the voice of Joan as he wrote it, or as we might say today, he “channeled” the French heroine and canonized saint as she spoke to him in the form of soul-to-soul contact.

In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote an introduction to this one in which I gave a brief history of Joan of Arc, Leon Denis and of course Doyle himself. The translation work on the book is further testimony to Doyle’s keen interest in spiritualism and the depths to which he sincerely believed in it. Why otherwise would he undertake the daunting task of translating this rather obscure work about a figure that has prominence in an historical sense but also has a limited audience that would want to hear from her “directly”?

A PARANORMAL THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Where does all this fit in the overall pattern of belief in the paranormal? Outside of showing how the subject can be batted around back and forth among the believers and the professional skeptics, I suppose if one were to offer a version of interconnected beliefs, a sort of Paranormal Theory of Everything, some of the spiritualist phenomena can be said to overlap to a considerable degree with modern UFO phenomena. For instance, it is reported in both fields that telepathy is a major component of communication. It is the method used for conversations between the gray aliens and their abductees as well as being a cherished belief of the spiritualists. A lot of the parapsychology studies that began in the 20th century attempted to document telepathy and mind-reading as a workable skill some subjects possessed.

Levitation is also said to happen in both realms of experience. The aliens quite easily remove a person from bed and then “float” the abductee into a waiting UFO, while spirits are said to float objects around the séance room to prove they are indeed present. The appearance of a departed relative is sometimes reported as part of an abduction experience, something similar to a ghostly apparition, but apparently in a less frightening context than a typical haunting. That the gray aliens have some kind of power to walk people back and forth between the afterlife and life in this world has been attested to by many abduction researchers, including Dr. David Jacobs, who told me about such instances when I interviewed him sometime in the 1990s, though he would not fully endorse words like “ghost” or “afterlife.”

Another point of intersection is the familiar “angel hair” said to be left behind after a UFO sighting. The substance is remarkably similar to “ectoplasm,” a white, gooey calling card from the other side which is sometimes excreted from the various orifices of a medium’s body and has even been photographed on numerous occasions. It would be difficult to argue that angel hair and ectoplasm don’t come from a common source, but at the same time their literal meaning eludes us, as does so much in UFOlogy and spiritualism.

Dr. Kenneth Ring has done extensive research into the relationship between alien abduction and the Near-Death-Experience, contending that both experiences come from a common source. Raymond Fowler, the famed abduction researcher behind the legendary “The Andreasson Affair” and many other books on abduction, once told me about a man visiting the dentist who received an overdose of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, and had a Near-Death-Experience while in the dentist’s chair. But instead of entering into the usual long tunnel and seeing a bright light, he found himself aboard a UFO undergoing the standard medical procedures of an alien abduction experience. There are numerous other anecdotes in the literature that lead one to draw this same conclusion, that there is a continuum linking UFOs, spiritualism and nearly any other aspect of the paranormal you would care to name. Were we to solve one mystery, it would likely lead to a solution for the other.

EVEN MORE RARE ARTWORK

You can keep all that in mind as you read the books here that revolve around Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s spiritualist beliefs. The books are beautiful to look at as well, especially the full color reproductions of Harry Houdini’s publicity posters featured in the book Revealing the Bizarre Powers of Harry Houdini and the lovely selection of spirit and fairy photos included in The Paranormal World of Sherlock Holmes. Another feast for the eyes can be found in The Charismatic, Martyred Life of Joan of Arc, in which Global Communications has generously reproduced several classic and modern paintings of Joan in full color.

If one considers one’s self to be a true student of the strange, these books are a vital, necessary part of one’s education. With the kind of direct hotline into the weird these books offer, one can lose one’s self in a mystic dream that encompasses all the many facets of the world beyond, whether it be manifested in a flying saucer or a séance room. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle can help you get there, minus the rigidly rational Sherlock Holmes that made him famous.

Find out more about these fantastic books HERE.

Source: UFO Digest
http://www.ufodigest.com/news/0610/doyle-houdini.php

- YOUR MIND BELONGS TO US DEPARTMENT -

The Strange Story of Sally Hartman

By H.P. Albarelli Jr., t r u t h o u t

On 26 October, [redacted], an employee

On 26 October, [redacted], an employee of the [redacted], contacted the Office of the Inspector General here at the Agency and related the following information. His wife, whose maiden name is [redacted], was previously married from 1955 until 1960 to [redacted], who was employed by CIA at that time. In the summer of 1956, according to [redacted], she accompanied her husband to the farm of her husband's supervisor for dinner, drinks and wine.  She believes her husband worked for Dr. Gottlieb, who was chief of the Technical Services Staff Chemical Division and heavily involved in MKULTRA activities. Her next recollection is receiving electric shock treatment at George Washington University Hospital for some time ...

- Letter from CIA assistant general counsel to John Gavin Esq., Office of Legal Counsel, US Department of Justice, November 2, 1977.

Mind-Control Victims

Over the past 15 years, while working on "A TERRIBLE MISTAKE," and after, about two-dozen people separately contacted me wanting to share their experiences as victims of CIA mind-control projects. Without exception, all of these people seemed quite sincere in their approach and claims. Some had written passionate letters, accounts, or articles about their experiences, a few had even written books about what had happened to them. Several of these books had been published and their authors were happy to send me copies, hoping that I would read them and perhaps write a review. Almost every person seemed more than convinced that they had fallen under the control of the CIA after being targeted at an early age. A surprising number claimed the CIA selected them through their fathers, who were somehow connected to the agency or with officials who worked for the agency. Nearly all of these people had also suffered physical and sexual abuse committed against them by their fathers and their memories of being controlled by the CIA were brought to the surface as a result of their working with psychotherapists or psychologists.

One woman told me a cadre of CIA men, including her father and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who routinely paraded about dressed in a Nazi SS uniform and jackboots, had mercilessly beaten and raped her so as to condition her to be "a programmed assassin." Another victim, who has written a slew of articles about various government activities, told me he had been selected years ago as part of a deep-black project that involved his mind being constantly bombarded with electro-waves of some sort. When I attempted to ask him specific questions about why he and others had been targeted by the CIA, he grew angry and said, "The technology I'm being subjected to is much farther advanced than you know. The experiences I mentioned were pretty elementary. If you don't get that, how can you understand what a target of the technology is going through?" I wanted to reply that his answer had little to do with my question, but I also realized that arguing with self-proclaimed mind-control victims was tantamount to arguing religion with a zealot.

Another woman told me the CIA had targeted her for mind control when she worked for the State Department. She claimed she had been transformed into an unwitting, programmed assassin and that she was convinced she had actually murdered several foreign diplomats overseas. I asked her for the names of some of these diplomats and she told me that they had been erased from her memory. Could you tell me what countries you worked in? I asked her. "No," she said. "That is a matter of national security." Well then how can I verify your claims? I asked. Can you at least show me proof you work for the government? "No," she said, "you have to trust me. Why would I lie about such a thing?"

The human mind is a complex and intriguing organ. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist. I don't know what provokes some people to invent situations that they claim to be true, situations and stories that I am convinced they actually came to believe themselves over time. About the time that most of these claims came before me, I read "Remembering Satan" by Lawrence Wright. The book is a fascinating examination of a case that involves recovered memories. It explained a lot to me, clearing up much of my confusion about "recovered memories" and "false memory syndrome."

I suppose I'm not as curious as I should be when it comes to some of these accounts, but I had little inclination to pursue most of the stories people came to me with. There were several reasons for this. The principle reason was that I simply did not believe these people. Their stories were riddled with clear-cut factual inaccuracies, ridiculous instances, erroneous statements and claims I knew would be impossible to prove. I am an investigative journalist and I am most concerned with objective evidence and facts. I can't settle for the explanation or argument, "Trust me, I'm telling the God's honest truth."

However, let me be clear here: I am not calling these people liars. I believe that many of them honestly believe their own stories. And, with some objective, hard evidence I think I, too, might believe their accounts; so, with some of these stories, I maintain a skeptical, but open mind.

But one story that came my way was clearly different from all the others. This story involved a woman who, in the mid-1950s, had been married to a CIA employee. In fact, the man had worked in the agency's Technical Services Section, Chemical Branch and had answered directly to Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook. I was able to verify his employment with the CIA. The woman had also worked for the federal government, holding a classified position with another intelligence organization. There were no doubts about any of this. Numerous sources, including former CIA, Justice Department and White House officials and others, verified these facts. I don't use this woman's real name here, or that of her husband, for reason's concerning her privacy and protection.

Sally's Story

One sunny Sunday afternoon in summer 1956, Sally Hartman and her husband Jim, traveled from their apartment just outside of Washington, DC, to the home of Jim's boss in rural Vienna, Virginia, 40 miles away. Sally and Jim had been married about a year before and their marriage had not been easy thus far.

A month earlier, Sally had suffered a miscarriage. It had been her longtime dream to have children, but Jim, despite earlier agreement, now had doubts about wanting a family. Their arguments about her pregnancy were greatly upsetting for Sally. Jim had insisted that, if she wanted a baby, she would have to stay at home and not work at all. Sally disagreed, telling her husband that she had not gone to college for four years to only be a housewife. "Times are changing, Jim" Sally said she argued. "I told him women could have careers and also be good mothers." Jim said, "Not my wife." Sally asked Jim to please consider her needs. Jim argued back that Sally should try harder to be "a good Christian" before attempting to become "a good Christian mother." Sally countered that she was a good Christian and that a woman who maintained a professional career could also be a good Christian. "You're wrong," Jim said. "Read your Bible more often." When Sally lost the baby, after weeks of arguing, she silently and partially blamed Jim for putting so much strain on the both of them. He was sullen for days after their last argument and said very little to her. Sally recalled that, after this, Jim would often "lecture me on morality, like I was stupid." She said, "He would quote from the Bible to back his lectures and tell me about the forces of evil in the world guised as Communism."

Jim had been a graduate student at MIT in 1953 when Sally and he had decided to marry. Nearing completion of his studies, the CIA recruited Jim. The agency offered him a good starting salary and the opportunity to travel. His recruiter told him the agency would help with what remained of his schooling and hold his position until he received his master's degree in chemistry and completed a six-month obligation for active duty with the Army Reserve. About a week before he was to start work, he was called in to meet his superiors, Gottlieb and Lashbrook. He had come home that evening excited and anxious to begin his CIA training.

"Sid and Bob are the nicest guys you can imagine," he told Sally. "And the job sounds really great." Sally asked what he would be working on, but Jim said he couldn't tell her anything about it other than that it was in his field, chemistry and that he'd have to travel on a fairly regular basis. Travel where? she asked. Jim said he couldn't tell her that either. Sally said that it would be difficult to raise children if he were to travel a lot and she was working, and Jim said maybe she should listen more to him about when they would start a family.

Sally knew that Jim was happy about his agency job and didn't argue, but Jim could tell she was not happy. A few days after Jim started work for the agency, he was required to attend an intensive secret training school that spanned three months.

Sally was working at the National Security agency (NSA) at Fort Mead, a job she had taken a few months before she married. In charge of a classified, computer data-storage project, she threw herself into her work as a way of not dwelling on her miscarriage. Like Jim's job, Sally's required complete secrecy. She could not speak to anyone, including Jim, about what she was doing. When friends asked what she did for work Sally said she would reply that she "was an just an administrative assistant to a mid-level government bureaucrat." Usually, at that, she said, "People asking wouldn't have any more interest in the subject."

One Saturday in mid-August, Jim had come home from a weeklong trip and told Sally that they had been invited to go to Gottlieb's house for dinner the next day. "We don't have to dress up or anything," Jim told her. "Sid lives on a small working farm."

The next afternoon, Jim drove Sally to Gottlieb's family farm in Vienna. It was a warm, gloriously sunny day and Sally recalled that the ride out of town almost immediately worked wonders at relaxing the two of them.

"It was like we were dating again and we didn't have a care in the world," Sally recalled. "Jim was unusually talkative, smiling, laughing ... he even pulled me over close to him in the front seat like we were a couple of school kids. It was great."

At Gottlieb's house, Gottlieb and his wife, Margaret, warmly greeted the couple. "Margaret introduced me to her three or four children. I got the impression that Jim had already met the children. They were really nice kids and the family seemed very happy. I remember wondering why, if Jim's boss could have such a large family, we couldn't have a small one. I don't recall now if Margaret had a job outside the home, but she surely had her hands full with the farm. "

Sally recalled the Gottlieb's raised goats. Sid told her that he tested and drank the milk the animals produced. "I learned right away that he was a chemist, like Jim, because he said he tested the milk himself, because, as he said, 'I'm a chemist and enjoy doing things like that.'" Sally recalled that Sid also said he had worked at the Department of Agriculture before joining the agency.

"I asked him if he had worked with animals at the department and he said, "Oh goodness, no. I never had the opportunity to leave Washington while there.'"

After taking a tour of the Gottlieb's farm, Sally said everyone, including the children, sat down to dinner. "We had a wonderful home cooked meal and some wine. After I had a glass full, I don't remember anything else about being there," Sally recounted. "I drank socially. I never drank a lot, but on weekends two or three drinks wasn't out of the question. But something happened that night, something really strange."

Sally has no recollection of going home other than a vague image of asking Jim to stop the car once because, "I felt like I was going to be very sick." She recalled, "I also remember having to urinate badly and thinking, My God, did one glass of wine make me feel like this?" At home, she recalls sitting up all night and "reading the Bible's Book of Apocalypse [also called the Book of Revelations]. I don't remember what Jim was doing or saying."

Sally recalls dark visions of ancient, crumbling cities and death and mayhem. She becomes visibly shaken when she tries to recount what she saw. "I was like in a dream state," she said. "Or perhaps more like a nightmare state. I was frightened, but at what I can't remember. I think I remember Jim laughing at something or maybe smiling or ... I'm really not sure what it was. I was scared, really scared, but I don't know why."

Even today, over 35 years after the incident, Sally inexplicably becomes very upset and nervous when she tries to recall that night. Her hands tremble and she looks about, as if expecting some dark shape to form before her.

The next morning, following the visit to the Gottlieb's, Sally went into work exhausted. From that day forward, Sally found it near impossible to concentrate on anything and she began to experience episodes of lost time, periods where she would function normally but not be aware of where she was or what she was doing. At times, she could not recall how she had traveled to or from work. Once, in a grocery store, she forgot how she had come to be there.

About six weeks passed and the episodes became more frequent. At home one evening, she told Jim that she was concerned that she didn't always feel she was in control of her actions or thoughts. Jim said he thought she was overworked and needed a break. He tried to cheer her up, once playfully suggesting that he hypnotize her as a way of relieving her stress. Sally said he had never been interested in matters esoteric and when she asked him what provoked his interest in mesmerism, he just shrugged and said, "Sometimes it's wise to keep an open mind about certain things."

A few days after this, Sally said she remembers receiving electric-shock treatment. "I know it sounds crazy," she said. "I have no idea where I was or how it happened, but I know that it did."

One day not long after, Sally went to work and became confused and then hysterical, for reasons unknown to her. She ran from her office, out of the building, crossed an expansive grassy field and tried to climb the eight-foot security fence surrounding the area. NSA guards struggled to pull her from the fence. On the ground she fought to get away, screaming at the guards, "You don't understand, let me go, let me go."

Sally was hospitalized at George Washington Hospital in Washington, DC. She was there for a little over a month at Jim's insistence. Besides being assigned a psychiatrist, she received 14 electric-shock sessions as part of treatment for diagnosed schizophrenia. As her treatment continued, Jim visited one day and told her that his boss, whom he sometimes calls "Uncle Sid," was very good friends with the superintendent of a well respected, Boston-based, mental health hospital. Since her family still lived in the Boston area and he was frequently required to travel for the CIA, Jim suggested that Sally transfer to the Massachusetts facility. Sally agreed and she and Jim traveled to Boston, where her father greeted the couple and the three went to the admission's desk of the hospital. Sally recalled that at about this time she had begun to experience "laughing jags, followed by periods of rapidly evolving thoughts and deep depression."

Sally remained in the Boston facility for weeks and, in addition to her family, was visited a few times by Jim's boss, Gottlieb, because Jim was away on travel assignments. She remembers very little about Gottlieb's visits other than one or two times Gottlieb suggested they go outside for a walk. Sally recounts on one such occasion it was "very cold with lots of snow on the ground." Sally remembers nothing more about the visit, other than that she had hospital slippers and a bathrobe on, yet, "I was not cold." On another occasion when Gottlieb visited, they again went outside; Gottlieb "mentioned something about Jim not being able to come," Sally recalled, but she remembers nothing more.

Sally also recalled being visited by a physician whose last name she thinks was Goodnow. This was most likely Dr. Robert E. Goodnow, a contractor with the CIA's TSS and with the CIA-funded Human Ecology Fund, a front organization for some MK/ULTRA and other projects. Goodnow was associated with the anesthesiology department at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Sally said, "I can't remember anything about Goodnow except that he was there in my room sometimes. Maybe once with Gottlieb or someone." Sally also seemed to recall being with either Goodnow or another physician on an occasion where she thinks she was in "another city somewhere." Sally said, "I don't recall why we were there or even where there was. We were in a high office building looking down on a large number of people; something was happening on the street below, but I don't recall what."

In February 1957, Sally was still in Boston when she was informed she would be released soon, but first needed to "undergo one more test." She was taken from her room to another room where she was shown what she recalls "as cards similar to Rorschach cards." The technician showing her the cards had "very intense eyes" Sally recalls and she has never seen him before at the hospital. After being shown a few cards, Sally thinks she blacked out, remembering nothing more until "waking up about two days later back in her room" with "an intravenous line and needle in her arm." A nurse came into the room and told her she hadn't eaten for two days. Sally's mother also recalled this incident, because it occurred the same week her daughter was to be discharged. She said Sally was discharged, walked through the main doors outside and, after standing there for a few moments, turned around and went back inside and was readmitted at her own request.

A month later Sally was discharged again and she went to her parent's house. Jim came by a few days before her release date and told her that the CIA had agreed to pay for his return to study at MIT for his Ph.D. in chemistry. Sally wanted to return to work at NSA, but discovered she has forgotten nearly everything she learned while working there for nearly two years. She retrained herself as a computer programmer while staying with her parents.

Jim soon returned to Boston to resume his studies and the couple rented a "very nice apartment near the MIT campus." Over several months, Sally began to feel quite happy. She also felt her relationship with Jim was becoming better and closer, but, within about a year things, became tense again after she told Jim she wanted to try to become pregnant again and to have a family.

Jim did not share her feelings, and, by summer of 1960, Sally decided to leave Jim. During this entire time, Sally was still experiencing episodes of lost time and depression. Sally wanted to reconcile with Jim, but he seemed pleased with their living apart. They saw each other a few times, but Sally can't remember anything about these dates. They decided to divorce within a few more months. Sally was distressed that her marriage was ending this way. She met another man, who seemed to share her desire to have a family. They married, but things went bad within a few months. At the same time, Sally had resumed her work in the computer field, this time again in a position that required a top secret government clearance. Sally was concerned that "my mental breakdown and hospitalization will hinder a clearance," but she encountered no problems at all. She had no remembrance of how her employment with NSA officially ended or how her high-level NSA security clearance was handled.

Despite her second divorce, Sally was extremely happy with her work and excelled in her field, making several significant professional advancements. In 1966, she decided to start her own company and, within months of doing so, she developed an international reputation for her highly creative approaches to the computer industry. She had lost all contact with Jim and no longer knew if he was still employed by the CIA. Occasionally, her old symptoms returned, but she was able to put them off through medication she was taking.

On one or two occasions, she felt that she had fallen into a "strange state, like sleepwalking while awake," and once, while on the West Coast for work, she woke up in a hotel room "unsure of where I'd been for the last twenty-four hours." She said, "I recalled getting unto a hotel elevator and there was a group of people already in it and someone nodded and said something and that was it. Later, I thought I remembered waking up in my room and finding someone standing there looking at me, telling me everything was just fine, not to worry about a thing.... I think it was a man who looked Asian ... I don't remember any more than that."

On the same trip to the West Coast, Sally met a middle-aged woman in a restaurant who told her that she had had an encounter with a UFO the previous month while hiking near Sausalito. The woman remarked that, after this encounter, she had experienced strange blackouts and incidents of missing time. Sally recounted that she thought she met with this woman again at a private home in San Francisco, but she can't recall for sure. "I remember sitting in an expansive living room overlooking the bay with her and she was telling me more about her experience, but it seems very dreamlike now. She was very nice, but there was something sinister about her that made me uncomfortable."

Sally's business continued to be very successful and demanding of her time. She fell in love with one of her closest associates, a former investigative reporter. They were married in 1969. Two years later, Sally and her new husband, Fred, sold her company for a lot of money. All of Sally's hard work had paid off and the couple was happy with their life together. They started a small consulting firm that also became quite successful. Months later, one of their accounts resulted in Sally being hired to oversee a large data system for the US Congress. The work was stressful, and some of Sally's old symptoms began to reappear. She had trouble sleeping and had strange dreams. At times, she found herself wondering what she had done or where she had been for the past few hours. Her doctor prescribed tranquilizers and she began to feel better. Fred had also taken a demanding job with Congress and the two remained happy together.

In early 1977, Sally went to work for the Carter White House on a special project. In August 1977, one day while working in the White House, Sally picked up a copy of The Washington Post and read an article about a CIA project called MKULTRA. The story mentions that the Massachusetts hospital she was in was part of the MKULTRA project. She went home that night and told Fred about the article and also told him Jim had an interest in hypnotism and once tried to hypnotize her. She recounted that this was the first time that she told Fred about her seven-month hospitalization in Massachusetts and of her "inexplicable recollections about her visits to the Gottlieb's farm." The next month, Fred read the full transcripts of Project MKULTRA Congressional hearings. He made detailed notes and discovered that Gottlieb and Lashbrook were directors of the project. He told Sally about what he has read, and she told him that Jim called Lashbrook Bob or "Lash" and that sometimes she heard Jim on the phone refer to Gottlieb as "Uncle Sid." Fred asked Sally how her Massachusetts hospital bills were paid. She told him that she had no recollection of ever paying any bill. She recalled seeing one bill, but had no idea what became of it. Fred asked if her parents might have paid the bills. She called them and they said they haven't seen any bills or paid anything related to her illness. Fred asked Sally if she was in the hospital for the entire seven months or if she was released and readmitted at any time. Sally seemed to recall being released at times and going somewhere, but she couldn't recall when or where. Did you travel anywhere? Fred asked. Sally seems to remember going somewhere on an airplane once, but the more she struggled to recall, the more distant the memory became. She tried to think harder and she became overwhelmed with inexplicable sensations of swirling colors and flashes of light. Sometimes she imagined she heard a voice in her head telling her, "Relax, just relax. Everything is fine. Now relax."

Fred talked to several physicians and was told by one, "Perhaps Sally is an unwitting victim of some sort of mind control effort." The physician told Fred that, given the dimensions of the MKULTRA project as reported in the newspapers, anything could be possible if Sally had somehow become a test subject. Fred began to develop a theory about what had happened to his wife. Based on public revelations about Frank Olson, Fred thought Sally had been given LSD by Jim or Gottlieb. Once she was placed in a secure hospital, he speculated, Sally became an ideal, unwitting, test subject. Fred thought, What better cover can there be, or greater achievement, than to control the mind of a person who is a patient in a mental hospital without detection? Sally's sudden "breakdown" and electric-shock treatments seem to be connected to her having been given some sort of drug that triggered her radical change in behavior. Fred called the Massachusetts hospital and requested his wife's medical records. After a few days, he received a return call from the hospital, telling him there was no record of Sally having been a patient. He told the caller there had to be some sort of mistake. Please recheck your records, Fred asked. The hospital told Fred someone would call him back within a day or two.

Two days later, the hospital called and told Fred that Sally's records had been located. Fred asked that they be copied and mailed to him. The same week, Fred consulted a noted psychologist about Sally. The psychologist told Fred the CIA had experimented extensively with "hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestion used in combination with certain drugs." The psychologist also told Fred the agency experimented with using a variety of surreptitious delivery methods for drugs to unwitting subjects. These methods included "techniques for penetrating clothing with drugs" and "treating paper in books and magazine with certain drugs."

Fred asked Sally if Jim ever sent her books or magazines while she was in the hospital. Sally said Jim didn't, but she seemed to recall that someone brought her books while she was in the hospital, but she couldn't recall who it was. Where are the books now? Fred asked. Sally couldn't recall bringing any books home with her.

Meanwhile, additional articles appeared in newspapers in Boston about the Massachusetts hospital Sally was admitted to. Some articles revealed that doctors there conducted surreptitious testing with LSD, mescaline, and other powerful drugs. Many of these experiments took place during the same time that Sally was a patient in the same hospital. Fred's concern mounted about what may have happened to Sally and significantly deepened after he read a July 1952 CIA document citing the "narco-hypnotic control" of subjects placed under what the agency dubbed "psychiatric-medical control" or hospitalization. "In each case," the memo stated, "a psychiatric-medical cover was used to bring ARTICHOKE techniques into action."

After thinking long and hard about it, Fred decided to pay a visit to Sally's former husband, Jim. After about a week, Fred found Jim, running his own consulting firm outside of Washington, DC, Jim agreed to talk to Fred, if he came alone. Jim confirmed that he had been a CIA employee assigned to Gottlieb's Chemical Division. He also confirmed that he and Sally went to the Gottlieb's home for dinner in summer 1956. He described the visit much the same as Sally had recalled it, but denied that Sally was dosed with any drug while there. He told Fred that Sally's mental problems were a result of other factors and of her having had a miscarriage. Jim said he obtained a "good Catholic" psychiatrist for Sally to help her while she was hospitalized. He also said he was unable to visit Sally as often as he would have liked because he was frequently traveling for TSS overseas, spending a fair amount of time in Greece, France and Germany. Fred asked what the psychiatrist's name was. Jim answered that the man's name was Dr. John Cavanaugh. Fred did not know it at the time, but Cavanaugh was a covert contractor for the agency. Very reliable sources, as well as several CIA documents, revealed that Cavanaugh made over 50 trips overseas related to CIA Project Artichoke. Cavanaugh also consulted closely with Drs. Harold Abramson, Harris Isbell and Robert Hyde. In Louisiana, Cavanaugh was especially interested in the CIA-funded work performed by Dr. Robert Heath with placing implants in the heads of a number of federal prison subjects.

Jim cut his visit short with Fred saying he had "a family affair to attend." Before departing, Jim said to Fred, "Be careful where you tread with this thing, Fred."

In 1977, after the initial revelations about Olson's death and Project MKULTRA, the Department of Justice was notified by confidential sources about what had happened to Sally. The Justice Department contacted the CIA with its concerns. A November 2, 1977, letter from the agency's assistant general counsel to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel read:

    She [Sally] recalls being referred by her husband's supervisor [Gottlieb] to a friend of the supervisor's at the "Boston Psychiatric Hospital." She and her husband, [redacted name and TSS title], went to Boston where she entered that Hospital. Both her husband and his supervisor visited her there and she recalls a strange walk out of doors with the latter. She also remembers taking various tests at the Hospital. [Sally] suffered a "relapse" and required psychiatric care two years ago, but apparently has since "come out of it." The recent Senate hearings and attendant publicity concerning Project MKULTRA prompted [Sally's husband] to review the Senate transcripts which he found contained information supportive of his wife's recollections. [Sally's husband] did not ask for any specific action or relief. He has been advised and voiced no objection regarding our opinion that this matter should not be investigated directly by CIA at this time but should be referred to Justice for consideration .... This matter obviously deserves further investigation to clarify, by confirming her suspicions or allaying her fears, the basis for whatever emotional distress [Sally] may continue to suffer. Of course, it may not be possible at this date to gather sufficient evidence to accomplish either result. In any event, however, it does not appear appropriate for CIA to conduct this investigation, even insofar as questioning [Sally's husband] who has already contacted an agency official on 31 October to inform CIA of the fact that his wife had related these allegations to him. Since it might appear to some that CIA has an interest in not confirming that individuals were in fact "victimized" by MKULTRA-type activities, the agency could be accused at some point, in this or any other investigation of the same general nature, of having not conducted the investigation in a proper manner. Should these matters proceed to litigation, this perceived conflict of interest on the part of CIA or its employees could become particularly damaging. The agency continues to be anxious to do everything possible to assist those who may have been adversely affected by MKULTRA-type activities. However, the complications surrounding any action contemplated by CIA itself continue to plague us, as the above-described case again illustrates. We shall be happy to assist you further, in any way you may deem necessary, in achieving a satisfactory resolution to these difficult problems.

After learning about Sally's story and her real name, I was stunned to realize that I knew her from my own work with the Carter administration. I called her on June 1, 2000, and asked if she would tell me about her recollections of what had happened in 1956 during her visit to the Gottlieb's farm. She agreed, but almost immediately became extremely upset and began to cry.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I can't seem to talk about it without becoming upset."

She told me that she found the Gottlieb's to be "very nice." She said, "We had a wonderful visit and dinner. Everything was fine and then I remember riding home with Jim feeling really strange and becoming very upset about something. I had to urinate and asked Jim to pull the car over on the side of the road. After that I can't remember anything else until later, when I was put in the hospital."

Did she recall the incident at NSA with climbing the fence? "Vaguely," she said. "I have no idea what I was doing or where I was going."

"How are you today?" I ask Sally.

"Not good," she said. "I feel like my life has been taken away from me. I'm never sure of anything. Most of the time I feel like I'm only half here."

"Half here?"

"Like part of me is always somewhere else. Somewhere where I'm not."

*****

Author's note: This is but a brief account, an overview, if you will, of Sally's experience. In 1999, I had a long conversation with a CIA official about Sally, during which the official asked me, "Are you familiar with the Bible's Book of Genesis?" I answered that I had read it, but was not well versed in it. "Well," he said, "you should read it again. Read it in light of what is occurring in today's world."

"Meaning what?" I asked.

"Read the Book of Genesis. Read it completely through. Focus on the serpent in the garden, on how that serpent came to the woman, made from the rib of a man fashioned in God's image and likeness and convinced her to ignore the warning of God and eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The woman told the serpent, 'We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden,' but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, least you die.'" The serpent mocked God's words to the woman, saying, 'You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing of good and evil.' So the woman ate from the tree and then had her husband eat from the tree and the rest is history."

"I'm not sure I understand what you're saying," I said, amazed the official could quote so readily from the Book of Genesis.

"The point is that the serpent is still the representation of evil in the world today. The serpent is best exemplified by the forces of terrorism and God remains with us in order to guide us away from the evil that wants to dominate the world and destroy the representatives of God."

As readers may note, this conversation took place prior to the horrors of the 9/11 attacks. I had made no mental note of his use of the term "forces of terrorism." About three months after those attacks, I contacted the CIA official once again. He had moved his work office from Tyson Corners, Virginia, to a large complex located in Washington, DC, on K Street.

The official greeted me warmly when he answered and said, "I think I can guess why you're calling." I told him to go ahead and try. He said, "You're curious about what I told you before. My guess is you're thinking about what I said concerning the evil forces of terrorism. Lately, as we all are well aware, they've acted to try to dominate things; the serpent is loose and threatening everything that is good in the world. Some people think a miracle is required."

Notes:

Letter dated 2 November 1977, from CIA assistant general counsel to John Gavin Esq., Office of Legal Counsel, US Department of Justice, Washington, DC. Approved for release by the CIA in October 1991, author's files.

Author's interviews with "Sally Hartman," June-July, September 2000, Florida.

The above article is extracted in part from the author's book: "A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments."

Several sections have been added to this article to make Sally's experience fuller and more understandable to readers. These sections were drawn for an interview with Sally in September 2000.

Source: Truthout
http://www.truth-out.org/the-strange-story-sally-hartman60306

- SIGNAL OR NOISE DEPARTMENT -

Eight Mysterious Unsolved Sounds


Did aliens try to send us a message in 1977? Is some mythical, nightmarish sea monster responsible for the bizarre ocean sound known as ‘The Bloop’? Could an enigmatic Russian radio signal be transmitting encoded messages to spies? The world is full of sounds, but some stand out, especially when they’re incredibly loud or simply unexplainable by science. These 8 sounds and signals are subjects of constant speculation between conspiracy theorists and scientists alike, but it’s possible that we’ll never know their origin or meaning.

The Bloop

Several times during 1997, a sound reverberated through the Pacific Ocean that has been a mystery to science ever since. Dubbed “the Bloop”, the sound rises rapidly in frequency over one minute and was loud enough to be picked up by multiple sensors located up to 5,000km apart. These underwater listening devices were put in place in an area known as the “deep sound channel” during the Cold War to detect and track Soviet submarines, and are now used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor natural phenomena.

The NOAA says there’s no way the sound was man-made, and while it does sort of resemble a sound made by a living creature, there’s no whale in the world that’s large enough to produce a sound of such volume – not even gigantic blue whales. In fact, no creature that is ever known to have existed on this earth even during the time of the dinosaurs would be capable of creating The Bloop. Of course, that could only mean one thing: it’s the Call of Cthulhu! Coincidentally (or not), the sound was traced to a remote corner of the Pacific Ocean located within 500 miles of the lair of H.P. Lovecraft’s legendary sea monster.

The Hum

All over the world in places like Hawaii, New Mexico and England, every now and then people turn to each other and say, “What’s that humming sound?” It’s described as an irritating, persistent low-frequency sound that resembles the sound of a distant diesel engine idling and can often be felt as vibrations in the body. According to people who have heard it, microphones just can’t seem to accurately capture this noise. It’s loudest indoors, at night and on weekends.

On Big Island in Hawaii, the noise is attributed to volcanic activity, but the same certainly can’t be said in Kent, England or Taos, New Mexico. On the Washington State island of Vashon, annoyed residents report that the sound is getting louder. Is it electromagnetic? Supernatural? Tinnitus? Collective delusion? It’s virtually impossible to say.

Bizarre Booms

“Mistpouffers” – it’s a funny name for a series of bizarre booms that have been heard in waterfront communities ranging from Bangladesh to the Netherlands, typically described as a cannon sound or extremely loud thunder despite the absence of clouds in the sky. It’s frequently heard on calm summer days in the Bay of Fundy, Canada and has also been reported in Italy, Ireland, India, Japan, the Philippines, Ireland and in several U.S. States. These booms are no modern invention – the Iroquois explained similar noises to early white settlers as the sound of the Great Spirit continuing to shape the earth.

In 1978, a boom heard on Bell Island off Newfoundland in Canada was powerful enough to damage homes. While some may still believe that it was caused by supernatural phenomena and a recent History Channel special questioned whether secret electromagnetic pulse weapons tests could be the culprit, the cause is still a mystery.

In May 2010, bewildered Pennsylvania residents contacted the local paper about a “big boom”. “I heard the boom, and my closed, wooden front door rattled just a little bit,” Kim Owen told the Sun Gazette. “I didn’t think much about it until a friend, who lives several blocks away, posted a note on Facebook asking if anyone had heard a loud boom.”  A similar noise in 2001 later proved to be caused by a meteorite crashing through the earth’s atmosphere.

It could be that these sounds are all caused by meteorite impacts, but other natural causes are possible as well including gas escaping from vents in the earth’s surface or underwater caves collapsing.

The ‘Slow Down’ Sound

Recorded on May 19th, 1997 – the same year as ‘The Bloop’ – this unexplained sound is seven minutes long, slowly descending in frequency toward the end. Known as the ‘Slow Down’ sound, it was loud enough to be heard on three sensors at a range of nearly 2,000km. Nothing like it has been heard ever since, and its origin remains unexplained, landing it on the NOAA’s short list of strange unidentified noises picked up by their undersea microphones.

Quacker

During the Cold War, as Soviet Navy ballistic missile submarines patrolled the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean, they kept hearing the strangest sounds: what they described as “quacking”, the Russian version of our own onomatopeotic “ribbit” of a frog. The sounds were heard whenever the subs passed certain areas of the sea and seemed to be coming from a moving underwater object. However, nothing registered on sonar.

The Soviets believed at the time that they were hearing some kind of secret U.S. Technology and interpreted the sounds as a somewhat frightening threat. Today, scientists believe the sounds may have come from marine life like giant squid, which – lacking rigid internal skeletons – might not show up on sonar.

The Spooky Sounds of Saturn’s Rings

They’re eerie and otherworldly, exactly the kinds of bizarre noises you would expect to hear in a sci-fi film – but they’re actually real recordings from another planet. The Cassini spacecraft began detecting these auroral radio emissions from Saturn’s atmosphere in 2002, which have natural rising and falling tones similar to those emitted by Earth. The NASA recordings have been compressed and compiled into this single spooky track, and it’s all too easy to imagine all kinds of things within them, from alien speech to a spacecraft taking off.
The UVB-76 Buzzer

It seems like a mystery worthy of LOST – a strange repeating radio signal from Russia, punctuated by occasional cryptic messages in Russian. Short, monotonous buzzing tones have been emitted 25 times per minute, 24 hours a day since 1982, and nobody knows exactly why. Perhaps it’s used to transmit encoded messages to spies, or signal the status of some undercover military installation. Or, maybe it’s just related to high-frequency Doppler weather radar.

The voice messages transmitted by this signal, which have occurred only three times in 1997, 2002 and 2006, have all been numerical in nature. One features a Russian male voice saying “”Ya ? UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14.”

On Sunday, June 6th, 2010, a commenter on Slashdot wrote, “Tinfoil hatters around the world are abuzz that UVB-76, the Russian shortwave radio station that has been broadcasting its monotonous tone almost uninterrupted since 1982, has suddenly gone offline. Of course no one knows what the significance of this is, but best brush up on your drills just in case.”

The ‘Wow’ Signal

Did aliens try to contact us with an interstellar signal detected in 1977? The strong narrowband radio signal picked up by The Big Ear telescope of Ohio State University lasted for a total of 72 seconds and matched the expected signature of an interstellar signal, prompting Dr. Jerry Ehman to circle the signal on a printout and write “Wow!” beside it.

There’s no question that the signal originated from outside of our solar system, and in fact, its origin has been pinpointed as somewhere beyond the constellation Sagittarius. It was picked up by only one of the Big Ear’s two detectors and was never heard again despite close monitoring, but all “rational” explanations put forth by skeptics have been proven wrong, from satellite transmissions to space debris collisions.

The Wow! Signal is still the only confirmed sound received from deep space that could possibly be an intentional signal sent by entities unknown.

Source: Web Urbanist
http://weburbanist.com/2010/06/07/signal-or-noise-8-mysterious-unsolved-sounds/

- I SEE DEAD PEOPLE DEPARTMENT -

Your Child Might Really See Dead People

Haley Joel Osment shocked millions of American moviegoers when he said, "I see dead people" in "The Sixth Sense."

Turns out, what's really shocking is how many kids can actually communicate with spooks -- or at least feel they do.

So says Caron Goode, a Fort Worth, Texas-based psychotherapist and author of the new book "Kids Who See Ghosts: How to Guide Them Through Fear" (Weiser Books).

Goode says that while some kids play with imaginary friends, there are others who are convinced they are being visited by spooks and apparitions.

Well, are they?

Depends on your upbringing, Goode says.

"Are ghosts real? In some cultures they are and others they aren't," she says, adding that there are many factors that can make people feel they are seeing one -- including stress and their brain waves being in a "theta" or daydreaming state.

On the other hand, there are many people -- including Goode -- who have had experiences that they believe could only be caused by another entity and are not hallucinations.

So how can you tell if your kid's chat with his dead Uncle Leo is normal child's play or a paranormal experience? Well, age appropriateness is one way.

"Generally, children at the age of 2, 3 or 4 aren't able to distinguish between a ghost or a purely imaginary playmate," Goode says. "By the time they are 7, 8 or 9, they are able to distinguish between an apparition or a shadow on the bed."

Goode claims she knows this firsthand.

When she was 8, Goode was allegedly visited by the spirit of a bald, full-bearded man in a friar's robe who would stop by her room every couple of months to thank her for donating a dollar to the nuns at her Catholic school.

She says she didn't know much about him, but when she was a high school senior, she recognized him as a Capuchin monk named Padre Pio, who had stigmata during his adult life before dying in September 1968 and was later canonized as a saint for his ability to bi-locate, or be in two places at once.

Goode says the ability to pick up the paranormal often shows up at a young age, and one way parents can tell if their kids are really seeing something is the child's reaction to it.

For instance, if Junior thinks he sees a ghost and has a visceral gut reaction that makes him run to tell Mom or afraid to go to sleep, chances are it's not imaginary.

However, Goode says there is still some cause for debate. She cites a former patient named "Lucy," who allegedly started seeing ghosts after her parents divorced when she was 8.

"[The split] caused financial setbacks for both parents, who lived in apartments, and Lucy went back and forth between both homes, usually sleeping on the couch when she stayed with her dad," Goode says.

One night, while at her father's place, Lucy woke up and reportedly saw the ghost of a little girl pulling the quilt off her toes. She wasn't frightened, just sleepy, and she told herself that she'd close her eyes and if the spook was there when she reopened her eyes, the ghostly girl would be her friend.

According to Goode, the ghost followed Lucy home, and, eventually, she told her mom they had been conversing for a year.

Whether the ghost existed or not is, to Goode's thinking, open to interpretation.

"This mother thought the daughter created the friend to deal with a stressful time, but another mother might accept that it was really a ghost," she says.

"Some cultures are more accepting of ghosts or spirits than others," she says. "Also, the parents' reaction can have an effect. Some parents try to shut their kids down."

Although Goode says older children are more adept at distiguishing a true paranormal being from a shadow, parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach says younger kids are actually more likely to stay firm to their beliefs that they saw a ghost.

"Younger kids will stick to their story while the older kids are more likely to be acculturated to the idea that there are no ghosts," Auerbach says. "Sometimes, the parent might also see the ghost too, but not want to admit it.

"One way to tell the difference between whether the child is seeing something more than an imaginary friend is when they mention recognizable details about someone you know, such as a dead relative they never met."

According to Auerbach, parapsychology "is a parallel field" to traditional psychology, but there have been baby steps to link the two fields of study.

"In the last 30 years, there has been something called 'transpersonal psychology' that takes a person's religious, spiritual and psychic experiences into account and how they objectively impact the person," Auerbach says.

Still, even if child therapists acknowledge the possibility that kids might be seeing spooks, not every kid is a budding "ghost whisperer."

"Some kids have one experience, and some have a lot," Goode says. "Sometimes, these experiences can be attributed to stress, reactions to trauma, distress, fluctuating blood sugar levels or sleep deprivation -- even plain daydreaming.

"It is possible that the kid could just be talking to themselves, but you need to look at the behavior and see how the child is coping [with] stress," she says.

In addition, some personality types are just more spook-friendly than others.

"A child who is a 'doer' or a 'high achiever' will likely work their way through a problem and not really feel their way through it the way a more sensitive child might," she says.

Also, a kid who is truly intuitive will consistently claim to see spirits, but others will have just one-time experiences.

"My grandson was staying with me once, and he looked up at the ceiling at one point and said, 'Grandma,'" Goode says. "He never calls me anything but 'Eetsie,' so I believe he saw something. However, it hasn't happened since, and I don't believe he is intuitive."

But even if a child is able to see or feel ghosts consistently, that doesn't mean a parent should become a paranormal stage mom who forces the kid to hang up a giant neon hand and start reading fortunes.

"I was teaching at a school for intuitive children, and one of the mothers was talking about her boy's needs and abilities, and he was just bored out of his mind," Goode says.

Using her own intuitive abilities, she sensed he wasn't a very happy medium.

"I asked him, 'You're not into this, are you?' and he said, 'No.' So I influenced the mom to enjoy enhancing her own psychic ability and let her son do something he enjoyed," she says.

And enjoyment -- or the lack thereof -- is one reason why Goode wrote her book.

"I don't want kids going to bed scared and shaking," she says. "I don't want them to grow to be adults who are afraid of their environment. If this helps parents understand that their kid might need to take a toy sword and fight the ghost in order to work through this, I'll be happy."

Source: AOL News
http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/psychotherapist-caron-goode-says-
your-child-really-might-see-dead-people/19512023


- NOW DEPARTING AT GATE 23 DEPARTMENT -

Conspiracy Theories Thrive at Airports


Officials insist the 26-foot tall statue of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis now standing outside the Denver International Airport terminal is there to promote a King Tut exhibit opening soon at the Denver Art Museum. But the giant image of the jackal-headed god tasked with protecting the spirits of the dead is alarming some travelers.

"I'm not superstitious, but it doesn't exactly instill confidence when the god of the dead is staring through the window at you!" says Brian Olson, a Colorado resident who travels frequently through Denver airport.

The Anubis statue, which has also spent time at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, will leave Denver International Airport in mid-August. Staying behind will be several pieces from the airport's permanent public art collection that some travelers consider ominous and, in some cases, out of this world.

Mile-high mysteries

Matt Chasansky, the public art administrator at Denver airport, has watched all the YouTube videos, answered many e-mails and read all the internet postings about the secret messages allegedly embedded in murals, sculpture and other art pieces in the airport. He's glad people are responding emotionally to the airport's collection but insists concerns about strange doings at DEN are just misunderstandings.

One traveler wrote to complain about the "demons" in the baggage claim area. Those demons are part of Terry Allen's work, Notre Denver and are European cathedral-inspired gargoyles meant not to harm people, but to protect them from losing their luggage. Other travelers see a secret code in the words and images in 21st Century Artifacts, the four mosaic floors created by Carolyn Braaksma and Mark Villareal for Concourse B. "The piece is actually about geography, archeology and topography," says the airport's Chasansky, "And those are Native American words and symbols for the Colorado River and other sites around the area."

On its website, the airport notes that "a few fanciful conspiracy theories have been generated" by Leo Tanguma's mural titled Children of the World Dream Peace, but that none of those far-out theories "were intended by the artist." And both the airport's telephone-hold message and brochure for the self-guided art tour make reference to the uneasy feelings some travelers get from the glowing red eyes of the 32-foot tall blue Mustang by Luis Jiménez, who died while working on the sculpture. Dubbed "Bluecifer" by detractors, the sculpture rearing up on the road leading to the airport has spawned Facebook pages and campaigns calling for its removal.

There are also rumors about the airport's aliens. The ones that have supposedly come to earth and now live in the hidden underground areas at the airport. "One theory says you can put your ears against the columns in the terminal and hear alien voices from the basement," says Chasanksy. Another describes how pushing the right combination of buttons on a keypad by the airport's time capsule will signal the elevators to descend to the aliens' underground base. Unfortunately for alien hunters, that 'keypad' is just a plaque with braille lettering on it.

"All those theories are fanciful and fun," says Chasansky, "But none of it is true. And the aliens aren't telling me to say this."

Unexplained events at other airports

Fanciful or not, Denver International isn't the only airport said to be visited by aliens. According to Peter Davenport of the Seattle-based National UFO Reporting Center, "There have been many reports which seem to be, in one way or another, associated with airports."

Larry Bowron, now the Transportation Director for the city of Battle Creek, Mich., says back when he worked at the Scottsdale, Ariz., airport he saw something he still can't fully explain hover over the runway and then zip out of sight. "It looked like a helicopter, but had no lights on it. All of sudden a white beam of light came on and within two seconds it accelerated and was out of my sight. There was no sound, yet it moved 100 times faster than anything I'd seen in my life."

Bowron says prior to that experience he was "sort of a skeptic" about UFOs, but "You see something that defies logic and it makes a believer out of you."

Travis McQueen, manager of Indiana's Huntingburg Airport, hasn't seen a UFO, but did jump in an airplane to take some aerial pictures of mysterious crop circles that once showed up on airport-owned land leased to a local farmer. He won't say whether or not he believes it was aliens or local pranksters who left their mark in the farmer's bean field, but McQueen did file a report with the local sheriff so that the farmer could file an insurance claim for his lost crops.

Then there's the UFO that may or may not have visited Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on November 7, 2006. Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center says he received documents "that left no doubt as to whether the event occurred, or to its bizarre nature." He estimates that the disc-shaped object seen hovering above Gate C-17 was observed by no fewer than three dozen people, including aircraft mechanics, airline supervisory personnel and others he calls "highly qualified observers."

The Chicago Tribune and other news outlets published reports about the 2006 UFO incident. Davenport and others call the event "very dramatic" and "very well documented." The only thing officials at O'Hare have ever said about the possible UFO sighting, though, is "No comment."

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/travel/experts/baskas/2010-06-16-airport-conspiracy-theories_N.htm

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