Do dogmen, Bigfoots and other cryptids select and follow certain humans…sometimes for years? One Michigan man wrote me about several dogman encounters that began when he was a child. The biggest question in this case may be: will the sightings someday end? The incidents occurred near Alto and Lowell in Kent County, starting when the man was just 11. These communities are just east of Grand Rapids, but both are near rivers and some small lakes, with numerous wooded areas and a rural feel.

Here is the main story as he wrote it (includes the first one and the latest), edited for length and punctuation:

The First Encounter: 1986

    “It was summertime, my childhood had a great group of very normal everyday kids and we played war a lot with each other. Normally about six of us played together through the day with kids rotating back home for chores etc. This particular Saturday we decided to play War behind the Alto Elementary School in the woods and creek area. Anyways I was trying to get in the woods ahead of the other kids before they showed up, to have the advantage. We were using squirt guns and water balloons.

    "It was like 10 am. As soon as I ran into the woods which I knew very well–this was my stomping grounds literally–I felt uneasy, like I was being watched… not by a friend, either. This feeling lingered and got stronger and stronger like whatever was watching me was moving closer.In this small stretch of woods there was a creek behind me that ran the stretch of the woods. There is a train trestle/ rail road tracks as well.

    "I was crouched in the tall grass facing the play ground and the road when I heard a splash and very fast movement going behind me. I jumped because I was startled at the height and suddenness of the shadow flashing behind me. When I whipped around I saw a large black/grey, wolflike creature that was running down the creek bed bank alongside the creek behind me. It was shifting from four to two legs and jumped after about three seconds into the brush away from me into the trees. It seemed to have disappeared and I didn’t hear it [any more]. I was a country/woodsy kid. I had no comprehension other than fear for what I saw at that moment.

    "I ran home which wasn’t far, about 1/4 mile. I didn’t tell anybody what I saw. I was afraid of being teased, or made fun of about it by other people.

    "When I ran in my house and got to my bedroom, it had only been like a few minutes but I remember thinking it resembled the werewolves in The Howling movie I had seen few years before that. It was, I’d guess, 7-8 ft. tall, and a very muscular  300 lbs? Its head resembled a timber wolf with long canines, long clawed hands, its legs bent backwards like a canine. It glanced back at me. It didn’t want me to see it. It didn’t SMELL AT ALL. It’s face was not feral or ferocious, its eyes were blue. Its presence was powerful, overwhelming.

    "I didn’t go outta my own yard for several days, which my neighborhood friends thought was odd. I had childhood asthma though, so they assumed that was my issue when they didn’t see me much. I used that excuse when my family wondered why I was so home-bound. I never told a soul what I saw for fear of not being believed. I stayed close to my friends when we played, but I didn’t go close to that creek stretch of woods for 3-4 years. And never alone….

    "Being an eleven year old kid then, I remember thinking about it quite a bit over the summer but fear of not being believed kept me from telling my friends and family what happened behind the school I attended.  I was glad that middle school was coming for me that fall. I remember my concern that I was going to see this creature elsewhere that we played in the Alto area but I didn’t. Over next few years I rationalized to myself that I didn’t know really what I saw and the wolf-like creature image in my memory was better left there."

The Roof Wolf

    “Flash up to 2008. I’m 33 years old. My profession at this time was personal fitness trainer and recreational bodybuilding was my lifestyle. We resided in a quaint house about a mile north of Lowell, MI. It had a very pretty welcoming woodsy area behind our home and we all enjoyed walking the trails in the woods as well.”

    “It’s wintertime 2009. It’s a blizzard of snow outside. All of my family was sound asleep. About 1 am, we wake up to a large thud sound on the roof of our home,  like the weight of a person moving around on the roof of our one story home. There is a lot of scraping noises and a slow, deliberate walking sound.

    "This goes on for about a minute. My girlfriend, our children and myself are genuinely spooked by this phenomenon happening on the roof. I recall vividly that all of us were utterly silent huddled in the hallway looking intently at each other and up at the ceiling from all of the loud creaking scraping sounds.

    "I don’t own guns, but I certainly felt it was a good idea to grab my machete that was in the closet. That was when I realized the dread feeling in my gut was the exact same feeling I had years ago with the wolflike creature from my youth. As I struggled with this realization I quietly as possible crept up to the back slider door, machete in hand. I had genuine fear for my girlfriend and children but kept it to myself. They were still huddled and scared, watching me sneak outside. Please know that I’m rather a fearless man for most part.

    "I ever so quietly sneak outside. It’s snowing hard big flakes outside, and it’s eerily quiet. I’m crouched in my pajamas alongside backside of the house. I’m holding my breath…looking up at the roof, listening. Slowly the clawed hands and timber wolf face with piercing blue eyes peers over roof down at me. It’s the exact same  creature I saw in my youth!

    "We stare at each other blankly for few seconds. There definitely was a weird sense of recognition between the creature and me ein those moments. I was physically frozen and shocked because the creature was only a good 8 feet or so from me on the roof of my home.

    "It suddenly leaps off the roof about 30 ft into our backyard. It lands on all four then runs on two legs back into the treeline in what seems like a blur. It’s standing there at treeline looking at me. The  contrast of the snow and it’s size and fur make it easy to spot.I hold still while the wolflike creature and myself stare each other down.

    "We stare at each other for I’m guessing a minute. In that minute my adrenaline dumped. My fear of this creature turned to anger for it disturbing my life, my family. I made a decision as my anger grew, a reckless one…."

The Voice
      
     "I yelled a loud angry noise and charged, machete in hand directly at it. Pathetically, it took me like fifteen seconds to run the distance the creature had in like 2 moments. The wolflike creature didn’t budge, move or anything. It just stood there watching me run at it. It appeared mildly amused, its facial expression almost a smirk.
           
     "As I got within about 30 feet, in my head loudly I hear audibly… “DON’T!!!”. It’s a deep loud voice. I swear the sheer volume of the voice stopped me dead in my run at the creature. I was instantly physically calm, confused, still afraid of the creature, my fear of it was different for me. It’s presence was still overwhelming to me…
           
      "At this moment I realized this creature is intelligent?
           
      "I dropped the machete in a physical plea, a gesture to not be harmed. I backed away in slow deliberate steps backwards still facing it.  If it chose to be violent, it could easily kill/ harm me from physical appearance of it.
           
      "After few seconds it turned and walked calm about 30 feet into the woods. Its presence faded and it felt like it wasn’t ever there…
           
      "I went back to my residence looking over my shoulder whole time. I was so bewildered. It was a very vivid, surreal feeling. My reality had been spun like a top. I go back inside, but I keep looking out the slider towards the woods. I announce 'It’s gone, girls!'
           
      "My girlfriend (Age 31), her daughter (10), my daughter (11)  walk into the dining room area from the hallway, asking questions in quiet voices. I hug our daughters, telling them it’s late. it was just an animal that ran off. They reluctantly buy it..My girlfriend and I  whisper about what happened earlier.  It comes out that she saw it a month or so before which then clicked to me…She had called me while I was running errands early evening. She sounded upset and scared. I was at [a store] only a mile from our residence. I was home in like 3 minutes. When I got in the house, she said she lied and chalked it off to the neighbor’s big Rottweiler. That was when I admitted my knowledge of the creature… Our daughters slept but we really didn’t.  It was simply crazy, Linda.”

This man had an unusual experience, I’ll say that! But not crazy. I have had other reports of upright canines crawling on roofs and staring at people from the tree lines of their back yards. I’ve also had many, many eyewitnesses report the feeling of receiving a message in their heads that indicates a warning of some type, although the message delivery seems extra vivid in this case. I hope to stay in touch with this witness in case anything else happens, and will update if I hear anything new. I have one more case to present from my recent Michigan batch so keep an eye out here for that.

* Listen to Linda Godfrey talk abot her favorite accounts of Dogman and other cryptid creatures on Exploring the Bizarre.

Source: Linda Godfrey
https://lindagodfrey.com/2018/04/20/michigan-dogman-roof-stalker/

Energize your desired future idea, while respecting the autonomy of others.

Going back through the ages, way beyond the 400 years of modern science, we can find practical wisdom that helps us to adapt and flourish within the increasing intensity of life in the digital age.

Think about how to create coincidences. Certain personality variables including openness and belief facilitate psi experiences. Certain situations like transition, high emotion and need increase the likelihood of coincidences. Culling through ancient wisdom, Dean Radin reports in his book Real Magic  that we need to embrace our own teleological abilities—to imagine a desired future and "let the world conspire" to make it happen. We have to be careful though. We must respect the free will and autonomy of others. For example, if the woman I love does not want to be with me but prefers to be with another man. I must not hope for the end of her new relationship. That would be attempting to subvert her will to mine. Ancient observations suggest those attempting to subvert the free will of another often have that negativity snap back at them.

Dean describes a four part synchronicity in which two people who do not know each other imagine a reciprocally desired future. They are somehow drawn to each other and fulfill their mutually desired future images.

Synchronicity #1

Early in the year 2000 I was searching for office space for a research institute that a colleague, Richard Shoup, and I were establishing. We called it the Boundary Institute because its mission was to scientifically explore the boundaries between mind and matter using the disciplines of physics, mathematics, and computer science. This organization would continue a program of psi research that I had been in charge of at a Silicon Valley technology company called Interval Research Corporation, funded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft.

The “dot com” craze was at its peak at the time, with new Internet startups popping up all over Silicon Valley. As a result, office rental rates, already at astronomical levels, were continuing to rise. We looked at four potential locations and ended up rejecting the first three because they were too expensive. That left only one clear choice, in the town of Los Altos, a suburb of Silicon Valley. It was a nice space with four offices, a common area, and a conference room, and it was located in a complex with accountants, therapists, real estate agents, dentists, and so on. The plan was that I would move in first and get things set up.

After moving furniture into a room that would become my office, I became curious about our neighbors. I found a directory sign listing the office suites. Most were ordinary businesses, but one was named “PsiQuest, Inc.” I thought this was a delightful coincidence, because our new institute was also a sort of Psi Quest, namely psi research of the parapsychological kind. There are only a handful of psi research facilities in the world, and we are all well aware of each other. So I was certain that the “psi” in PsiQuest must have meant “Personnel Service Investigations,” or something like that.  The “psi” similarity was just an amusing synchronicity and I soon forgot about it.

Synchronicity #2

About a month later, I took a new route to the office and noticed that the sign on the suite next door to ours, which I hadn’t passed before, was labeled, “PsiQuest Research Labs.” Now this was suddenly more interesting, because what in the world was “Personality Services Investigations,” as I imagined PsiQuest to be, doing with a research lab? The miniblinds on the PsiQuest Research Labs window were closed, and what little I could see through the blinds only revealed a well-appointed reception space. No one was visible.

I checked every day for the next two weeks. Finally someone was in the PsiQuest Labs office. I knocked and tried the door. It was unlocked, so I entered and prepared to say hello to a man behind a desk. He looked up, his eyes widened as though he saw a ghost, and before I could say anything he managed to croak my name, “Dean Radin?”

I hesitated, alarmed. “Yes,” wondering how he knew who I was, and if he was feeling okay. He didn’t reply. He just continued to stare at me. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, “I’m your neighbor, next door. I just wanted to introduce myself and see what kind of work you do here.”

At length, the man replied, “I’m doing what you’re doing.”

Confused, I asked, “What do you think I’m doing?”

He replied, “psi research…. parapsychology.”

Now it was my turn to stare, dumbfounded. Unbeknownst to me or to any of my colleagues around the world, here was another group engaged in the same kind of research as we were, and they were located next door to our new offices.

Synchronicity #3

It turned out that the President of PsiQuest, Jon K., was not only thoroughly familiar with psi research, he was specifically engaging in a magical practice to manifest me! Jon was using a Tibetan Dream Yoga technique, which involves alternating three-hour periods of sleeping and waking over the course of 24 hours. During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track, and one of those signs would be for me to show up, somehow, so I could join his Board of Directors. But he had no idea where I was or how to contact me. Hardly anyone at the time knew that I was living in Silicon Valley, and even fewer knew where our new Institute was located.

That’s why when I opened the door to Jon’s lab that day he was speechless. He couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming. From his perspective, my appearance on his doorstep was literally an act of magic based on his clear, repeated affirmations. When he finally was able to tell me what he was doing, I too felt seriously disoriented. We both had to sit down.

Synchronicity #4

The month before all this unfolded, I was spending quite a bit of time visualizing what our new offices and laboratory space would look like. I was drawing sketches of my ideal lab on the whiteboard in my office and imagining a certain kind of reclining leather chair, a shielded room, and other types of equipment that would be useful to have in the lab. I know all this would be expensive, and our budget was limited, so I figured we wouldn’t be able to afford it in the short term. But that didn’t stop me from imagining what I wanted.

Returning to the story, after recovering from the shock of our meeting, Jon invited me to tour the rest of his facility. As we moved from one room to the next, I could hardly believe my eyes. Jon had the reclining leather chair, the shielded chamber, and the other pieces of equipment I had been actively imagining. All of this was located on the other side of the wall from my desk, no more than 6 feet from where I had been sketching what our lab would look like. I literally drew what I wanted into being.

This was an amazing set of coincidences!

Dean's summary of what you need to do, goes something like this:
Respect the free will of the others.
Do not animate inanimate objects--like corporations.
Be careful about the impacts on others of your imagined future.

A good friend of mine writes books, many of them. He finds that his only resource is his own mind; that is how he survives. He recognizes that he must have some idea about where his current book is going but not hold that idea too rigidly. He learns to "surf" the energy that flows through him, to respond when the waves are high and stay on the beach when there is no activity. Also, if it is raining, he's still got to hit the waves.  He needs to respond nimbly to contingencies, those unexpected events that can influence his direction and energy. He needs to be able to improvise and to act as if what he is seeking to do has already happened. He does not use quantum physics or ancient wisdom to bolster his confidence or to explain his methods.

How then to resolve this apparent conflict between Dean's views and my friend's? A matter of degree. The deeper you get into the ancient wisdom, to the depths of consciousness, the more low probability events are likely to happen. There seems to be a continuum from the individual functioning alone at his keyboard to another person navigating the complex world of people and moving things.

To listen to Dean discuss these ideas, please click here.

Source: Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/experts/bernard-d-beitman-md

President Trump vowed last year to release all the long-secret files related to the JFK assassination, but the administration announced Thursday that some documents will remain redacted until October 2021 for national security reasons.

In a White House memo, Trump said that the nation’s intelligence community persuaded him to keep some parts of documents secret because their exposure could harm “identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.”

Trump gave the CIA, FBI and other agencies a deadline of April 26 to release documents related to the investigation into President John F. Kennedy’s assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

Trump, who once suggested Sen. Ted Cruz’s father played a role in the assassination, had promised to release the entirety of the 5 million pages of records, most of which have been available since the late 1990s.

[JFK assassination conspiracy theories: The grassy knoll, Umbrella Man, LBJ and Ted Cruz’s dad]

“Subject to the receipt of further information, I will be allowing, as President, the long blocked and classified JFK FILES to be opened,” Trump tweeted on Oct. 21, 2017.

Six days later, he promised: “After strict consultation with General Kelly, the CIA and other Agencies, I will be releasing ALL JFK files other than the names and addresses of any mentioned person who is still living.”

The president did authorize the disclosure of 19,045 documents that are available on the National Archives website. Of that batch, more than 15,000 documents — which had been released previously with varying degrees of redactions — still have blanked-out sections, according to a National Security Council spokesman. In most of those cases, the redactions are now fewer. The spokesman also said no more documents are being withheld in full under the section that falls within the public disclosure rules under the Kennedy Act.

Trump said the next deadline for release of more documents would be Oct. 26, 2021. “The need for continued protection can only grow weaker with the passage of time…,” Trump wrote.

Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post staff writer who edits JFKFacts.org, a website devoted to the Kennedy records, said in an interview that he was disappointed by Trump’s decision to delay the full release for another three years and, possibly, beyond.

“Trump said that all the JFK files will be released, but the truth is that thousands of JFK files are still secret. The clear intent of Congress was to have these released last October and now we’re talking about 2021,” Morley said. “The point is that the CIA wants to keep this secret forever. It’s a very clear statement of intent.”

Morley also said that the Trump administration is not complying with the stipulations of the Kennedy Records Act, which requires that the administration provide declassified explanations for withheld documents.

On October 26, 1992, President George H.W. Bush signed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act. The law required that all the assassination records “shall be publicly disclosed in full and available” at the National Archives “no later than the date that is 25 years after the date of the enactment of this act.” But the law did allow for postponements if the government was worried that harm to the military and intelligence communities “outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”

Morley, who has been fighting the CIA in federal court for the last 15 years to obtain other Kennedy records, said he was quickly going through the 19,000 files that were released Thursday and came across redactions that made little sense to him. One document was an FBI report detailing an agent’s interview of Oswald’s brother Robert and mother Marguerite in April 1960. The July 1961 document refers to four confidential informants — code-named T-1, T-2, T-3, and T-4 — but their names are blacked out.

“This is a 57-year-old document,” Morley said. “And the names are still being withheld. Why?”

Another document is a House Select Committee on Assassinations interview of Boris and Ann Tarasoff, two former contract employees with the CIA at the agency’s Mexico City station in the run-up to Kennedy’s assassination. The transcript’s exchanges are mostly all there, except that Morley noticed one paragraph whited-out for reasons he could not ascertain.

    In a separate interview with Mr. Tarasoff on November 30, 1976, I learned that the photographic expert on station in Mexico City in 1963 September to November was Bob Zambernardi. Zambernardi’s —

And then the paragraph is whited out until it continues again:

Zambernardi was probably the man in charge of photographing the activities of both the Cuban and Soviet embassies in 1963.

At the same time, Morley did give credit to the government for taking documents that were once heavily redacted and lifting their veils. “There is some progress,” he said. “Some significant material has been released today, but other significant redactions remain.”

Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, which tracks the JFK files, said he wasn’t sure yet what had been withheld and needed to spend time scrutinizing the latest release of documents to see whether they contain a large or small amount of redactions. He said he did a quick “spot-check” and was surprised to see fewer whited-out sections than in previous releases.

“I checked a few dozen files, and there were certainly many with redactions, but they tended to be names and short phrases,” Bradford said.

Source: The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/26/trump-delays-release-of
-some-jfk-files-until-2021-bowing-to-national-security-concerns/?noredirect=on&utm
_term=.c2df17959388

- OUR WEIRD, WEIRD WORLD DEPARTMENT -

Clouds of Suspicion

When is a cloud not a cloud? Perhaps when it behaves so strangely - even to the point of attacking people - that it becomes a truly puzzling manifestation.

There's more unexplained strangeness in our skies other than UFOs. For generations, eyewitnesses have reported absolutely weird and astonishing activities or attributes from ordinary and sometimes not-so-ordinary looking clouds. Some of these reports were even recorded in prestigious scientific journals.

The Rock-Filled Cloud
Do you think only rain, snow, and ice can fall from clouds? In an otherwise clear September sky near Agen, France in 1814, a small, white, spherical cloud appeared. It floated motionless for a while before beginning to spin and head quickly southward. Witnesses reported that deafening rumbling noises thundered from the cloud, and then it suddenly exploded in a shower of rocks and stones. The cloud then slowly faded away.

Moving Against the Wind
Besides meteorologists, perhaps no group of people knows clouds as well as sailors. On March 22, 1870, the crew of the bark Lady of the Lake saw a remarkable cloud and recorded its description in the ship's log. The report was reprinted in the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. According to Capt. Banner, it was a circular cloud which included a semicircle that was divided into four parts, "the central dividing shaft beginning at the center of the circle and extending far outward, and then curving backward." Transfixed by this light gray but most unnatural-looking cloud, the sailors watched as it traveled from a point at about 20 degrees above the horizon to a point about 80 degrees above. "It was much lower than the other clouds," the log stated, and it traveled against the wind. "It came up obliquely against the wind, and finally settled down right in the wind's eye," the report stated. It was visible to the ship for half an hour, and when it did finally disappear, it did not disintegrate like a cloud, but "was lost to sight in the evening darkness." 

A Rain of Insects
Mr. John Zeleny witnessed a peculiar, unexplained event in 1897. In a letter printed in a 1932 edition of Science magazine, Zeleny described a luminous, cumulus-type cloud that drifted over Hutchinson, Minnesota from the east. "It shone with a uniform, steady, vivid, whitish light and passed directly over the town," Zeleny wrote. "When the cloud was overhead, a great shower of insects descended to earth covering the ground all around to the number of about 50 to 100 per square foot." Upon examination, the insects proved to be a common type of bug of the species hemiptera. Zeleny also reported a second event that took place that same year but in Macerata, Italy. This time, out of blood-red clouds precipitated thousands of seeds unfamiliar to locals.

Triangles in the Clouds
We've all seen dark patches on clouds, but how about patches that move from cloud to cloud? In the April 8, 1912 edition of Nature, the much-respected British science journal, Charles Tilden Smith wrote that at Chisbury, Wiltshire, England, he saw something in the sky  "unlike anything that I have ever seen before. Although I have studied the skies for many years, I have never seen anything like it." Smith recalled that he saw two stationary dark patches upon the clouds. Extraordinarily, they were stationary with respect to the clouds, which were rapidly moving. The patches, which he described as fan-shaped or triangular, kept the same position on succeeding clouds as they passed across a particular region of the sky. Smith watched them for more than half an hour.

Mysterious Shadows
One year later, Monthly Weather Review published an April 8, 1913 report from Fort Worth, Texas that described a mysterious shadow of some unseen body on the clouds in the sky. "It was supposed to have been cast by an unseen cloud," the publication stated, "but this patch of shade moved with the declining sun."

Attacked by a Cloud
Storm clouds can be foreboding and sometimes dangerous, but it's not often that one appears to be deliberately malicious. It was a summer morning in 1975 that school teacher Tom D'Ercole of Oyster Bay, Long Island, had a very bizarre experience with a cloud that seemed to be after him. D'Ercole was about to get in his car when he saw a small, dark cloud hovering above his house. "The cloud seemed to move and slightly enlarge as I watched it," the science teacher said. "This basketball-sized cloud floated back and forth across the peak of the roof, changing in shape from a small globular mass to a larger ovoid and finally becoming an abstract, muticurved, dark, vaporous ‘something.' It finally measured about six feet in height and one and a half feet in width." Then things got really strange. As D'Ercole watched in fascination and puzzlement, the cloud appeared to inhale, form pursed lips, a spit a stream of water at him and his car - drenching them both. After a few moments, the spray ended and the cloud disappeared.

Source: Paranormal.About
http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa011000a.htm

- LOOK DEEPLY INTO MY SOUL DEPARTMENT -

Dark History of Mind Control

In perhaps the most famous psychological experiment of modern times, Stanley Milgram proved that most of us are no better than Nazis. In 1961 the Yale psychologist divided pairs of paid volunteers into test-takers and shock therapists; each wrong answer from the former earned an electric shock by the latter, who could hear but could not see his partner in an adjoining room.

The test-takers were never actually shocked, but were directed to scream and plead as the shock therapists — ordered to proceed by an authoritative psychologist — thought they were administering near-lethal zaps. Two-thirds of participants dumbly obeyed the white coat even though they thought they were practically killing an innocent stranger.

The American Psychological Association, appalled at the experiment’s effects on participants, stripped Milgram of his membership, but he nonetheless earned a place in history: He later analyzed the My Lai massacre and his name has surfaced repeatedly in discussions of torture at Abu Ghraib.

The Milgram experiments were the pinnacle of decades of research into social control and human engineering driven by the “behaviorist” school of psychology. Born at the University of Chicago in the first years of the 20th century, behaviorism posited that human actions are unaffected by free will or consciousness, and instead may be empirically predicted, recorded and shaped by external stimuli. Just as a plant turns toward the sun, a frustrated human lashes out aggressively; the plant can be conditioned by its orientation to light, as can the human by modifying his level of frustration. Or by giving stern orders, as Milgram dismayingly proved.

Rebecca Lemov, a lecturer at the University of Washington, has produced a lively and well-researched history of the human engineering field and its broad intellectual and social legacy. Lemov nicely structures the book around key social scientists in the behaviorist movement, most of them psychologists at Yale’s Institute of Human Relations from the 1920s to the 1960s. From John B. Watson’s early (and breathtakingly durable) thesis that animal behavior is an infallible predictor of human behavior came decades of laboratory studies of white rats marching around strung out on drugs and shocked into doing this or that. Then came George Murdoch’s effort to amass all knowledge about humankind in great storerooms of boxes and card catalogs, which, when brought to the attention of the Defense Department, earned the fusty professor a shiny commission in the Navy in addition to grants from Uncle Sam. (”[W]e were repeatedly subject to Jap attack and ambush . … I really had the time of my life.”)

With the birth of the Cold War, a more nefarious collaboration began between government and social scientists, as the CIA funded universities’ mind control and brainwashing experiments that left unsuspecting volunteers psychologically impaired. One example was the “psychic driving” of McGill University’s Ewan Cameron, who played subjects an endless loop of one of their own statements from therapy, such as “You killed your mother,” while keeping them packed with mind-altering drugs and locked in sensory depravation chambers. They emerged broken, ready to “be built up again.” This is real “Manchurian Candidate” stuff, and it is easy to see how it could have a dramatic impact on human behavior.

An anthropologist, Lemov is less interested in the technical features of this research than in the culture of those who would practice laboratory totalitarianism in the name of political anti-totalitarianism. Lifelong sufferer of manic-depressive disorder O. Hobart Mowrer late in life found Jesus, dropped behaviorism and pioneered the snuggly group therapy of Alcoholics Anonymous. In contrast, John Dollard, an anthropologist of Southern racial tensions, eventually rejected the subtleties of the human experience and joined the rigid behaviorists at Yale. More chillingly, we learn that McGill’s Cameron, a dark wizard if ever there was one, actually helped prosecute Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg tribunals.

Lemov’s central thesis might have been spun out a little further. She argues that the world at large eventually replaced the laboratory as all these experiments spawned real human engineering in the form of modern annoyances like advertising and focus groups. But rather than trace the connection in detail, she leaves off in the 1960s, before the research really began to bear commercial fruit. And not for want of material: John Watson, whom she profiles, left academia in 1920 to join the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Scientists must of course be free to research broadly, but if the decades of human and animal suffering that Lemov recounts have served primarily to allow modern money grubbers to play mind control games with consumers, much has been wasted.

The author is also too eager to see in mid-century social science a vast plot to control human behavior. Plenty of mid-century anthropologists and psychologists simply wished to explore and understand their world and had no designs to bend others to their will. As the book demonstrates, a few well-positioned scientists with that aim were enough to do plenty of harm.

Source: Rebecca Lemov/RINF.COM
http://www.rinf.com/columnists/news/dark-history-of-mind-control