Further Musings

First, I'd like to direct everyone to a site I just found and happened also to be mentioned by reader, Daniel in the comments under the "Welcome Back" entry. It's called Rigorous Intuition and by coincidence happens also to be on Blogspot. I will be visiting there regularly.

Secondly, I'd like to add that I just touched the surface in my last two posts and there are reasons for that. One is that the information is out there, though you have to be sure NOT to leave your critical faculties in the cupboard when you are exploring this area, particularly because of reason two, which is this:

There's just an awful lot of bullshit you have to wade through to get at anything close to the "truth."

I did not build up a systematic case that the government intentionally creates "Manchurian candidates" and that likely this is often done with abuse and even with children. Further, some of these children may have been abducted right off the street for these purposes as well as to feed a large child sexual slavery network. I say that I did not build my case systematically because that takes a lot more than a blog. I believe, however, that the case has been made fairly well. Except....

Except....


There's something that is common to the topics under discussion here and also subjects such as UFO's, for example. I hope I can get this out clearly. The chain of evidence and reasoning that I've seen, and we'll stick with the child slavery/mind control stuff, is solid. Each link is well supported and much of the information on mind control at least has a government paper trail.

The problem is that, as you follow the chain of reasoning out to its conclusions, you almost always end up with disinformation at the other end, and it is quite frustrating.

Let's take the scenario of kidnapping and abuse of children for the purposes of mind control. I mentioned the testimony of Valerie Wolf and her therapy clients in a recent post. This testimony was taken in connection with Congressional hearings on radiation experiments on unconsenting subjects and I have no issue with this testimony. But now go to the website of Cathy O'Brien, another alleged victim until rescued by "Intelligence insider" Mark Phillips. Phillips' representation of his background has not been consistent, but looking at his picture, he sure looks like a spook, doesn't he? Reminds me of Robert Culp, but I digress.

I once wrote to O'Brien as she used to have info on her website about how her own daughter was being held in a mental institution against her will. I thought, "Wow, let me sign their petition or whatever action they are taking to help." So I asked her how I could help. She said the only way was to buy her book.

Oh really. Gee, glad you are so concerned about her.

Other reasons I tend to doubt her story a bit.

1. She was allegedly raped by Presidents Clinton, Ford and at least one Bush (I can't tell them apart, I think it was the one without the Texas accent.) Strangely enough, none of these figures have ever filed a libel suit against her.

2. All these people who rape her also let her know all their secret plans for world domination.

3. She saw George Bush shapeshift into a reptilian alien. (I'm not shitting you.)

Okay, so why should one bit of disinfo bother me so much? Well, I think that questionable info she has contributed has made it into all sorts of other accounts. For example, the Franklin cover-up story is as solid as it gets. You can view the documentary if you haven't done so already. As I also mentioned before, however, the main investigator working on this case is a former state senator who numbers former CIA director, the late William Colby among his friends and indeed Colby is quoted in the documentary. But further, one of the young victims, Paul Bonnaci, the same one who said Hunter Thompson directed a "snuff film" he was involved in, started talking about Project Monarch. Monarch, for those of you following this discursive mess of a paragraph (sorry about that) is the alleged name of the whole kidnap-kids-and-turn-them-into-mind-control-sex-slaves enterprise. Problem is, I've never seen any solid evidence that Monarch exists. In fact, the only "evidence" I've seen is the testimony of Cathy, "Read My Books" O'Brien and this statement of Bonnaci.

The two cases have another similarity, in fact. Both O'Brien and Bonnaci are taken under the wing of a hero figure. In O'Brien's case it is the aforementioned Phillips whose "intelligence background" allowed him to know exactly how to deprogram her. Isn't that conveeeeenient? In Bonnaci's case, he comes under the wing of investigator and CIA pal John DeCamp.

You see where I'm going here? I think it is a pattern. You get a real story emerging, in swoop these "hero" types and all of a sudden the stories start to expand and shift and lose credibility.

Let me quote another alleged victim of these activities, Kathleen Sullivan. You can see her website and evaluate her story yourself, but this quote is taken from her interview on Rigorous Intuition (really, I'm not being paid to push them...I just like the site!). Here's a long quote because it gets to the heart of whatever the hell I'm rambling on about.

1. The agents usually lure one or two outspoken, fairly credible mind-control survivors by wooing them and/or promising to protect the survivors. Some of the agents have actually influenced the survivors to allow the agents into their homes, sex lives, and bank accounts. These agents have then gained illegitimate credibility by encouraging their new protégés to co-write with the agents and appear with the agents at conferences on mind control.

2. The agents promote disinfo-laden conspiracy theories through themselves and their protégés. For instance, a current joint conspiracy among recognized disinfo agents is to frighten people into believing that: the high-level perpetrators (world-ranking politicians, etc.) are really shape-shifting aliens in human bodies who have already, in secret, created a New World Order that is in the process of changing all of us into mentally controlled slaves. (It is not difficult for identified disinfo agents, who are masters in mental manipulation and hypnosis, to “convince” the highly suggestible protégés that they saw high-ranking politicians morph into lizard aliens and back again.) By buying into this disinfo, we are likely to either become irrational, or to melt into puddles of helplessness and fear. I believe that as long as they focus our attention onto subjects like this that are likely to push our panic buttons, they will render us nearly, if not totally ineffective in learning the truth and using it effectively.

3. By feeding other bits and pieces of false information to the protégé survivors, they use the survivors to promote even more disinformation. Hearing such disinfo from both the agents and their protégés causes us to be more likely to believe that the disinfo must therefore be legitimate. My biggest concern about this, is that the protégés are not only adding an undeserved sheen of credibility to the disinfo agents and their lies, but the protégés are also being used to influence the public to believe that ALL mind-control survivors must believe the same lies. Beyond that, any individual who is educated or smart enough to recognize the disinfo as such, may therefore not trust information provided by those of us who are presenting legitimate information.

Of course, all this begs the question, "If these folks are mind control subjects, why not simply program THEM to give out the disinfo without the need for the additional disinformation agents?" However this model is a familiar one. I will end with a couple of other instances of this in other fields, just to show you that it is a rather common disinformation tactic.

First you have Danny Sheehan, the founder of the Christic Institute. Sheehan has a habit of getting into slamdunk legal cases with important political ramifications and then losing the cases by introducing a lot of unsupported and diversionary conspiracy information (some of which may even be true, but still goes unsupported by solid evidence in his briefs). The most famous example is his involvement in a lawsuit that involved many aspects of the Iran-Contra case. It's a long and complicated story. For an analysis with which I agree, you can go to this article by Chip Berlet. This link takes you into the middle of the article but the whole article is how rightwing elements and perhaps intelligence figures infiltrate and distort attempts to expose important political information. The bottom line is that a pretty winnable case was lost as Sheehan introduced all sorts of theories about a "secret team" that was running all these operations. The secret team elements of his lawsuit were not at all proven and detracted from the credibility of the rest of the case. Berlet also adds that many of the conspiratorial elements in his case originated in work by neo-fascist Lyndon Larouche and rightwing publication Spotlight.

Sheehan went on to get involved with a UFO organization called the "Disclosure project" (whose homepage I'm having trouble finding at the moment, for some reason.) They had a big press conference a few years ago designed to show blockbuster evidence of UFO's as extraterrestrial in origin. Other UFO researchers gave the press conference rather mixed reviews. Within that conference was Sheehan adding his own spin that all of the UFO stuff was evidence of....a secret government. The last thing I saw Sheehan involved in was Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign. I'm not saying Kucinich would have won the nomination without Sheehan on board...but hey...one more casualty on the Sheehan list. You can check out his UFO work here.

So, what happens is that legitimate information and "conspiracies" get mucked up with additional information that either supports a rightwing agenda or intentionally discredits the legitimate information. Some UFO research falls victim to the same approach . In fact, this is one of the reasons I don't discount UFO research, though UFO researchers are the most gullible bunch as a general rule and are ripe for this sort of trickery. However, if these spooks are messing around with these guys, there has to be SOMETHING of interest going on.

My favorite example is of the two Military Intelligence officers who disclosed bits and pieces of the entire "alien presence on earth" to various researchers. These guys, code named "Falcon" and "Condor", were invited to appear on a TV show called "Ufo Coverup? Live!" back in 1988. One of the producers of that show, Bill Moore, himself has confessed to intentionally providing disinformation to another UFO researcher at the request of "UFO insiders" promising to reveal aspects of the truth to him. So already we see these games beginning. On the show, Falcon gives a rundown on the now famous MJ12 group that secretly carries out research on and maybe even cooperation with the aliens. Falcon also offered the helpful details that the government was currently hosting an alien visitor and that these aliens like Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream.

You see how this works? I don't know what, if any, of MJ12 is fact, though the fact that the intelligence community itself is partly responsible for the MJ12 legend seems clear to me. But by the time he got to "strawberry ice cream", anyone who was beginning to find the story believable just changed the channel. Even Moore admits that there was a great deal of "disinformation" mixed in with the truth. (For a sober assessment of UFO evidence you may find surprising if you are new to the subject and which is based very much on US military documents, see UFO's and the National Security State by Richard Dolan. )

I found this quote at about.com which sums up very nicely what such disinformation does for research:

Some of these birds tell us that the "secret information"
that they give us is "partly disinformation and partly true".
Sheesh! If I gave them a wine glass and told them it was partly
champagne and partly horse urine, would they take a sip?
(Uncle Phaed's UFO Investigator's Handbook)

I don't know anything about this Uncle Phaed, but that quote really gets to the heart of the problem when looking into the murky world of conspiracy theories which are tainted by disinformation. And for whatever reasons, these intelligence guys are pissing all over the place.

What Lies Beneath

From our last post, we have this comment from Dream's End reader Anonymous (who has written some fine erotica, I might add.)

Welcome back!

Can't wait to hear your take on Hunter S. Thompson... [ties to child molestation/snuff/porn ring which include elite political figureheads? Suicide or made-to-look-like-a suicide?]

...wrote some great books though...

Thanks, Anon. But you are spoiling it for everyone. I'm never going to see a movie with you.

Let's review. I started last time talking about my wife who has a condition called D.I.D. I didn't and won't say a whole lot more about her, because that's personal. She's well on her way to full functionality, I'm happy to say.

I mentioned that this condition is of interest to government spook types and that there is a long paper trail showing exactly that. I mentioned Colin Ross's book, Bluebird as a place to see some of this information. The book is fairly damning, but keep in mind that he only used information that had been declassified. Also keep in mind his weird need not to make the CIA look bad in his book. Not an easy job, that.

I didn't mention, but will now, the famous radiation experiments which were performed in the 40's through the 70's. These experiments involved exposing and injecting unknowing subjects with radiation just to see what would happen. The Department of Energy has a website about the experiments here.

These are relevant for two, no make that three reasons.

1. The experiments show that our government and various research universities were perfectly willing to experiment on unwilling and unknowing human subjects, including children. Nice.
2. Clearly, before the story broke about these experiments and hearings were held, anyone who had come out and said that the government had performed such experiments on them would have been given a Golden Ticket to their nearest asylum. This doesn't prove anything about other conspiracies, but does show that we should be at least somewhat cautious about dismissing such allegations.
   
3. In 1995 there were Congressional hearings on these experiments in which a small amount of time was given to some people claiming that they'd been victims of mind control experiments since they were children. The testimony was within these hearings because the victims alleged that some of the doctors prominent in the radiation experiments also figured in the mind control experiments. Here's a place to start if you'd like to read their testimony.

It's number 3 I'm going to talk about for a bit. First off, let's note that therapist Valerie Wolf says that when it was made known that she was going to testify about mind control experiments which some of her clients were victims of she was contacted by 40 other therapists with similar stories. Secondly, she claims that much of this information was remembered spontaneously or continuously without the aid of hypnosis, so all the recovered memory hoopla doesn't really apply.

Let's stop and take a breath. If you've never been exposed to this information before, you are likely to simply dismiss it. Look, the Congress actually held hearings back in the 70's on mind control research by the CIA under the code name MKULTRA. I don't believe they focused on the deliberate creation of multiple personalities but there's an awful lot of stuff that has been admitted to on the record such as use of hypnosis, sometimes accompanied by drugs such as LSD, surgical brain implants and other "brainwashing" techniques. This is all a matter of public record. We can't dispute that these things occurred.

Secondly, we have the radiation experiments to help us understand that the government was perfectly happy to experiment in destructive ways on children. This, too, is a matter of public record.

Now, we add to this testimony about abusive treatment, that is, the deliberate application of trauma to children in order to create useful "Manchurian candidates" trained to do the government's bidding without even being aware of their activities. This stuff has NOT been acknowledged by the government. We have testimony and we have documents showing the government's interest in the possibility of creating Manchurian candidates, but no document that says: on this date, we applied electric torture followed by hypnosis on this little girl who retained no memory of the ordeal. Naturally, if there were such documents, they would never see the light of day, but I simply want to differentiate proven facts from allegations which I find convincing but have not yet been substantiated by government records.

We also have the clinical information about D.I.D. That is to say, D.I.D. seems often, if not always, to be a result of trauma, most usually trauma induced by someone who has control over the victim, such as a parent. Sexual abuse is particularly likely to trigger dissociative responses. And this brings us to Hunter S. Thompson.

Recently, Hunter S. Thompson allegedly committed suicide via a handgun shot to the head. Thompson is most famous for founding the "Gonzo journalism" style and for books such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I'd always enjoyed his writings.

I saw his name mentioned in another context, however, and until recently I had completely dismissed this allegation. A week ago, however, I went to a bookstore, found Thompson's latest book and verified that a passage I'd seen quoted was indeed within that book. I'll get to that.

But first, you'll have to be aware of the Franklin Savings and Loan Scandal. It's way too big for me to get into details. I think it would be worth your time, however, to learn the details yourself. The best way would be to have a look at a documentary that was scheduled to air in 1994. Evidently, though I've not confirmed this, the documentary was actually listed in TV guide and was to be shown on the Discovery Channel. At the last second it was pulled and most copies were destroyed.

The Scandal went way beyond finances and involved a prominent Republican's ferrying of children from an orphanage to provide prostitution services to high powered political figures. Some of this had reached the light of day before, during the famous (but shortlived) Congressional call boy scandal in 1989. This went much further. I highly recommend you go here or here and download a copy of the documentary yourself to understand what we are dealing with. Go ahead and watch it and get back to me.

Done? Frightening, huh? I want you to keep in mind that there very well may be some disinformation games being played in all of this. John DeCamp, for example, the former Nebraska state congressman who was the main investigator, brags of his friendship with former CIA head William Colby who actually appears in the video. This does not make me feel warm and fuzzy, so do be cautious in accepting everything DeCamp says at face value.

Now, what's this to do with Hunter Thompson? Well, one of the victims of the Franklin scandal was a guy named Paul Bonnaci. He has stated that he was involved in a child snuff video which was actually "directed" by someone named Hunter Thompson. People had assumed this was the famous writer, but I hadn't seen that confirmed anywhere. You can read about this and about connections among Bonnaci, a young man named Johnny Gosch who was kidnapped in 1982 and the recent scandal of male prostitute/blogger/"reporter" Jeff Gannon at this site. This article was written in "Point Blank" a rather mainstream weekly. You could view it yourself on its site of origin, only they got shut down a week or so after this article appeared. Go figure.

This stuff is all over the internet, though as I mentioned you'll have to be careful in what you accept and what you dismiss. For example, one handy disinformation technique is to get someone involved in a legitimate case, such as the Franklin case, and then start putting out additional false information that discredits the information that is accurate. There could be some of that going on here, so just keep that in mind.

But be cautious in your use of the above caution as well...err, or something like that. I had assumed that Bonnaci's mention of Hunter Thompson was surely a case of disinformation. Why the hell would Thompson go about doing something so heinous and telling the kids his real name? Clearly this bit of information had been fed to Bonnaci in order to discredit other aspects of his testimony. At least, that's what I thought until I opened Thompson's last book and saw this:

The autumn months are never a calm time in America. . . . There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in the football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings. (from Hey, Rube, p. 3)

I suppose Thompson could have been playing around with those accusations, an inside joke, if you will. But they really weren't that widely known, so who would have gotten the joke? Anyway, a bullet in his brain will prevent us from asking him directly.


Let's review:

1. The government is willing and able to perform covert and harmful experiments on its citizens, including on children. The government itself established this fact in their hearings on radiation experiments.
2. The government has been and likely remains interested in techniques to control the thought processes of individuals for purposes of espionage and who knows what the hell else. This, too, is a fact, though the most horrific approaches involving deliberate application of trauma are not confirmed by government documents...only by testimony of alleged victims. If you don't think this is possible, by the way, I encourage you to review the case of Patty Hearst. What is the "Hearst syndrome" after all, but an abuse victim who blindly obeys her abuser?
3. I think it is clear that there is a network (how organized I can't say) of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, who service our political elites. In addition, it seems obvious that anyone who could control such prostitutes could also get plenty of blackmail material on those who participate.
   
4. The Franklin case shows us that kids in orphanages might be one source of child prostitutes (really, sex slaves is a better term as the kids don't get to keep the money) and the case of Johnny Gosch, while murky, suggests that other child prostitutes are likely kidnapped, as Thompsons suggests, right off the streets. Bonnaci himself claims to have been part of Gosch's abduction and further claims that he and Gosch were part of project Monarch...a project basically along the lines of Bluebird, specifically involving training and brainwashing children for lives of espionage and sexual servitude. Much of the information on Monarch that I've seen other than Bonnaci's comes from a source I don't trust, but in any event, we see how our two threads of child sexual slavery and government mind control games move in the same circles.
   
5. There is a widespread international trade in sex slaves. This New York Times articletalks in general terms about international sex slaves being brought into the United States. It doesn't confine itself to children but does, for whatever reason, confine itself only to female victims. In any event, it will surprise no one that the international sex slavery industry makes procuring victims a trivial matter. How hard is it to imagine that the folks behind both Bluebird type mind control experiments and CIA operatives looking to raise illegal cash and keep politicians on a short leash would take advantage of this lucrative business. And in the article, please do notice how one girl taught others to "float away" (i.e. dissociate) so that their treatment at the hands of the "johns" wouldn't hurt. Also please notice the errors mentioned at the end of the article. One of the errors was that they did not disclose that one of the interviewees had multiple personalities. They give a caveat about how multiple personality disorder leads to "false memories" though this particular woman's story seemed to check out. I would like to point out the obvious that even the False Memory Foundation never suggests that dissociative disorders CAUSE false memories...only that bad therapists implant these memories during hypnosis. They also interviewed an expert who helpfully explained that Multiple Personality Disorder is a common result of sexual abuse.
   
6. The connection of this sex trade to political elites and intelligence agencies is strongly suggested by this series of articles by Dave McGowan. He really pulls this together so you should take the time to read them. The links for the rest of the series are in blue boxes at the bottom. Read all of them.
   

I guess what I'm suggesting...and we are only scratching the surface here...is that the reality that underlies the political facade in this country and in much of the rest of the world is dark, corrupt and completely immune to "reform" movements. For example, and this is purely hypothetical you understand, let's suppose that Tony Blair likes to diddle little boys. Let's further suppose that someone in one of these shadowy networks either provided him an expendable sex slave, from Ukraine, say, and then took a few snapshots. Or perhaps he was provided with some boy programmed to service him via project Bluebird (or Monarch if it exists). Either way, he's totally at the mercy of whoever is calling the shots. I have to say that if Blair, whose support of Bush and the war strikes me as so counterproductive to his own image as to be pathological, doesn't get a REALLY cushy job on a board of directors for some oil company after he's done with politics then I will assume that this hypothetical has to be true. How else could you explain it?

Nothing I've written here will convince even someone on the fence about these issues, much less a sceptic. That's not the point...I can't do that blog style, at least not in one entry. But I want readers to begin their own search. You've got brains and the internet...now use them. Despite the con artists and disinformation specialists out there, the truth is not really that well hidden. We won't/can't know all the details, but you'll soon start to get the picture.

Here's a story I leave you with to show you the kinds of things to start looking for. It's not a pretty one, and I will print it here, but you can link to the orinal article here.

Italy investigating 186 over child torture site

Tue May 24, 2:10 PM ET

ROME (Reuters) - Italian police are investigating 186 people including three priests after uncovering an Internet pornography site for pedophiles that showed young children being tortured, an official said Tuesday.

Police said the anonymous web site had been protected by a password and was only accessible for nine days last year in an apparent effort to avoid detection.

But a tip-off to a child-abuse telephone helpline allowed computer experts to track down the users. Besides the Roman Catholic priests, police also believe a mayor, a teacher and a doctor downloaded illegal videos.

"The children on the films were aged between 4 and 8 at most. Some were abused, others were even tortured," said Domenico Di Somma, coordinator for the police computer investigation taskforce.

Police have confiscated computers across Italy, but have not yet pressed charges as they continue with their investigation.

The head of an Italian child protection organization said the case, which was centered on the Mediterranean island of Sicily, was just the tip of an iceberg.

"Dismay turns to uncontrollable rage when you are confronted by these images which not even the most hardened maker of horror films could bear to watch," Antonio Marziale of the Observatory of Child Rights was quoted as saying by Ansa news agency.

"Pedophilia has assumed emergency proportions and should be top of the government's agenda." (I would add that the torture of young children goes well beyond pedophilia.)

Now what do you want to bet that children who were abused by this ring are having this conversation with themselves right now: "My memory is hazy but in therapy I had this flashback of a man in a black robe torturing me. The FSFM says that these memories were all implanted by my therapist. Besides, things like that just don't happen."

Welcome Back!

Well, technically, I guess I'm welcoming myself back into the blogging business. First, some housekeeping. Blogspot has changed a few things. For example, they now allow comments. I was paying Squawkbox for this, but now I'm going to try the one included with this service. The old posts retain the old squawkbox code, even though I took that out of the html code in the template. I'll keep messing with the settings till it works.

Wow, that was an exciting first paragraph after such a long absence! I'll add one more...what the HELL is going on with this site? I have a hit counter at bottom. It is run by Microsoft, who took over bcentral. I can no longer access the account to get stats and I'd actually like a different one if anyone can suggest one. In any event, I have received FAR MORE HITS when I was NOT PUBLISHING anything than I ever did when I was actively writing. What are you folks trying to tell me?

So what happened to me? I've been caught up in my own affairs, though these affairs have interesting and disturbing political aspects to them as well (more on that anon). I've also felt rather burned out, as if there's really not much hope for changing the course of this train wreck of history we all seem to be riding together. I still feel that way, actually, but if there is hope, or even if there's not, we might as well be together for the ride.

Okley dokley, let's see if you can wrap your mind around all this. As old readers, and you five know who you are, will know, my wife was undergoing mysterious psychological difficulties. She's been hospitalized twice. When we finally figured out what was going on, and by "we" I mean she and I, as her own therapist didn't catch it, it was rather jarring.

The clue was when she admitted that she was hearing voices in her head and that these voices were adament she not disclose their existence to anyone. Some of them laughed at her and said mean things. You might have thought schizophrenia, but these internalized voices are more typical of another diagnosis: Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder.

You can read about it if you would like. One of my favorite sites is this one which is for significant others of those who have this condition.

And you couldn't pick a more controversial, politically charged condition to have. The basic idea is that childhood trauma causes some people to "dissociate". We all do it to an extent, such as while driving or just "zoning out". For some, the trauma is severe enough that these dissociative states take on their own "identity" and assume different functions separate from the main personality. These others are often called "alters" or "insiders".

Are these others "real"? Are they truly separate personalities? That issue will have to wait for another day, as I don't think you could get two psychologists to agree on exactly what constitutes an individual personality or whether such a thing as a unified self exists at all, much less multiple selves. So we won't ask that question for now. It's fascinating one, however.

Now, you know this is possible. Why? You've all seen sideshow hypnotists. In a hypnotic state, a person does or says some things that he or she can't remember upon waking. Perhaps the person has been given a post-hypnotic suggestion to act on some instructions they don't remember receiving when a signal is given. Think of dissociative states induced by trauma as similar to hypnotic trance, only with other dynamics at work.

Why is all this so darkly political? Several reasons. First is the debate over the idea of "recovered memories", memories of traumatic events that are repressed until recalled much later. Critics (and we'll get at who these critics are in a minute) suggest that this memory recovery is nonsense. Traumatic memories, they suggest, are remembered better than everyday events. "Recovered memories" in their view are planted or created during the therapy process, particularly when hypnosis is applied. These so-called memories are usually false and the people being accused of abuse based on these memories are the real victims.

Naturally, a few salient facts are overlooked in this criticism. One fact is that many of these recovered memories are recovered spontaneously, without the aid of hypnosis or even therapy. Either as part of the healing process or simply a result of a sensory "trigger" that brought forward the buried memory, people recover memories of earlier trauma all the time.

Secondly, while one can argue that hypnosis and dissociation are distinct phenomena, nevertheless one can point to hypnosis as an example of a process that allows memories to be created which can only be accessed under certain conditions.

Thirdly, there are studies that support this recovered memory process as being a real phenomenon. Here's a whole page of such studies.

In fact, the main force behind this "debunking" of recoverd memories is an organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. There are some rather disturbing folks involved in this foundation and I won't get into all of them here but I'll mention just one: Martin Orne. Orne was considered one of the leading authorities on hypnotism and as such was well aware that states of consciousness can be induced that can lead all kinds of information to be "hidden" from the conscious mind. Hey, wouldn't that be handy for government work? Sure would and Orne was involved with CIA research in project "Bluebird" in which the government was looking at creating "Manchurian Candidates" who could carry out missions of which their conscious minds remain ignorant. You can read about him in the book, Bluebird by Colin Ross. Dr. Ross is considered an authority on Dissociative Identity Disorder and used the freedom of information act to gather the information in the book. It's not well written, often more of a list than a narrative, and Ross has some weird need to constantly assert that he's not criticizing the CIA but merely the psychiatric community, but it's a starting point. You can read a summary of his book here.

Much of what Ross found with his FOIA requests had to do with using hypnotism to create these Manchurian Candidates. However, there are indications that the CIA was interested in full fledged multiple personalities and may have resorted to abuse in order to create such personalities in their "subjects."

Now, let me back up. We are almost certain that this is NOT what happened to my wife, but it shows the murky waters into which we wade. In any event, the evidence is clear that the CIA believed in and attempted to exploit this poorly understood aspect of human consciousness. It is curious, then, that Orne and others with similar connections, figure prominently in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Orne himself certainly knew such states were possible. To be fair, his classified work probably also indicated that people could be made to believe false things had happened. Hell, a sideshow hypnotist can make you remember "riding a chicken". So I don't discount the fact that false memories can be implanted.

But saying that false memories can be implanted is not the same thing as saying all recovered memories are false. This, however, is the logic that is employed by those in the FSMF.

I've oversimplified the debate, I suppose, but check out the links yourself. We have darker waters still to navigate. Waters so dark that I, as cynical as I am, didn't really credit their validity. That is, until Hunter S. Thompson died. And that, dear reader, will be the topic of my next posting.

Thanks for hanging in with me during this hiatus.