Crapaganda.com

A 31-year-old UFO mystery was nothing more than a schoolboy science experiment, according to a man who has claimed responsibility for lights seen hovering in the Manawatu sky in the 1970s.

On a clear April evening in 1979 an orange light was spotted traveling in the night sky from Aokautere toward Hokowhitu.

Government documents released last week put this unexplained light down to a radar balloon “in the hands of people outside the meteorological service”.

These official X-files show the light was spotted early in the evening on April 20, while other orange lights were seen in the region six days later.

Malcolm McCrea was then a 16-year-old fifth form pupil at Awatapu College.

He said that at school, a science teacher would build hot air balloons from tissue paper, cardboard, wire and cotton wool.

Using heat from a Bunsen burner, the balloons would be released into the atmosphere.

About April or May 1979 those pupils decided the balloons would look better at night, so McCrea and his friends would release them into the atmosphere – powered by burning meths.

By stuffing different coloured tissue paper into them, the pupils could make a virtual kaleidoscope in the night sky, with the balloons ranging in size from a shoebox to a fridge.

The balloons would usually meander through the sky until an airstream caught them and made them rocket away – looking much like a silent alien aircraft speeding into the distance.

“We would often release several balloons at the same time, hence seeing something in a V-formation meant they were all caught in the same airstream,” McCrea said.

Oddly enough, one of the April 1979 sightings was of three lights traveling in such a formation. There were also plenty of other reports in the media about unexplained lights in the night sky.

“We thought it was very funny.”

McCrea, who now lives on the Kapiti Coast, said he released about eight or nine balloons himself – as did about 15 other people.

This likely explanation for Palmerston North’s 1979 sightings did not surprise New Zealand sceptics spokeswoman Vicki Hyde.

While most sceptics would not rule out the possibility of other life forms existing somewhere, most possible UFO sightings could be explained.

“The bulk of [sightings] are from sincere people who have seen something they can’t explain,” she said.

“You don’t have to be foolish to be fooled.” Ms Hyde encourages people who see unexplained objects to keep an open mind about what they’re looking at.

Another UFO sighting in Palmerston North happened in June 1972, when 17-year-old Jon Watson looked outside of his Crew Crescent flat and saw three silver objects flying 1000 feet overhead. “I got a fright at first,” he told the Manawatu Standard at the time.

“We followed the three spaceships with our eyes for about a quarter of an hour. They were following each other and were quite close together.”

Fourteen-year-old Freyberg High School pupil Gregory Key saw three “spinning silver objects” above Pahiatua on June 15 the same year.

Source: stuff.co.nz

The Argentine Air Force has created a commission to record and investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFO) in the South American country’s airspace, a spokesman told AFP Wednesday.

The Commission for the Investigation of Airspace Phenomenon “is in the process of being formed,” said Captain Mariano Mohaupt.

Officials said the air force already holds records of reported UFO sighting, but the interdisciplinary commission — involving meteorologists, air traffic controllers and civilian pilots alongside military authorities — would formalize the data keeping.

Other South American countries including neighboring Brazil and Uruguay and have previously moved to record alleged UFO sightings.

Argentine authorities urged military and civilian pilots as well as air traffic controllers to report their experiences and, if possible, to send any documenting evidence.

Source: Agence France Presse

In what may set a Delaware precedent, a Superior Court judge has gutted a criminal case against a Newark man who was pulled over with 10 pounds of marijuana because police used a GPS tracking device without a warrant to follow him for nearly a month.

In court papers, Deputy Attorney General Brian Robertson argued that information from a global positioning device that police attached to the car of Michael D. Holden was only a part of a larger “multifaceted” case against the 28-year-old by officers with the interagency Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force.

On the day in question, Feb. 24, police saw what they believed to be an exchange of cash for drugs in New Jersey — though they did not see cash or drugs, only bags. They called the Delaware River and Bay Authority Police to stop Holden’s car as it crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge. During that traffic stop, police recovered a duffel bag with 10 pounds of marijuana inside.

But defense attorney John P. Deckers countered that the 20-day-long use of a GPS device to track his client — weeks before police got a tip about the Feb. 24 exchange — amounted to an unreasonable search under the state constitution and violated his client’s privacy without probable cause.

While police have long been allowed — without a warrant — to follow suspects as they drive from place to place, Superior Court Judge Jan R. Jurden wrote earlier this month that using a GPS device is different.

“The advance of technology will continue ad infinitum,” she wrote. “An Orwellian state is now technologically feasible. Without adequate judicial preservation of privacy, there is nothing to protect our citizens from being tracked 24/7.”

Though police can follow a suspect in public, there are limits to how long officers can keep up the tail, whereas a GPS device never sleeps and “provides more information than one reasonably expects to be ‘exposed to the public,’ ” the judge wrote.

To get the same level of detail using only old-fashioned police surveillance techniques would require “millions of additional police officers and cameras on every street lamp,” Jurden wrote. And if no warrant is required for such surveillance, “any individual could be tracked indefinitely without suspicion of any crime. … No one should be subject to such scrutiny by police without probable cause,” she concluded.

And with that, Jurden ruled that the evidence of the duffel bag must be suppressed, forcing prosecutors to drop marijuana trafficking and possession charges against Holden that carried a minimum punishment of two years in prison and up to 20 years behind bars if he was convicted.

The judge made clear she was not prohibiting law enforcement from using GPS tracking, she was just requiring “a warrant be justified and issued” before the devices are used.

“This is a case of first impression in Delaware,” said Deckers. “I think the ruling reinforces our general right to privacy, and specifically, signals that Delawareans have a legitimate expectation that their every movement by automobile will not be remotely tracked and recorded by private parties or by law enforcement.”

There is a split among courts across the country looking at this same issue, according to experts, and Robertson said the Attorney General’s Office is considering appealing the ruling to the Delaware Supreme Court.

Widener University associate professor Wesley Oliver said Jurden’s ruling puts Delaware in line with many other state courts — including New York, Oregon and Massachusetts — that have found warrantless 24/7 tracking by police to be an infringement.

Without modern technology, Oliver said, it would be impossible for police to get the same level of detail about a suspect’s life and travels.

“So the opinion makes a lot of sense from a practical perspective,” he said, comparing it to wiretapping limits that were adopted in the 1930s after being unregulated for decades.

Without such restrictions, Oliver said, an incumbent candidate for sheriff could track an opponent with a GPS device — searching for visits to a strip club, mistress’ house or clinic — and be perfectly within the law.

But professor Laurie Levenson of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles expressed surprise at Jurden’s ruling, citing federal court decisions that have sided with police on the issue.

Levenson said the federal courts have followed the logic that if it is permissible for human surveillance without a warrant, it is permissible for GPS surveillance. “There is a different expectation of privacy in a car,” she said.

“If you want privacy,” Levenson said, according to federal rulings, “Go in your house and pull down the shades.”

Levenson said the U.S. Supreme Court also seems pointed in that direction, but she said Jurden’s ruling is not likely to end up there because Jurden — like other state court judges — ruled on protections contained in the state constitution.

And as Jurden wrote, “The Delaware Constitution affords greater protection than the United States Constitution” in this area.

Source: Delaware Online

RICHMOND, Va. — A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.

The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.

The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton’s surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.

The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.

‘‘He’s saying, ‘I can’t help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,’ ” Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. ‘‘It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was.’’

The bottle, less than 2 inches in length, had sat undisturbed at the museum since 1896. It was a gift from Capt. William A. Smith, of King George County, who served during the Vicksburg siege.

It was Wright who decided to investigate the contents of the strange little bottle containing a tightly wrapped note, a .38-caliber bullet and a white thread.

‘‘Just sort of a curiosity thing,’’ said Wright. ‘‘This notion of, do we have any idea what his message says?’’

The answer was no.

Wright asked a local art conservator, Scott Nolley, to examine the clear vial before she attempted to open it. He looked at the bottle under an electron microscope and discovered that salt had bonded the cork tightly to the bottle’s mouth. He put the bottle on a hotplate to expand the glass, used a scalpel to loosen the cork, then gently plucked it out with tweezers.

The sewing thread was looped around the 6 1/2-by-2 1/2-inch paper, which was folded to fit into the bottle. The rolled message was removed and taken to a paper conservator, who successfully unfurled the message.

But the coded message, which appears to be a random collection of letters, did not reveal itself immediately.

Eager to learn the meaning of the code, Wright took the message home for the weekend to decipher. She had no success.

A retired CIA code breaker, David Gaddy, was contacted, and he cracked the code in several weeks.

A Navy cryptologist independently confirmed Gaddy’s interpretation. Cmdr. John B. Hunter, an information warfare officer, said he deciphered the code over two weeks while on deployment aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific. A computer could have unscrambled the words in a fraction of the time.

‘‘To me, it was not that difficult,’’ he said. ‘‘I had fun with this and it took me longer than it should have.’’

The code is called the ‘‘Vigenere cipher,’’ a centuries-old encryption in which letters of the alphabet are shifted a set number of places so an ‘‘a’’ would become a ‘‘d’’ — essentially, creating words with different letter combinations.

The code was widely used by Southern forces during the Civil War, according to Civil War Times Illustrated.

The source of the message was likely Maj. Gen. John G. Walker, of the Texas Division, who had under his command William Smith, the donor of the bottle.

The full text of the message to Pemberton reads:

‘‘Gen’l Pemberton:

You can expect no help from this side of the river. Let Gen’l Johnston know, if possible, when you can attack the same point on the enemy’s lines. Inform me also and I will endeavor to make a diversion. I have sent some caps (explosive devices). I subjoin a despatch from General Johnston.’’

The last line, Wright said, seems to suggest a separate delivery to Pemberton would be the code to break the message.

‘‘The date of this message clearly indicates that this person has no idea that the city is about to be surrendered,’’ she said.

The Johnston mention in the dispatch is Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, whose 32,000 troops were encamped south of Vicksburg and prevented from assisting Pemberton by Grant’s 35,000 Union troops. Pemberton had held out hope that Johnston would eventually come to his aid.

The message was dispatched during an especially terrible time in Vicksburg. Grant was unsuccessful in defeating Pemberton’s troops on two occasions, so the Union commander instead decided to encircle the city and block the flow of supplies or support.

Many in the city resorted to eating cats, dogs and leather. Soup was made from wallpaper paste.

After a six-week siege, Pemberton relented. Vicksburg, so scarred by the experience, refused to celebrate July 4 for the next 80 years.

So what about the bullet in the bottom of the bottle?

Wright suspects the messenger was instructed to toss the bottle into the river if Union troops intercepted his passage. The weight of the bullet would have carried the corked bottle to the bottom, she said.

Source: Pueblo Chieftain

The following in the most complete list we could find of all of the casualties of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001.  As you go through the list of airplane passengers you will notice that the names of the alleged attackers are suspiciously missing.

The Pentagon

• Paul W. Ambrose
• Spc. Craig S. Amundson, Army Petty Office
• Melissa Rose Barnes, Navy
• Master Sgt. Max J. Beilke, Army, Retired
• Yeneneh Betru
• Petty Officer Kris Romeo Bishundat, Navy
• Carrie R. Blagburn
• Col. Canfield D. Boone, Army National Guard
• Mary Jane Booth
• Donna M. Bowen
• Allen P. Boyle
• Bernard C. Brown II
• Petty Officer Christopher L. Burford, Navy
• Capt. Charles F. Burlingame III, Naval Reserve, Retired
• Petty Officer Daniel M. Caballero, Navy
• Sgt. Jose O. Calderon-Olmedo, Army
• Suzanne M. Calley
• Angelene C. Carter
• Sharon A. Carver
• William E. Caswell
• Sgt. 1st Class John J. Chada, Army, Retired
• Rosa Maria Chapa
• David M. Charlebois
• Sara M. Clark
• Julian T. Cooper
• Asia S. Cottom
• Lt. Cmdr. Eric A. Cranford, Navy
• Ada M. Davis
• James D. Debeuneure
• Capt. Gerald F. DeConto, Navy
• Rodney Dickens
• Lt. Col. Jerry D. Dickerson, Army
• Eddie A. Dillard
• Petty Officer Johnnie Doctor Jr., Navy
• Capt. Robert E. Dolan Jr., Navy
• Cmdr. William H. Donovan, Navy
• Lt. Cmdr. Charles A. Droz III, Navy, Retired
• Cmdr. Patrick Dunn, Navy
• Petty Officer Edward T. Earhart, Navy
• Barbara G. Edwards
• Lt. Cmdr. Robert R. Elseth, Naval Reserve
• Charles S. Falkenberg
• Leslie A. Whittington
• Dana Falkenberg
• Zoe Falkenberg
• Petty Officer Jamie L. Fallon, Navy
• J. Joseph Ferguson
• Amelia V. Fields
• Gerald P. Fisher
• Darlene E. Flagg
• Rear Adm. Wilson F. Flagg, Naval Reserve, Retired
• Petty Officer Matthew M. Flocco, Navy
• Sandra N. Foster
• 1st Lt. Richard P. Gabriel, Marine Corps, Retired
• Capt. Lawrence D. Getzfred, Navy
• Cortez Ghee
• Brenda C. Gibson
• Col. Ronald F. Golinski, Army, Retired
• Ian J. Gray
• Diane Hale-McKinzy
• Stanley R. Hall
• Carolyn B. Halmon
• Michele M. Heidenberger
• Sheila M.S. Hein
• Petty Officer Ronald J. Hemenway, Navy
• Maj. Wallace Cole Hogan Jr., Army
• Staff Sgt. Jimmie I. Holley, Army, Retired
• Angela M. Houtz
• Brady Kay Howell
• Peggie M. Hurt
• Lt. Col. Stephen N. Hyland Jr., Army
• Lt. Col. Robert J. Hymel, Air Force, Retired
• Sgt. Maj. Lacey B. Ivory, Army
• Bryan C. Jack
• Steven D. Jacoby
• Lt. Col. Dennis M. Johnson, Army
• Judith L. Jones
• Ann C. Judge
• Brenda Kegler
• Chandler R. Keller
• Yvonne E. Kennedy
• Norma Cruz Khan
• Karen Ann Kincaid
• Lt. Michael S. Lamana, Navy
• David W. Laychak
• Dong Chul Lee
• Jennifer Lewis
• Kenneth E. Lewis
• Samantha L. Lightbourn-Allen
• Maj. Stephen V. Long, Army
• James T. Lynch Jr.
• Terence M. Lynch
• Petty Officer Nehamon Lyons IV, Navy
• Shelley A. Marshall
• Teresa M. Martin
• Ada L. Mason-Acker
• Lt. Col. Dean E. Mattson, Army
• Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, Army
• Robert J. Maxwell
• Renée A. May
• Molly L. McKenzie
• Dora Marie Menchaca
• Patricia E. Mickley
• Maj. Ronald D. Milam, Army
• Gerard P. Moran Jr.
• Odessa V. Morris
• Petty Officer Brian A. Moss, Navy
• Teddington H. Moy
• Lt. Cmdr. Patrick J. Murphy, Naval Reserve
• Christopher C. Newton
• Khang Ngoc Nguyen
• Petty Officer Michael A. Noeth, Navy
• Barbara K. Olson
• Ruben S. Ornedo
• Diana B. Padro
• Lt. Jonas M. Panik, Naval Reserve
• Maj. Clifford L. Patterson Jr., Army
• Robert Penninger
• Robert R. Ploger III
• Zandra F. Ploger
• Lt. Darin H. Pontell, Naval Reserve
• Scott Powell
• Capt. Jack D. Punches, Navy, Retired
• Petty Officer Joseph J. Pycior Jr., Navy
• Lisa J. Raines
• Deborah A. Ramsaur
• Rhonda Sue Rasmussen
• Petty Officer Marsha D. Ratchford, Navy
• Martha M. Reszke
• Todd H. Reuben
• Cecelia E. (Lawson) Richard
• Edward V. Rowenhorst
• Judy Rowlett
• Sgt. Maj. Robert E. Russell, Army, Retired
• Chief Warrant Officer William R. Ruth, Army National Guard
• Charles E. Sabin Sr.
• Marjorie C. Salamone
• John P. Sammartino
• Col. David M. Scales, Army
• Cmdr. Robert A. Schlegel, Navy
• Janice M. Scott
• Lt. Col. Michael L. Selves, Army, Retired
• Marian H. Serva
• Cmdr. Dan F. Shanower, Navy
• Antionette M. Sherman
• Diane M. Simmons
• George W. Simmons
• Donald D. Simmons
• Cheryle D. Sincock
• Petty Officer Gregg H. Smallwood, Navy
• Lt. Col. Gary F. Smith, Army, Retired
• Mari-Rae Sopper
• Robert Speisman
• Patricia J. Statz
• Edna L. Stephens
• Norma Lang Steuerle
• Sgt. Maj. Larry L. Strickland, Army
• Hilda E. Taylor
• Lt. Col. Kip P. Taylor, Army
• Leonard E. Taylor
• Sandra C. Taylor
• Sandra D. Teague
• Lt. Col. Karl W. Teepe, Army, Retired
• Sgt. Tamara C. Thurman, Army
• Lt. Cmdr. Otis V. Tolbert, Navy
• Staff Sgt. Willie Q. Troy, Army, Retired
• Lt. Cmdr. Ronald J. Vauk, Naval Reserve
• Lt. Col. Karen J. Wagner, Army
• Meta L. (Fuller) Waller
• Spc. Chin Sun Pak Wells, Army
• Staff Sgt. Maudlyn A. White, Army
• Sandra L. White
• Ernest M. Willcher
• Lt. Cmdr. David L. Williams, Navy
• Maj. Dwayne Williams, Army
• Chief Petty Officer Marvin Roger Woods, Navy, Retired
• Capt. John D. Yamnicky Sr., Navy, Retired
• Vicki Yancey
• Petty Officer Kevin W. Yokum, Navy
• Chief Petty Officer Donald M. Young, Navy
• Edmond G. Young Jr.
• Lisa L. Young
• Shuyin Yang
• Yuguang Zheng

World Trade Center

• Gordon M. Aamoth Jr.
• Edelmiro Abad
• Maria Rose Abad
• Andrew Anthony Abate
• Vincent Abate Read more »

As airport security becomes more of a concern during the holiday travel season, travelers will be seeing delays of all sorts. But an hour-long delay for Lafayette Regional Airport users Tuesday morning was of a nature most fowl.

The airport was briefly shut down as authorities investigated a suspicious package that turned out to contain a frozen chicken and a head lamp, said Lt. Craig Stansbury, spokesman for the Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office.

Police were called to the airport around 10:48 a.m. Tuesday after a TSA employee saw the package run through the screening process.

According to Stansbury, the outline of the wires from the head-mounted mining light overlapped another image, that of the chicken, during the screening.

The combination made for an odd and not readily identifiable image, so the employee notified other security personnel.

The terminal was evacuated while the package was examined.

Stansbury said bomb dogs and other resources were used to make sure the package did not contain anything dangerous.

The wires coming from the lamp made the chicken look particularly suspicious, he said.

According to authorities, the chicken was reportedly stuffed with crawfish as well,

The all-clear was given around 11:45 a.m., and airport operations resumed as usual.

Source: The Advertiser

The Air Force has released thousands of top secret papers about UFOs.

More than 2000 pages of material dating back to the 1950s documents files of correspondence on apparent sightings from 1952 to 2009.

Communications about sightings began in 1952 when they were described as UFOs – unidentified flying objects. Later they were called UAS – unidentified aerial sightings.

The files contain reports by sightings of private individuals and military personnel; investigations by Defence and other departments and agencies into the reports; newspaper clippings on UFOs and letters from individuals who claim to be in touch with alien beings and craft.

The redacted files include communications about New Zealand’s most famous UFO footage – filmed 32 years ago – of mysterious lights near the Kaikoura Coast filmed by a TVNZ camera crew.

“It sort of hovered along the treeline, then darted sharply up and to the left,” Lloyd McFadden said.

Papers show that investigators believe a squid boat, atmospheric conditions and a possible meteor could have been behind the lights.

But UFO sighting researcher Suzanne Hansen said the lights were obviously not Venus, a squid boat or muttonbirds flying south.

“It is obviously something else we can’t explain,” Hansen told ONE News.

“We don’t know what it is, but it is certainly something that is unidentified and non-conventional.”

The complete Air Force investigation into the mystery is just one of the files among letters, theories, reports and drawings about UFOs.

The papers have been held by Archives New Zealand, which was set to make them available in February this year after requests from the public. They were originally supposed to be held until 2080.

The Defence Force said it needed to remove personal identification from the files in order to comply with the Privacy Act, and has now done that, deleting all names of military personnel.

Much of the 12 volumes contains correspondence of a fairly outlandish nature but there is also a 1961 sighting from a respected Air Force officer who insists he saw a mysterious cigar-shaped object, with what appeared to be a cockpit and undercarriage – a sighting that baffled him and his superiors.

Hansen, who has been investigating UFOs for more than 35 years, has been campaigning for the documents’ release after witnessing numerous “sightings” in her life. She said the move is a step toward openness on the topic.

Hansen said her first sighting was when she was eight and it was also observed by hundreds of people in South Auckland and down through Waikato.

She said the most striking sighting for her was in 1995, and this was also witnessed by a senior air traffic controller at Hamilton Airport. There were a number of sightings of “this unusual light and object” in that time period, she said.

Hansen has not yet seen the Defence files but hopes they will reveal more information on major sightings around New Zealand, especially Air Force reports from pilots and military sightings that have occurred.

She said the body of evidence worldwide from aviation, pilots, the military, astronauts and scientists confirm the reality of this phenomenon.

“It is sufficient to make us realise there is something going on that the public needs to look into more deeply and we need to try to understand,” said Hansen.

Defence does not share the view that we are visited from outer space, or covertly by aircraft or machines of potentially unfriendly nations.

But as far as believers are concerned, the truth about whether this country has been visited by aliens is still out there.

Source: TVNZ

By David Kacynski

Was my brother, Ted Kaczynski (AKA “the Unabomber”), a sort of “Manchurian candidate” – programmed to kill by our government in a CIA-funded thought-control experiment gone awry?

I hope you will excuse the provocative question – especially since I don’t know the answer to it.

What I do know is that my brother was a guinea pig in an unethical and psychologically damaging research project conducted at Harvard University where he attended college in the early 1960′s. While it is true that my brother suffers from paranoia, it is also true that he fell victim to a conspiracy of psychological researchers who used deceptive tactics to study the effects of emotional and psychological trauma on unwitting human subjects. My brother was harmed by psychologists who recognized – at least tangentially – that they were hurting him yet who made no attempt to undo or ameliorate the harm they’d caused to their young and vulnerable subject. Thus, it would be fair to say that my brother’s paranoia had a reference point in reality.

Fifteen years after his experience at Harvard, Ted Kaczynski embarked on a mail bomb campaign that targeted leading researchers in technology, behavioral psychologists among them. Is there a connection between my brother’s violent behavior and his earlier experience as a guinea pig at Harvard? It seems there must be some connection. But how much connection? And what role might the US government have played in unleashing the Unabomber’s anti-social behavior?

After the revelation of Nazi atrocities following World War II, the civilized world struggled to absorb the lessons of such overwhelming horror. “Never again!” became a catch phrase that summed up civilization’s moral resolve to prevent a recurrence of organized dehumanization on such a grand scale. Moreover, the post-war Nuremberg trials revealed the extent to which Germany’s scientific establishment had lent itself to the Nazi agenda through cruel, harmful, and often lethal experiments performed on unwitting or unwilling human subjects. From the Nuremberg revelations emerged the so-called Nuremberg Code – an ethical standard that limited scientific research on human subjects, requiring that research participants provide “informed consent” to researchers before they could be studied at all.

However, it is by no means clear that the “mad” Nazi scientists represented a purely negative example to all. Some Nazi scientists deemed highly useful in our post-war competition with the Soviet Union were readily absorbed into what President Eisenhower later called “the military-industrial complex.” Pressures of the cold war insinuated top-secret government agendas into civilian universities through the funding of various clandestine projects, including research on human subjects. In 1967, according to the CIA’s internal assessment, there were literally hundreds of college professors on more than 100 American college campuses under secret contract to the CIA. Needless to say, universities like Harvard that wanted a piece of the action decided to dispense with the ethical standard embedded in the Nuremberg Code. From 1953 to 1963, federal support for scientific research at Harvard increased from $8 million per year to $30 million.

One secret CIA research project that used unwitting American citizens as subjects was code-named MK Ultra. It lasted 10 years and ended in 1963, shortly after Ted graduated from Harvard. MK Ultra experiments used sensory deprivation, sleep learning, subliminal projection, electronic brain stimulation, and hallucinogenic drugs to study various applications for behavior modification. One project was designed to see if subjects could be programmed to kill on demand. Experiments were conducted in penal institutions, mental institutions, and on university campuses. Some hapless human subjects went crazy, and some are known to have committed suicide.

When the media began to catch wind of a program of secret government experimentation on American citizens, former CIA director Richard Helms ordered many records pertaining to MK Ultra destroyed. Thus, the full scope of the program and its abuses may never be known.

The Harvard study my brother participated in was called “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.” It was overseen by the noted psychologist Henry Murray, who during WWII worked for the OSS (which later became the CIA), where he developed methodologies for interrogating prisoners of war. In his professional life, Murray was known for his brilliance and his grandiosity. In his personal life, according to his biographer, he displayed sadistic tendencies. His research on college men bears a certain resemblance to his research on prisoners of war. He was quite a big wheel in his day, perhaps as well known and influential in military and government circles as he was in academia.

Were the so-called “Murray experiments” part of MK Ultra? It may be that no one living knows the answer to this question. We know that the experiments were highly unpleasant for my brother and for some others who participated. We know that the basic premise of the research was to study how bright college students would react to aggressive and highly stressful attacks on their beliefs and values.

It may seem that I am trying to provide my brother with a handy excuse – a deflection of blame – for having killed three people and devastated numerous lives. But that is not my point. I believe that we are both individually responsible for our actions, and collectively responsible for conditions of harm and injustice that exist in our world. My brother was a victim before he victimized others – and in this he is hardly unique. Those who victimized him exercised cruelty with impunity, and quite possibly with the best of intentions. Status and power are hardly guarantees of good judgment or good character. Thus, the lessons we must learn are complex. The search for one quintessential villain is generally a mistake, a displacement of both understanding and responsibility.

What was done to my brother at Harvard should never be allowed to happen again. Our best insurance against inflicting harm on others – as was done to Ted and by Ted – is to avoid objectifying human beings, and to approach others with compassion.

Watch Snowshoe Films‘ Conspired Against

Source: TimesUnion.com