From MK-Ultra and Programmed Assassins to UFOs and January 6th: Escaping the Prison of False Memories

We suffer more in imagination than in reality 
—Seneca 

Anchored in the memory of many Americans, the story surrounding the events of January 6^th events has served as an “official” story continuously used to shape contemporary political discourse, despite very questionable on-the-ground footage which suggests agencies other than a citizen-led insurrection were deeply involved. 2021 footage sparked renewed questions concerning the role of intelligence operatives in manipulating government opposition groups and creating what would in conspiracy lingo be referred to as “false flags.”

On a higher level, questions regarding January 6^th center on the wider role played by Western intelligence agencies in crafting the narratives which shape popular opinion on all sides of the political spectrum. From stories about blood-thirsty dictators shelling innocent civilians justifying “R2P” humanitarian military interventions to enhanced surveillance programs enacted for the purposes of monitoring threats posed by “dissident political groups,” many of the most nefarious government-run policies have historically relied on the magic of narrative and imagery to win hearts and minds. 

However, none of this is new. From ancient Babylon and its “magician” priests of Marduk, the rhetoricians of Classical Greece and Rome to MK-Ultra social engineers and their “mind control” programs, the art of using language and imagery to shape the inner worlds of people is hardly a new phenomenon. 

In his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippman described this age-old practice as the art of shaping “the images inside the heads of human beings”: 

The pictures inside the heads of human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs and purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion, with capital letters. 

Describing who controlled this “Public Opinion,” Lippman wrote that it was controlled by a:  

Powerful, socially superior, successful, rich urban social set [which] is fundamentally international throughout the Western Hemisphere and in many ways, London is its center. It counts among its membership the most influential people in the world, containing as it does the diplomatic sets, high finance, the upper circles of the army and navy, some princes of the church, the great newspaper proprietors, their wives, mothers, and daughters who wield the scepter of invitation. It is at once a great circle of talk and a real social set. 

This brings us to the curious story and events surrounding January 6^th. Commemorating the scenes that transpired in the capitol one year earlier, President Joe Biden’s January 6^th 2022 speech contained the following remarks: 

The Bible tells us that we shall know the truth and the truth shall make us free. We shall know the truth. Close your eyes. Go back to that day. What do you see? Rioters rampaging, waving for the first time inside this Capitol, the confederate flag that symbolized the cause to destroy America, to rip us apart. Even during the Civil War, that never, ever happened. But it happened here in 2021. 

Rioters rampaging, waving for the first time inside this Capitol, the confederate flag that symbolized the cause to destroy America, to rip us apart. Even during the Civil War, that never, ever happened. But it happened here in 2021. 

What else do you see? A mob, breaking windows, kicking in doors, breaching the Capitol, American flags on poles being used as weapons as spears, fire extinguishers being thrown at the heads of police officers. A crowd that professes their love for law enforcement assaulted those police officers, dragged them, sprayed them, stomped on them. 

President Joe Biden—January 6^th, 2022 

Despite the appearance of a simple set of vague but violent platitudes, in the few brief sentences above we can identify the use of various Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and hypnotic induction techniques. They include “framing,” “priming,” “anchoring,” “binds,” “embedded commands” and “visualizations.” However, when it comes to addressing the population and public messaging campaigns across the “Five Eyes” web, the current example (which we’ll examine in a moment) is by no means an exception. 

Previous articles have explored how these techniques were applied throughout the pandemic and how they continue to be used to frame the climate crisis using what behavioral scientists call “automatic motivations” and “mental shortcuts.” However, the January 6^th speech offers an opportunity to revisit some of the particularly interesting efforts by 1960s MK-Ultra researchers to achieve one of the program’s most coveted goals: the creation of “false memories.” 

In his monumental 2019 book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, journalist Tom O’Neill recounts how the creation of false memories was considered one of MK-Ultra's most coveted goals by one of its top researchers, Dr. Louis “Jolly” West: 

[…] West reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. In a 1956 paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: He knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. Without detailing specific incidents, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.” He’d done it, he claimed, by administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.” (O’Neill, 363) 

O’Neill points to never-before-seen correspondences by West in which he celebrates having at least partially succeeded in the program’s goal of creating “false memories” during the 1950s-1960s period:  

Using hypnotic suggestion, he claimed, “a person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course of this year many changes have taken place... so that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that previously felt he should not discuss... An individual who insists he desires to do one thig will reveal that secretly he wishes just the opposite. (Ib., 364) 

Apparently, questions about installing false memories were especially of interest regarding how they might be used to create, among other things, “programmed assassins.” While O’Neill describes the destruction of most MK-Ultra files by former head of the CIA, Sydney Gottlieb (nicknamed “the Black Sorcerer), O’Neill writes: 

As for those sixteen thousand new pages, they were mainly financial records, but a few more tantalizing documents found the CIA explicating its ambitions. “Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and mental) of any individual, willing or unwilling... with a guarantee of amnesia?” they asked. “Can we force an individual to act against his own moral concepts?” And: “Can an individual... be made to perform an act of attempted assassination?” (Ib., 357) 

Finally, O’Neil observes: 

Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading to mocking headlines like the “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight.” Perhaps the agency wanted the world to assume that MK-Ultra was a bust, and to forget the whole thing. (Ib., 365)