- Started during WWII with research on hypnosis for interrogation, secure courier duties, and reducing fatigue. Also research into effects of primitive drugs like barbiturates and cannabis as far as drug-assisted interrogation goes.
- George Estabrooks was the leading proponent of hypnosis as the be-all and end-all of manipulating peoples minds. His book, 'Hypnotism', published in the early forties, has been decried as too fantastic and improbable in terms of describing the capabilities of hypnosis with certain very suggestible subjects, but his arguments and examples remain valid to this day.
Estabrooks admitted in 1971 to creating hypnotic couriers and programmed multiple personalities for Military Intelligence purposes in this 1971 Science Digest article. MUST READ!!
- Start of Cold War and Korean War in particular gave a big boost to mind control research with the emergence of 'Brain Washing' as a common term. Supposedly a development of the dastardly Chi-Coms, the term was actually coined by a magazine writer later found to be on the CIA payroll as an agent of influence. Postulating a 'brainwashing gap' The CIA got the go-ahead for research into countering communist mind control efforts and developing their own to aid in the espionage wars.
- Hypnosis, drugs, and psycho-surgery; separately and combined, were the tools of this quest for the ultimate truth serum on the one hand, and the capability to create an agent who could not have his or her mission tortured out of them, or even be aware that they were carrying secret information given to them in an altered state of consciousness. More and more sophisticated drugs were experimented with, such as LSD, Ketamine, and Psilocybine. Lobotomy and the implantation of electrodes were considered as methods for creating a compliant agent. Electro-Convulsive Shock, combined with LSD, sedation for days at a time, and constantly replaying the patient’s own voice through helmet-mounted headphones was a notorious Canadian researcher’s recipe for mind control.
- One of the most remarkable cases of mind control involves a famous model of the late 40's and 50's named Candy Jones. In the book, "The Control of Candy Jones" the author reviewed hours of tapes made by Candy Jones and her husband which revealed a systematic program to create and manipulate alter personalities as the foundation for programmed couriers resistant to torture, where the primary personality would not even be aware of the secret information being carried. The information could be summoned forth via a post-hypnotic command or response to a pre-programmed cue.
- Research continued into early 70's by CIA's own admission during the Church hearings. John Marks, author of the best study of CIA mind control experiments, makes the subtle differentiation that the CIA congressional witnesses might truthfully say that all research done by the TSS Directorate had ended, since the programs were moved into other areas once operational techniques had been developed. Many of the names mentioned in reference to mind control research turn up in the few references to supposed dead-end research in ESP.
- There have been persistent rumors of Navy research involving attempts at telepathy from submarines under water, the Nautilus being the most famous of these. Detection of enemy submarines, and communicating with our own, has continued to be an important area of conventional research for the Navy, so it is no surprise that researching the use of ESP for these purposes would be of interest. Communicating with a submerged submarine is the only kind of communications where the very act of receiving puts the receiver in danger, since submarines must normally stick an antenna out of the water for high speed radio traffic, or rely on trailing a long wire antenna under water relatively near the surface to receive very slow speed traffic using ELF radio waves. Newer techniques may involve the use of blue-green wavelength lasers, but evidently penetration to any depth is still a problem.
If you look at telepathy as a problem in the transfer of information in a very noisy environment, then certain existing solutions suggest themselves: There have already been experiments in the transmission of five distinct symbols via telepathy, namely Zener card symbols. I suggest that there is already a way of transmitting information using two symbols only, namely Morse Code. Current ELF or VLF radio transmission methods for communicating with fleet ballistic missle submarines to issue them their launch orders involve very low data transfer rates, on the order of 3 to 30 bits per minute, if I am not mistaken. Messages are very short, consisting of pre-formulated action or targeting codes. I suggest that telepathic 'Zener Morse' is an operational technique for information transfer under severe signal to noise conditions. In fact the use of five Zener symbols would increase data transfer rates, but at the expense of a higher error rate due to the problems in discriminating between five and just two symbols.