Wayne Morris:
We are in week #9 of a radio series about mind control in Canada and the U.S., and today we're going to be hearing a lecture by some of the original writers about this topic. We're going to hear from Walter Bowart who wrote Operation Mind Control back in 1978, Dr. Alan Scheflin who wrote The Mind Manipulators also in 1978 based on the files that were released in the 1977 Kennedy Hearings in the U.S. We're also going to hear from Randy Noblitt who has written about cult ritual abuse. This lecture was recorded at a conference on cult abuse, trauma and dissociation Dallas, Texas in 1995. You're listening to CKLN 88.1 fm.
PAMELA PERSKIN:
Before we get started here I had a couple of remarks that I just would like to make. Everybody is here for their own purposes. Either you are survivors or you know survivors or you treat survivors or all of the above, and we hope that you'll gain something from your interacting both with our presenters and with one another. We believe that there is a diversity of opinion as to what is going on, what's happening. We should all be concerned that whatever is happening, it's producing people who are being damaged, and it's our responsibility as citizens and as human beings to reach out and try to stop this. I'd like to present our first speaker, Dr. Randy Noblitt. He is a clinical psychologist in private practice. He has developed a lot of expertise, somewhat against his will, in the area of ritual and cult abuse. He's the author of a book to be published in August entitled Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Antropology and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America. So, without further ado here's Dr. Noblitt.
(applause)
Randy Noblitt:
Actually, I'm not going to be a speaker right now, I'm just going to make a few comments and introduce the panel that we have today, which... I am in awe of the opportunity to stand up here with these gentlemen. I'm very happy that we've been able to attract such a profoundly skilled, well-known, courageous group of people to come here and talk. First of all, we have a gentleman that many of you, probably almost everyone here knows or has heard of. Some of you may have been fortunate enough to see or read his book, Operation Mind Control. I'd be interested in hearing more from Walter Bowart why I can't go to the store and buy a copy of it, and maybe he'll tell us all some more about that. But he has an organization called The Freedom Of Thought Foundation, and today, Walter Bowart, who is one of the eminent international experts on mind control, will speak to us a little bit on the subject of mind control. So, I introduce to you Walter Bowart.
(applause)
Walter Bowart:
Thank you, Randy. Thank you, Pam. I haven't seen Alan Scheflin in, what, twenty-five years, when we went over all of those C.I.A. documents in, what, 1977?
Alan Scheflin:
1976/1977.
Walter Bowart:
And I was looking at people registering and I said, I was thinking, "Is that Alan? {slight laugh} Is that Alan?," you know how you do when you're trying to meet somebody at the airport and you haven't seen them for years, but then immediately as soon as I saw him I recognized him again. I'm a journalist, and in 1978 I published a book, it was published in five languages, called Operation Mind Control, and I was paid full royalties for millions of copies, it was a best seller. I went on a national tour in the United States. I did ninety-eight radio and television interviews in thirty-three cities in thirty days. When I went through O'Hare Airport in Chicago, going out for two weeks, I saw racks and racks full of the book, and I came back two weeks later and there were none, but nobody seems to have that book. The book is now fetching $250 in used bookstores if you can find it, if it's in mint condition. If it's in tattered and torn dog-eared condition, that little $3 paperback is worth $20 today. I have since updated it and I have put out a thing that's actually two volumes, twice the size, and revised all of my errors, because I didn't know what multiple personality was in those days, really. I didn't diagnose anything, I just reported what had happened. And today doctors and psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists are using the book and saying, "That's a multiple personality," Candy Jones and all the others that I mentioned. Since then... By that time, in 1978 before the book came out, I'd interviewed three hundred survivors, and now I've interviewed thousands and I've lost count.
I've seen several patterns emerge, and one of them is the Satanic or cult ritual abuse pattern, and the other one's the alien abduction experience, and I'm talking later in the week on that subject and I have some very interesting charts and graphs that were developed by a psychologist who wishes to be, go anonymous, remain anonymous, and she and I have developed, added the mind control to the comparison of descriptions and reports from people that report alien abduction experiences, ritual abuse, and the government mind control side of things. And it's very interesting for the similarity, there are so many similarities it looks like one and the same thing, but it's worth discussing the differences and that's what I'll, what will be coming up.
I founded the Freedom Of Thought Foundation because I'm trying to network people who have known for now almost thirty years and who are duplicating their efforts, a lot of them, everybody's got a little group and everybody's goin' in their own direction and there hasn't been much communication nationally and internationally. For example, in Germany today the prevalent belief system in the wards, in the psychiatric wards in hospitals, is that there's no such thing as M.P.D., and probably that's the way they'd like to keep it. Probably for years here that was what gave the intelligence community the advantage, because these people, I think, were diagnosed primarily probably as schizophrenic or something in those days, or some kind of erratic diagnosis, which is happening today. You change the manual, the diagnostic manual, and you get different diagnoses, and if you change the manual enough you're gonna have ten or twelve different diagnoses for the same thing. I'm sure you've seen that. So, I formed the Freedom Of Thought Foundation for the purpose of networking, for the purpose of communicating this information, we publish a monthly newsletter, but to me, at least in my heart, the main ...the thing I kept running up against and I know maybe Alan did, too, and maybe all of you have, is the National Security Act Of 1947. It says in the interests of national security all of your civil rights can be suspended. Criminals can be let loose because they work for the Department Of Defense, and a lot of these people that have perpetrated the crimes that we've seen and the abuse, the sadistic abuse that we're describing here at this conference and the thing that we call mind control, have done that under the charter of The National Security Act Of 1947. The act covers probably more criminal behaviour than it does secrets at this time, there's no more cold war, so I think that the time has come for us to call for the abolition or the repeal of The National Security Act, and for us as citizens to take back our Bill Of Rights and our Constitution, (applause) thank you ... and also to hold a cold war crimes trial and prosecute the tyrants that have done this. (applause) Thank you. I feel the same way you do. March 15th last, Valerie Wolf testified before The President's Commission On Radiation, and through I think Randy and Mark I was fortunate enough to talk to her before, almost during and after the testimony. She took two survivors with her, one with amazing abilities that you very often find with re-integrated multiple personalities or multiple personalities that aren't re-integrated for that matter, an incredible eidetic memory, and she had dates and codes and times and names of the doctors, and they named six doctors, among them Martin T. Orne of The University Of Pennsylvania, somebody I've been trying to interview for thirty {slight laugh} years, and he's always run out. I almost got him on the golf course one time, but he's always run from me. Also, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the C.I.A. doctor, and Col. L. Wilson Green, U.S. Army Defense Intelligence, Chemical Warfare Division, Defense Intelligence Agency. These men and three others who, I didn't recognize their names, were among the doctors and professionals that were named in this. I said... I told a local doctor, a psychiatrist here one time talking on the phone, I said, " You know, you all, you psychiatrists created this mess, and it's gonna be up to you to clean it up," and he agreed with me, and then I said, well, then I'd give him a year or two and hold him to it, and if he doesn't get busy and do something about it I'm gonna add his name to the list, 'cause if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem as far as I'm concerned. You all know about the experimentation that was done on everyone. We are a nation of Guinea pigs since 1940, and the earliest mind control situation that I've run across in the modern context was the situation of a naval officer who apparently was working either behind enemy lines or... He was on a, one of the islands that were in Japanese territory, and so he got taken by the Japanese, captured by the Japanese, and he was tortured, but before that it seems as though he did some torturing himself. He knew a lot about the atrocities of war, so he had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and the Naval Intelligence people used their techniques that were being developed in MKUltra in those days to suppress his memories. He did not remember, and he died in the early '90's, or late '80's. He didn't remember a thing. He had a wife and children, he'd raised them, almost fifty years went by, everything was hunky-dory, he was blissfully oblivious, total amnesia, but then he started having cardiovascular accidents or strokes, and back came all these memories, and he died in terror, screaming the nightmares that he should have screamed back fifty years before. Now, that's a gruesome story, I hate to see a human being suffer, but there's hope in that story, because it means that memories cannot be suppressed, that all of the memories are going to come back, that there's some kind of an emulsion, like a film emulsion on the human soul that remembers things, and be that was it is. Also, the False Memory, I call it the Spindrome Foundation, {group laughter}} and I hope you'll start using that term because I think it is a spindrome and that it is not a syndrome. Look up the word syndrome and you will find that what they're talkin' about is not a syndrome it is a spindrome, especially since it was Martin T. Orne who founded the organization and came up with the board of directors -- very important. This is a Central Intelligence Agency action. It is an action aimed at the psychological and psychiatric and mental health community, to discredit you, to keep you in fear and terror, and you're an easy group to terrorize, I want to tell you. You've got a license that the government has issued, most of you. The therapists and social workers and others are freer, I think, and I think there's where the cutting edge is going to be, where you're going to find it. My friend who wishes to remain anonymous, a brilliant psychologist, told me, reminded me to not feel insecure about talking to you experienced hands in the fields of mental healing, because, she said, "These people need your input because every advance that has ever occurred in psychology has come about from somebody outside of the community, from a non-professional." So, a thing that I'd like to talk about, and I know that Mark Phillips is very well aware of this and Randy knows all about classical conditioning, and Mark calls it one thing, Randy calls it another, and I call it Neuro-Linguistics Programming because I learned it from the President's therapist, Tony Anthony Robbins, {slight laugh} and it was used in military and C.I.A. training and it is absolutely the Rosetta Stone for unlocking the human unconscious or subconscious or whatever you want to call it, the part where you're not conscious, and ninety percent of us are not conscious most of the time, you know. And so, there is a system by which you can wake up and take charge, and you can, though it sounds like a cliche, a new-age cliche, you can create your own reality, you must create your own reality, and there's nobody gonna do it but you, and we all must do it together. If you as therapists are finding that you've got a lot, your phones are ringing all the time and you've got patients all over you and you've got no time, the meaning of communication is the response you get, and I think maybe instead of teaching these people how to fish, you are feeding them fish, and now you've gotta start teaching them how to fish for themselves, and Neuro-Linguistics Programming is a very rapid and immediate, effective technique that you can adapt... It isn't... I don't... Anthony Robbins doesn't call it Neuro-Linguistics Programming. A guy named Richard Bandler who had associations with the C.I.A., worked with a guy named John Grinder who was more a family counsellor, most of you know this, but Bandler bragged to some of his students one time, "I'll bet I could commit murder and use this to get myself off." Several years later he was involved in a murder trial and he was, he was declared innocent, by a jury of his peers I'm told. And it was very interesting, and it's in the book Operation Mind Control, but the question comes up that since he boasted about it in the beginning, did he get away with exactly what he did? And every attorney needs to know Neuro-Linguistics Programming and probably a lot of them do. Robbins uses that guy with the cowboy hat from Wyoming, what's his name, Jerry Spence, as an example and modelled Jerry Spence. Modelling is... I'm sure all of you know about modelling and I'm sure some of you know N.L.P., too, as well, and call it what you will, it's Ericksonian technique, and I first learned some of it from my encounters with Milton Erickson when I was writing Operation Mind Control. Dr. Erickson was found in the files and he had, you know, the way it appeared he had used hypnosis to get a Japanese colonel to confess all of the secrets of state. He said no, he didn't do that, Margaret Meade told him that the Code Of Yushido said that if you touched these guys on the top of the head they had to commit suicide, "So I talked to this guy, there was a Marine with a rifle on him, he couldn't get anywhere, he was locked in a room, he could see the rifleman aiming at him through the windows, if he had done anything he would've been a dead man, and I said to the guy, "Okay, you're dead now, tell me the secrets", and the guy spilled the beans. So, that was what I learned from Erickson, that the context, the manipulation of the context is what we're talking about with all of these things. What we see as ritual abuse, mind control, or the alien abduction things, these are state-dependent things. These are dependent upon a state that's evoked and then anchored, and by collapsing the anchors you can loosen the state, jar it loose, and then deprogram people. We can go through the entire history. In '43 there was LSD. discovered by Hoffmann, in '47 the army conducted all kinds of hypnosis experiments, in '50 Richard Helms accompanied--he's the D.C.I. of C.I.A.--he accompanied two doctors to the U.S. Embassy annex in Japan, where four Japanese were interrogated under these new fledgling MKUltra techniques. That same year, in 1950 the Director Of Research Addiction at the research centre in Lexington, Kentucky, kept seven men on LSD for seventy-seven straight days, and then addicts were paid off in heroin if they took part in the drug experiments. In '51, McGill University's Donald Hebb -- and so on and so on and so on -- and it hasn't stopped yet. In 19... What is it here? I have the date. Just a year or so ago, 19... It was '94, I think, yes, October, 1994, the U.S. became a State Party to The Convention Against Torture And Other Cruel, Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment. The Senate had ratified it four years before it was signed, and I think that the delay was because they wanted to finish up on some of you--finish up their tortures. Now it's illegal by international treaty, whether or not we can enforce that remains to be seen. In order to enforce that we have to abolish, repeal... Just like our mom and dad repealed the Volstead Act and said, "Now we can drink a beer legally," we have to repeal The National Security Act.
Randy Noblitt:
Alan Scheflin, also, is a great honour to be on a dais with, and to introduce. Many of you probably have heard about his work. He's the author of, again one of the very early books in mind control, The Mind Manipulators, which came out in 1978, he's also the author of a more recent book, Trance on Trial, and he'll be speaking about the legal climate right now that has, that influences all of us regarding the concerns about false memories, the other legal aspects that seem to be coming around to plague those of us who are working in this area. So, without any further ado, it is a great honour to introduce to you all Alan Scheflin.
(applause)
Alan Scheflin:
Thank you. It's a great privilege to be here. As with Walter, I'm nostalgic about times past, when there were three of us and only three of us. John Marks, Walter, and I were working on books. We had the good fortune to collaborate together, so we were able to learn each other's stories and research and share them, and it was a very open spirit but there just were three of us. And the idea of a conference like this was unthinkable, the idea that we would have to keep doing this, I think, was unthinkable. I don't know whether Walter shares my naivete, but I thought in 1978, when The New York Times was running headlines about the C.I.A. mind control programmes, when our books were appearing, when we were doing media work all over the world, that we would finally get the story out, the vaults would be cleansed, the victims would learn their identities, the story would become part of history, and the people who had been injured could seek recompense. Instead, what happened was the great void. As soon as the story hit the paper it was yesterday's news, and we waited and waited for the Congressional hearings and we waited for the lists of people who were victims to be notified, and none of that happened, and for a long period of time consisting of all of the'80's and now almost half of the '90's, we waited to see the government do justice to the people that it had done experiments on unfairly and unfortunately. But that didn't happen, and so now we're gathered again to ask the government to release the files, to give us the information, and our need is great now than it was in 1978, because in 1978 we only had a little inkling of the story. Now we know that it's bigger and stranger and more difficult to grasp than we ever thought, we know that there are more victims than we conceived of, and we know that there was more pain involved than we could ever have imagined. So, on the plus side there are no longer three of us, there are many more. We must network, we must share, we must learn to investigate and produce good, solid data, and for the first time we have an enemy, which we did not have in 1977 and '76 and '75 when we began this research, and so we have to address the issues of the enemy. I'll turn to that in a moment, but I wanted to make a couple of points first. One is that the climate in those days was so much different than today. I remember working on the George White story... George White was a renegade C.I.A.and Bureau Of Narcotics agent who did some mind control experiments almost on a free-lance basis. He would try the drugs first and then give them to his friends. And so, I heard that the George White Papers were in a little college about twenty minutes away from where I teach, and I called up the college and asked if I could come by and look at the documents, and they said, "Sure," and I made an appointment for the following Tuesday, and about a day and a half later I get a call from the librarian, and God bless that librarian who said to me, "We've just learned that the Justice Department is issuing a subpoena to shut down everyone's access to this information. If you can get here right away we'll let you look through all of it." And so, before... In the presence of an armed guard who could have shot me if I had tried to take any of those documents or do anything with them, I was able to read through all of George White's diaries. These days we wouldn't even have access to the diaries. We wouldn't have access to a good deal of the information that we were able to stumble on quite naively then, because there was not an organized force against us. In this world, because of the false memory issue, it is important that you avoid legal liability, and given the nature of the material that we're talking about today, there are some hints I've got to give you and some tips that you should know to avoid liability, and here they are. In the first instance, it is almost impossible for therapists to be sued on third party liability theories, if the therapist does nothing other than work within the therapy session and not go outside it. Now, generally therapists can be sued by either patients or third parties. Third parties have no standing to sue therapists, and I argue ought not to have standing to sue therapists. If the false memory movement is successful in creating third party liability, and there is legislation now being proposed in half the states to do just that, it will put therapists in the position as follows. If you believe your patients the third parties will sue you, if you don't believe your patients the patients will sue you. That's a conflict of interest, and it's impermissible in any profession, yours as well as the legal profession, where we have a series of very well-worked-out rules to guard against conflict of interest. And so, for third party liability, do not leave the therapy session, and here's what I mean by do not leave the therapy session. You may be familiar with the Ramona case, it's been written about a great deal, involving the man in Napa who sued a therapist successfully, claiming that the therapist had implanted memories of child abuse in his daughter. He got a judgment for $475,000, and the false memory media machine said, "This is proof that these things happen and this is our first major court victory." Well, here's what happened in that case. The therapist's patient went in with an eating disorder complaint and came out with recollections of child abuse. The jury was given only one question in reference to the negligence of the therapist, and that question was, did they negligently implant memories? The jury felt that the therapists were negligent, but not that they had implanted memories, and so the jury did the only it could to reach a verdict it thought was just, because the judge had given improper instructions to them. The jury said, "Well, we'll find the therapists negligent, we'll just ignore the fact that the grounds that the verdict says are the implantation of memories." The therapists acted improperly in their therapy. They stressed the childhood sexual abuse issue as opposed to the eating disorder issue. They were not familiar with the literature. The initial therapist brought in a psychiatrist who used sodium amytal interviews improperly to anchor the memories, and then claimed that the sodium amytal works as a truth serum and therefore the memories must be true. All of that would still not have created liability, but the therapists went one step further. They asked the father to come to the hospital and see the daughter as part of the therapy. The father flew down to the hospital, and the daughter was coming out of the sodium amytal interview, accused her father, the therapist in a hallway filled with people said to the father, "You'd better confess. You'd better confess. You know you did it. It'll make everybody better if you confess." By having stepped out of the therapy session that way they triggered a bizarre case in California known as the Molian case. This case is so bizarre that the Supreme Court has tried to overrule it twice, but doesn't understand the case well enough to know how to overrule it. They said, "We would overrule it, but we don't know what we'd be overruling." The case, the Molian case, involves a simple fact pattern. Wife goes to a doctor, doctor says, "You have syphilis, go tell your husband and make sure he gets treatment," she goes back and tells him and sues him for divorce because if she had syphilis she must've gotten it from him, the family falls apart, it turns out the doctor's diagnosis was incorrect, and the husband now sues the doctor. The husband, of course, had never been a patient of the doctor. The Molian case held that the doctor, by telling the wife to tell her husband, created a direct duty owed to the husband, and thereby in a sense made the husband a patient, and it's on that, the basis of that case that third party liability rests in the Ramona case. Now, the Ramona case is touted as a big false memory victory. It cost the father one-and-a-half million dollars to bring the case to trial to get a verdict of four hundred and seventy-five dollars back. That may have been a moral victory, it certainly was not an economic victory, and on the moral victory side an interesting thing happened right after the verdict. The father went on television and said, "I have been vindicated. Everything I said about those therapists and implanting memories was true." The jury went on television and said, "No. It's not that way. We didn't believe the father. We knew he was a salesman." He worked for (inaud) {company's name} He had one of those unpleasant jobs somebody has to do, worked in a winery and made four hundred thousand dollars a year doing that. The father claimed that this was a victory for him. The jury said, "We didn't believe him. We don't know whether the therapists implanted memories or not. We didn't address that issue and we certainly don't believe him when he said he didn't do the acts.
We just found that the therapists had acted improperly and that the father had suffered as a result." If the therapists had not gone out of that therapy session there would have been no liability. So, to protect yourself from third party liability claims, make sure you have identified who the patient is. If you bring a third person into the therapy session, you can do so but use an informed consent form, and the informed consent form should say that, "You are coming in to assist in the therapy of the patient, name the patient, "You are not the patient, and by your appearance here the doctor is undertaking no duty and no responsibility to you." If the person will not come in under those circumstances, do not bring them in. That will protect you from third party liability. In terms of liability to patients, the problem is difficult, because a lot of the stories you're hearing are unbelievable, not unbelievable in the sense that they're physically impossible, but unbelievable in the sense that people do not want to know that these things happen, and they are willing to believe that these things do not happen. The false memory people, in what I call the false logic of false memory, commit an error of science when they lump together Multiple Personality Disorder, Satanic Cults, Mind Control Programming, Green Programming, etc., etc. It is important that all of those things be separated out. The DSM-IV as did some of its predecessors, entitles therapists to diagnose a condition of Multiple Personality Disorder, or now Dissociative Identity Disorder. You have the right to do that. It is a recognized psychiatric phenomenon, and though the false memory people may not like it, it empowers therapists to diagnose people as having that condition. And so, if you do so, the fact that you have used that diagnosis is not sufficient to make you legally liable. Even if you are wrong in a particular case as to whether a person is a multiple, that in and of itself will not necessarily make you liable to a patient as long as you have done your work conscientiously and you really believe that that was an appropriate diagnosis. It is very helpful to network with people to get second opinions, in other words, to diffuse the responsibility among other professionals, to show that you have done everything possible to make sure that the judgment that you passed on that patient was as clinically accurate and correct as it could be. In that context, when we move to Satanic Ritual Abuse, we do not find anything in the DSM - IV, and we do not find anything on mind control programming either, and so these are tougher grounds, they are harder to defend, and they are much more difficult to face in courts of law. How do you handle them? It is a general rule of therapy that you will do better as a therapist for your patient if you believe the patient or give the appearance of believing the patient.
A good deal of therapy, as all of the studies are showing, has to do with the relationship and not the theories used by the therapist. It is the relationship of trust and confidence and authenticity that is paramount in the healing process. And so, if a patient comes in and says, "I'm an egg plant," you should believe that that person is an egg plant for the purpose of sitting in that room, and you can give advice to stay out of kitchens, to stay away from knives, you are well within your rights to take whatever presenting conditions come in and work with it at that level. You get more from accepting what people tell you than you do by arguing that they must be crazy or they must be wrong -- and I think this is one of the essential points that's missed by the false memory people because they don't do clinical work, and their scientific board, for the most part, doesn't do clinical work either -- that no matter how strange the presenting ideas, you will do better clinically by working with them as if they are real than to try to resist them and talk your patients out of them. Now, as to whether you believe what they are telling you or not, that's up to you, and that's not something that should be the basis of a law suit against you, but how you work with a patient is a fiduciary responsibility. It requires you to act in the patient's best interest, which means to give the patient that sense of sincere belief even if you don't have it. Now, the unfortunate thing is that there are many crazy stories that we have heard that we've been able to validate. I'm thinking of the Jim Thornwell case in particular, where one day some lawyers in Oakland called me and said, "We've got some crazy guy here talking about mind control and shoot-outs with the French police and truth serums and hypnosis and whatever. We don't have any idea what he's talking about. Why don't you come over and see if you can make any sense out of it?" So, I went over there, and I spent a few hours with him, and he told me this incredible story about being in Orleans, France, and working in a NATO facility, there were some secret documents that were missing, and suspicion focused on him. They asked if they could hypnotize him, he said, "Yes," could they use a polygraph, "Yes," could they use a truth serum, "Yes." None of that showed him to be guilty, but the officers still decided that he must have been the one to have taken those documents, and so they staged a shoot-out with the French police. They're driving along, and the French police car pulls up, squeals to a halt, the doors open, the officers come out, start firing at the car in which Jim Thornwell is riding, and that car squeals away to get out of the gunfire. Then... That did not phase Thornwell, they could not get him to confess, because he said, "I'm innocent." They then told his fellow barracks members that he was having sexual relations with their wives, and so when they released him back to the barracks he wound up getting in a lot of fist fights. So, they kindly agreed to put him under protective custody for his own good, took him to a mill, and gave him LSD. Of course, he didn't know what LSD was at the time, almost nobody knew what it was at the time, and he said that he was sitting down, and the next thing he knew he was off in a corner baying like an animal, his head exploding into a thousand galaxies, and people saying to him, "Did you take the documents? Did you take the documents?" The experience was so destructive to him that he never did get to put his life together, and even after Congress through a special bill which is almost impossible to get, awarded him about a half a million dollars, he never got to enjoy that because he was found dead under mysterious circumstances shortly thereafter.
It turned out that everything that Jim Thornwell told me, and I have it all on tape, was accurate. As bizarre as the story may sound, we wrote to the Army, we got three thousand pages of documents, and one of them said, "We're not gonna court martial this man 'cause his memory is too good and we don't want this on the public record." And everything that he had told us was validated, we turned the story over to Sixty Minutes, they did it, and then CBS did a film based on his life. So, no matter how strange the story you hear, the patient is at least entitled to the presumption of some truth in it, and you must work with that some truth.
The false memory argument that I accept is that therapists have been unfamiliar with a literature on suggestion and social influence, and in fact are implanting the memories rather than recovering them. I've had enough experience testifying in courts to know that the false memory people have correctly identified a problem, a problem that could have been solved by now had they not been vicious in the way in which they sought their own solutions. But the false memory argument that therapists are implanting memories leads to a development that you need to know about, because I think it is the next step in therapy, and it's not inconsistent with what you've heard from the prior two speakers. There has never been a reason in your training why you should have to read police interrogation manuals, the brainwashing literature, the literature on suggestion, the literature on persuasion and social influence, but that time has now come. You are in essence being accused by the false memory people of not being familiar with the basic currency in which your profession traffics, and that is manipulating people. Interestingly enough, I accept the argument of the false memory people, but I reject their conclusion. The false memory people argue that therapy is in fact persuasion or manipulation, and that's what's wrong with it. I argue that's what's right with it, and that what we have to do is to recognize that yes, there is in the therapy setting, a relationship that is disproportionate in terms of power, in which one person is stronger and more knowledgeable, and another person is more dependent, and the job in that relationship is for the person who is more powerful to change by consent the person who is more dependent. The patient comes to you, and doesn't say, "I like the way I am. Let's just sit around and talk." The patient comes and says, "Change me," and the false memory people now want to sue you for doing it. I think they've missed the point. I think yes it is true that you have not been aware of the suggestion literature, and the social influence literature and the police interrogation literature, and that you will have to know that literature now because there's a new standard of care for practicing therapy emerging, and that the ultimate conclusion of what the false memory people are saying is to up the ante on the kind of training therapists will have to have, but that's simply gonna put on the table the one question that therapy has been avoiding all of this century, and that is the ethics of manipulating people, and with the recognition that you are in a social influence relationship when you are with a patient, then your job is to do it well and to use the techniques that are available to you not to hurt the patient and not to mind-control the patient, but to allow the patient to change usually outside of the conscious awareness of the patient, in a way that that change can be therapeutic. And to do that you must know the social influence literature, and so, for some people on the false memory board, they point a finger at you and they say, "You see, you're a mini-cult. The relationship between a therapist and a patient is like the relationship between a cult leader and a follower." And then they say, "Well, actually, you know, you're like a police officer doing an interrogation," 'cause the same principles apply in both settings -- both social influence settings -- and so they see you as mini-cults and mini-police interrogation stations, and accuse you of using techniques of social influence.
I argue that they are right to point out that these are social influence settings, but they cannot point to any setting which is not social influence-based. Any time two people interact with one another the laws of social influence apply, and your job is not to get rid of the social influence aspect of doing therapy, but rather to do it better and make sure you do it in ways which are consistent with your fiduciary responsibility to the patient. And in the long run, when the false memory people go away, what will happen is that you will have learned the laws of suggestion, the laws of police interrogation, all the things that we'll be talking about during the next couple of days, and that eventually it will be part of the basic training in therapy schools for people to be familiar with this literature. And in that sense we... I think an odd thing has happened. In the 1970's when we were working on our books, mind control was this demon, and the government had played with it and we were trying to rest those files from the government control. Really what we're trying to do is to tame mind control and to find ways for it to work for everybody's betterment, and if we can accomplish that, then we'll be twice blessed. We would have solved the problem we started in the '70's and we would have eliminated the unfair condemnation of the false memory movement. Thank you.
(applause)
Randy Noblitt:
I want to thank the speakers. I also have... Those of you that know me know that I'm gonna have two cents to add, so... Some of you may be wondering though at this point, "Okay. Mind control. What does it have to do with cults?" Since that word is associated with the topic for this conference, I wonder how many people out there think that there are groups, cults, whatever, where they practice let's say harmful, deviant, black magic, Satanism, not witchcraft in the sense of Wicca but dark arts so to speak. I wonder how many people think that. Now, some of you might be wondering, "What is the connection between cults, witchcraft, Satanism," and so on, and the mind control that you're going to be hearing a great deal about from the finest experts on that subject here. And that's an important point, and I'm hoping that if we accomplish one thing in this conference it is that we get a clear sense about what is the connection, because there is a connection. First of all, when you think about what people are calling Satanic Cults, many of you are aware that the false memory syndrome folks are arguing that this is entirely a fantasy concept, you know, it has no basis in reality, that people stay up too late and watch late-night T.V. or they go see a therapist who's fanatical, and I had such a patient. Actually, I've seen about two hundred. This is a garment that her false memories conjured up in her attic. I'm not sure how her false memories did it, but here it is. I'm gonna be talking a little bit more about this robe because it has an interesting story associated with it. It was brought to me by a patient who found it in her residence. She dissociated and was able to explain what it meant and what it was about, but in her waking normal state she was shocked and horrified that she foUnd this in her residence. In fact there's a part of the garment that she didn't even know what is was, and we'll be talking more about that later. It was found in a box with roses, dried roses, very old, and a newspaper that's twenty years old, that apparently was just used for packing purposes. So, it's amazing what these false memories can produce out of nothing. But anyway, we need to start thinking about what is the common thread that goes through all this, and actually there is a common thread, and it goes back even further historically than Satanism or what people call Satanism. I say that and I qualify that, because I don't believe that everybody who puts on a black robe is a Satanist. I think there are times that fraternities do stunts like that, and... In fact, I think our previous President, Bush, wasn't he a member of a group called the Skull and Bones, and I think they put on things like this. Of course, {slight laugh} that doesn't seem to disprove {laughter from audience} you all, but I'm trying, I'm trying my best. Anyway, {laughter from audience} maybe I should have taken a different {laughter from audience} kind of logic there. But actually, this is an old story, and it's a story of trauma, it's a story of slavery, it's a story of the complete annihilation of other human beings when you can get away with it. It's a very, very sad story and it has a long history. We can hear about that story and read about it in old documents such as The Bible. The Bible talks about children passing through the fire. It talks about horrible things happening. And... Of course many people may have just thought, "Well, that's kind of an interesting story," you know, "What does it mean?" What does it mean that Aztecs and other Meso-Americans would flay people on an altar and consume their heart? What does that... What is that all about? Well, my argument is, there's a thread that goes all through this, and if we want to go back in time we can go all the way back to the worship of nature, Shamanism, and so on. Trauma has always been viewed throughout history as a way of creating altered states of consciousness. Trauma...There are a variety of ways to create altered states of consciousness. Obviously you can meditate, you can do hypnosis, you can listen to drums pounding and they'll kind of carry you off and you'll drift a little bit, but nothing really exciting happens. Nothing very impressive happens. It's my belief that many, many years ago people learned that if you traumatize a person in a certain way you can create the god, the god that you worship, and so for that reason many early religions, many very old religions included trauma in their worship. In fact there's a book out, some of you may have seen it, it's called God Is a Trauma, and it's particularly about some of the gnostic, traumatic practices that went back into ancient times. We can carry this back even further than say the ancient times, the ancient Medieval times, back to, again, Shamanism. Now, it's hard to really understand Shamanism in detail now, the ancient version, because again, many of these practices are pre-literate. We have no way to know exactly what people did. We just see these examples, for example, in the Mayan temples, and we know that these buildings were probably used for these purposes, but it's a little easier to understand if we look into the Shamanistic practices of modern times. For example, I wonder how many people here are familiar with the Sun-Gazing dance or the Sun Dance as it's called. Some of you are. Okay. Well, this is still practiced in North America. Some of you may have seen the movie that came out some, I guess, twenty years ago, A Man Called Horse, and in the movie... I thought it was totally fictional, because I didn't think you could ever get anybody who would agree to be lifted up but with hooks stuck in their pectoral muscles. I didn't figure a big line would establish with people waiting to do that, but... And I assumed it was totally fictional, but as it turns out I was doing some reading on Shamanism and I read a modern-day account and I saw photographs of them doing the Sun Dance now--the Sun-Gazing Dance--and again, the idea's very simple, and I'll be talking about this more when I get into more programming in particular. To me this is where programming begins, where people perhaps learned accidentally that the use of trauma and other kinds of ritual acts can produce dissociative states, can produce dissociated identities.
That is, you can produce the deity, and many villages may have wanted to have their deity there, and it may have been a great honour for some child to go through these horrible procedures so that the village could have their deity right there with them. Well, through time these practices passed through some changes, but not a whole lot. Many of you are probably aware of the Mystery Cults that existed around in the Mediterranean during the ancient and up until the Medieval times. Many of these involved traumatic rituals as well, and so now we have people making allegations that some of the modern-day remnants of these Mystery Cults, that is, the fraternal organizations of modern times, engage in this kind of behavior as well. There are also many other pre-industrial cults. There's an excellent book by Oki, an African, Juju High Priest, who writes about the traumatic ordeals that were used in his West African community on people, and he describes the dissociation that also occurs there, so these things are happening now. Now, some of you may wonder though, "Okay. This makes sense, it's logical," and somewhere in there Satanism is a part, too. We hear so much about Satanism. Certainly there must be some... I mean, where's there's smoke, you know, there's gotta be something to that. So, where's the connection with the U.S. government and other governments and C.I.A. and Military Intelligence? I mean, doesn't this really sound awfully far-fetched? Well, we can go back to the Hellfire Clubs of England and Ireland in the 1700's, and we see a very clear connection there between governments, powerful members of governments, and bizarre occult or Satanic, whatever you want to call it, dark kinds of activities. As you all... As many of you probably know, Ben Franklin was a visitor of the Hell Fire Club in London or outside of London, and additionally the organization that was established in the outskirts of London was actually created by Sir Francis Dashwood, who shortly thereafter became the Chancellor Of The Exchequer Of Great Britain. In other words, he would be the equivalent of the Secretary Of The Treasury. We're talking about top level government. He was a close personal friend to George III. I mean, very high-level government type individual. And this was an individual who was carrying on in his residence bizarre practices that included blasphemous religious acts, bizarre sexual acts, and so on. Well, this is where we see a rather obvious beginning connection between government and bizarre occult and other kinds of procedures like that. Allister Crowley's another individual where we see a very clear connection between occultism, possibly Satanism, and governments. Crowley, of course, was involved with the British Intelligence as many of you know, and from then we have this marriage made in hell so to speak.
In any case, there is a clear connection between the use of trauma in a ritualized manner and the development of dissociated individuals, the individuals that are coming forth that we're seeing nowadays clinically, and hopefully... I'm hoping that in this particular conference we'll be able to show that connection, how it is, how it works, and hopefully give an opportunity for... We have many survivors who will be here telling their stories. We also will have some mothers who are protective mothers, who are doing their best to try to protect children in extremely abusive environments, and they're finding out that the government who was supposed to protect them is doing just the opposite, and we'll have time to talk about that as well. This is one of the great tragedies, is that something horrible is going on, but the people that we all should be able to trust to help us don't seem to be doing their job. And that is why it is my belief that we must have a citizens' movement to correct this terrible wrong. Now, you may wonder what good can people do, just individual people? Those of you who may be familiar with the history of the Mafia may know that the... Oh! Maybe I should ask. Do any of you believe the Mafia exists? {laughter from audience} There's one person over there. Okay. Did you know that there was a group that came out that said the Mafia did not exist? And in fact, they persuaded the Governor of New York at that time to become a member. They affected the production of The Godfather so that they took the word Mafia out. And in fact, I have to admit that for a long time I didn't know if there was such a thing as the Mafia, and I didn't use that word out of respect to Italian-Americans. I still do respect Italian-Americans, but I know that the Mafia does exist, because in 1989 the FBI did finally get a tape, an audio tape, of a Mafia initiation ceremony. Anyway, the false... I mean, not the false memory syndrome, not them but this organization trying to protect Italians eventually did succeed in convincing many people that the Mafia did not exist. In fact, it does exist. Well, the interesting thing though, I'm going about this in a very circuitous way, many of you know that the Mafia did not first start in New York. That was not really where it first got started. I think that there's an excellent parallel here between the Mafia and these various agencies of the government and individuals practicing these deviant acts, because the bottom line is that they're engaging in criminal behaviour, organized crime, it's a kind of organized crime, and we know that our government is capable of engaging in organized crime.
We're learning that more and more all the time. But the Mafia, since it did begin in New Orleans, it was first operative in New Orleans, was very successful, and there were some cases that came up where people complained and there were efforts to prosecute the Mafiosi, but they were entirely unsuccessful. Aren't you all amazed, that the government was unable, the local government was unable to effectively prosecute the Mafiosi in the late 1800's in New Orleans? This comes as a shock to many of you I understand. But the Mafia were essentially driven out of New Orleans, not entirely obviously, I don't think you can ever there now, but how was it done? It was done by a citizens' movement, by a grassroots group of people who decided they were not going to have this in their community any more, so it is my belief that if we truly want to see this kind of horror stopped, it is something that we as citizens, we as human beings, will have to make that commitment to, and I'm hoping that this, that our organization in part and you've heard about other organizations here that are looking toward that same goal, that as we join together as a whole we will be successful in this endeavour.
Wayne Morris:
We've been listening to a lecture by Dr. Randy Noblitt, Walter Bowart, and Dr. Alan Scheflin, and you've been listening to The International Connection here on CKLN, 88.1 FM. Stay tuned next week. We're going to feature the next two weeks a lecture about the history of mind control, what we know and what we don't, by Dr. Alan Scheflin. You're listening to 88.1.