A few years ago, an April Fool’s piece in the Daily Mail referred to “the U.S. Military’s supposed research into using microwaves as a mind control weapon”. For many people, however, the subject is no joke. Machines designed to tamper with a victim’s thoughts are, according to those who know about such things, employed on a routine basis by governments and other agencies. What few people realize, however, is that reports of such devices have a long history that stretches back more than two hundred years.

Until relatively recently, belief in mind control machines was automatically assumed to be a sign of madness. The first detailed study of the subject was an article entitled “On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia”, written by the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk in 1919. From a study of various psychiatric patients, Tausk concluded that a relatively common form of delusion involved what he referred to as an “influencing machine” (or in the original German, Beeinflussungs-apparat): a device that “produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient’s knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain”.

If such beliefs are symptomatic of mental illness, then according to Mike Jay “Patient Zero” was an English businessman named James Tilly Matthews. In 1797, after accusing the government of treasonous conspiracy, Matthews was incarcerated in the Bedlam lunatic asylum in London. It was there that he developed his theory of the “Air Loom” – the progenitor of all future influencing machines and mind control devices. To quote from Jay’s article:

Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. They were using a machine called an Air Loom, of which Matthews was able to draw intimate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. […] Its discharges of magnetic fluid were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews’ brain. […] To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet into his head. As a result of the Air Loom, Matthews was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head.

The Air Loom

In an article about the Air Loom in the May 2003 issue of Fortean Times, Mark Pilkington described how subsequent delusions evolved to keep pace with the latest developments in science: “patients were quick to grasp new technologies in their attempts to rationalize what was happening to them”. In 1886, soon after the invention of the telephone, one doctor observed that his patients would now complain “that people use these instruments to torment them”. In 1897, the Swedish author August Strindberg wrote in his autobiography that “the idea that I was being persecuted by enemies who employed electricity began to obsess me”. By the time Tausk came to write his famous paper in 1919, the situation had evolved still further:

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavour to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvellous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

Despite their technical sophistication, the mind control devices – from the days of the Air Loom to the early 20th century – were always the work of human beings. Sometimes the shadowy operators were members of a criminal gang, in other cases they were agents of the government – but no-one imagined they were anything but human. Then Richard Shaver came onto the scene, and everything changed.

On the face of it, Shaver was a science fiction writer. The bulk of his output was published in Amazing Stories magazine, under the editorship of Ray Palmer, between 1945 and 1949. But Shaver maintained that his writings were based on the truth, and Palmer went along with this – presenting the stories in the guise of a neo-fortean “Shaver Mystery”. Central to the Shaver Mystery was the idea of a vast, unknown subterranean world populated by ancient, degenerate creatures known as “deros”. According to David Hatcher Childress, writing in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth:

The deros have special beam weapon rays that they use to create as much trouble with the outside world as possible. The dero secretly foster wars, crimes and disasters while working among surface people or using their “controlling rays”. These rays can create solid-looking illusions, nightmares, hypnotic compulsions and urges to commit a crime.

This is remarkably close to the widespread belief in clandestine government activities that can be found on the web today – not just mind control on an industrial scale, but the deliberate creation of wars and “natural” disasters.

So was Shaver telling the truth? Many people will have difficulty with the concept of subterranean deros… but if he had talked about aliens, or an alliance between aliens and the government, his ideas would still meet with approval in many quarters today. This begs the question: were Shaver’s deros really aliens who created the illusion of a vast underground world in his mind?

And that brings us up against the Catch-22 of mind control. If Shaver was lying, or deluded, then of course we can’t believe a word he said. But if he was telling the truth – and he really was the victim of systematic mind control – then… well, we still can’t believe a word he said, can we?

Dero, from Amazing Stories June 1947

Andrew May

Mind control history channel

We all want to be a little smarter, a little more effective and skilled.  Some people exercise and take vitamins, some people do jigsaw puzzles, and some of our Silicon Valley overlords micro-dose themselves with LSD every morning.  Now an Australian company has developed a new tool in our eternal quest for perfection. HUMM Tech recently announced the Edge V One, a wearable device—a headband, to be precise—they claim can boost brain power by up to 20%, but some experts worry that this headband of intellect could be hacked to mind control the person wearing it.

The Edge V One works by reading the electrical signals produced by the brain and delivering a small jolt of electricity approximately equivalent to the power of an electric toothbrush to parts of the brain that are not performing at optimum levels. CEO of HUMM Tech Iain Mcintyre described it like this:

What we’re doing is artificially connecting parts of the brain and letting those parts of the brain talk to each other better.

Our understanding of consciousness and the human brain is being upended all the time. Recently, we’ve learned that about the role of brain waves in consciousness, and we have a better picture of what the mind looks like. This brain boosting headband seems to fall in line with many other current discoveries.

Studies show that the mind looks like a wave of electricity through the brain. This device can, allegedly, redirect that electricity to boost brain power.

HUMM Tech says that their headband is the “beginning of a revolution,” that will lead to direct human interfacing with machines. They did, however, agree that there was a risk to the technologies. Asked if the tech was a type of mind-control, HUMM Tech co-founder Dr. Tim Fiori said it was “kind of mind-control.” Iain Mcintyre also agreed that, if the technology was abused, it might be possible for bad actors to hack the brains of those who wear this device.

Perhaps we should be concerned with this potential mind control technology falling into the hands of companies who have already admitted efforts to manipulate populations getting their hands on it. Facebook is currently working on similar technologies, as is Elon Musk, and as our own Brent Swancer recently examined, government research into mind control is a well established tradition.

Iain Mcintyre described the potential applications of machine interfacing technologies in a way that sounds like a dream come true for Facebook, and many Facebook users:

“Instead of needing to type on your phone, your brain can send the word to the person you want to message.”

So, machine enabled telepathy. Telepathy filtered through the corporate service providing it. Yikes. Will we soon see targeted ads based on our dreams and private thoughts?

This is what the zombie apocalypse looks like.

Of course, none of this is a new idea. Transhumanism has been around for a long time, but it’s only now that the first wave of technologies are being released to the civilian population. Should we run for the hills?

That’s up to you. Every technological revolution carries with it new and weird risks that were impossible to conceive of before it was invented. As our capability for incredible and amazing feats of progress increases, so too does our capability for exciting new ways to do terrible things to each other. So it goes.

At least this headband might let you savagely beat your friends at video games before Facebook completely zombifies you.

The Edge V One will be released on Kickstarter later this year.

It seems like each month, there’s a new discovery proclaimed to have the potential to “rewrite the history of human civilization.” Like in every scientific discipline, the exponential rate of technological growth and development has led to many new breakthroughs in human archaeology and anthropology lately. Last year, a set of fossil teeth were discovered in Germany which were claimed to push the earliest known date of human migration back by millions of years. Even as those claims are still being validated, a new discovery published this week has yet again generated headlines of “rewriting” human history.

According to two twin studies published this week in Science, archaeologists have discovered sophisticated stone tools in Kenya’s Olorgesailie Basin which are the oldest of their kind. In confirmed, this discovery could mean early humans were trading with one another, fashioning tools, and painting objects far earlier than we know – implying a level of intelligence and sophistication usually associated with much more recent ancestors. 

Kenya’s Olorgesailie region contains some of the best examples of Stone Age tools known to science.

The majority of the excavation was performed under the direction of by Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution in conjunction with the National Museums of Kenya. The bulk of the discovery consists of stone tools, nearly half of which were carved from obsidian sourced from volcanic areas 50 kilometers away from where they were discovered. These Middle Stone Age tools have been dated to 320,000 years old. Eighty-eight lumps of pigment were also discovered, some of which show evidence of grinding or tooling. The researchers believe these pigments could have been used to signal some sort of group identity or social status, and the fact that they were carried long distances shows they were of some specific significance to the group of humans or human ancestors who left them there.

Unfortunately, the excavation of this site has yet to reveal any hominid fossils, so it’s impossible to tell if these tools were used by early Homo sapiens or by another human ancestor species. George Washington University’s Alison Brooks co-authored these new papers and says that without any definitive fossil record, the identity of these tools’ creators remains a mystery:

There was the argument that Homo sapiens came along and then developed all these things. But now it seems that the behavior and the morphology came along together. Maybe the behavior even came first.

Will we ever really know the early history of our species? Who knows what hidden aspects of history lie just under our feet, forgotten along with so many other vestiges of the past? While this new discovery might not be a perfectly-preserved early human found in a block of ice, it adds to the growing body of evidence which suggests human civilizations could be much older than we think.

Though it may come as a surprise to many, debates surrounding extraterrestrial invasion are not restricted to the UFO community and Hollywood. In recent years, mainstream science and even the US defense establishment have openly discussed ‘falling skies’ scenarios and what humanity might do to repel potential alien aggressors.

The late, great Sir Stephen Hawking was perhaps the most high-profile individual to warn of the potential dangers of extraterrestrial contact. In April 2010, Hawking made international news by stating his firm belief that humanity should seek to avoid any form of interaction with aliens. In an episode of the Discovery Channel’s Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, the professor said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the American Indians.” Hawking suggested that aliens “might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet” and would perhaps be “looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

Hawking’s anti-alien comments captured the attention of Hollywood and, later that same year, were incorporated into the marketing campaign for the alien invasion blockbuster, Skyline(2010). The trailer for the film begins with bold text against a cosmic backdrop, reading: “On 28 August 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life.”

This is true. On the date specified, the Australian government, through its “Hello from Earth” science initiative, and with the help of NASA, sent some 26,000 carefully vetted messages from the public to the extra-solar Earth-like planet Gliese 581d in a single transmission. This proactive approach to alien contact, known as METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence), differs from the traditional passive approach favored by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which devotes its efforts simply to listening for any potential incoming alien signals. Stephen Hawking was not a fan of the METI approach as he considered it unwise to knowingly alert our presence in the galaxy to any technologically superior civilizations.

In a bid to blur fact and fantasy for viral marketing purposes, Skyline made use of Hawking’s comments in its trailer, which featured well known American newsreaders—including Dan Rather—citing the famed professor on the potential dangers of extraterrestrial contact. The trailer then cuts to panoramic views of an American city being obliterated by dozens of the “massive ships” to which Hawking had referred. Against a black screen, and again referring to the professor’s warning, bold text then reads: “Maybe we should have listened.”

Skyline wasn’t the only movie to draw inspiration from METI initiative, or from Hawking’s dire warnings against phoning E.T. The 2012 movie, Battleship, opens with a scene in which NASA prepares to transmit a signal to the Gliese system, exactly as the space agency had done in real life two-years prior. In the movie, a wise-cracking scientist paraphrases Stephen Hawking, quipping, “it’s going to be like Columbus and the Indians—only we’re the Indians.” But the signal is sent anyway, and NASA gives itself a hearty pat on the back. Needless to say, alien contact ensues, and it ain’t pretty.

In April 2012, a month before the release of Battleship in American cinemas, Professor Paul Springer of the US Air Command and Staff College was granted special clearance by his employers at the Pentagon to discuss how the military would respond in the event of an alien invasion. Springer’s comments were aired in a televised interview for Australia’s Channel 9.

When asked by his interviewer exactly how an alien invasion might unfold, Springer replied:

“That really depends on why they are here in the first place. If they are here for the extraction of a specific resource, for example, they might just want to eliminate any resistance that might block them from their objective. If, on the other hand, their goal was actual occupation and conquest, then they would probably have to prioritize anything they perceive as a threat to their own dominance. So, they would probably start by wiping out as many communications networks as possible and eliminating as many weapons that might represent some form of threat either to them, or to the resources they are trying to extract.”

However, any plans the Pentagon may have drawn to fight-off evil aliens are almost certainly in vein. If any aliens out there do harbor plans for invasion, it is probable that their tactics and technology would make any resistance on our part entirely futile. “If they are hostile,” warns Professor Michio Kaku, “it would be like Bambi meeting Godzilla if we ever had to fight them… we would present no military challenge to such an advanced civilization… We would be a pushover for them. Forget all the Hollywood movies.”

In my book, Silver Screen Saucers, I take Hollywood to task for its simplistic, pumped-up depictions of how an interstellar civilization might invade our planet. If aliens should ever decide to attack Earth for its natural resources (water, minerals, human DNA, etc.), it seems unlikely in the extreme that they would opt for the scorched earth approach depicted in the likes of War of the Worlds and Independence Day. Actually, it seems improbable that the aliens would launch air strikes at all, let alone anything so messy as the ground invasions seen in, say, Falling Skies or Battle: Los Angeles. Any tactics that would provoke a military response from Earth’s leaders would probably result in damage to the very resources the aliens are seeking to acquire, especially if weapons of mass destruction are used by either side.

Even if the aliens’ goal is simply to eradicate humanity, direct engagement with our military forces would likely be entirely unnecessary. Many UFO movies depict aliens using psychic forces to harm or control those around them—but if real aliens have developed advanced psychic abilities, might they be able to use these on a mass scale? If so, our psychically puny species would be conquered within a matter of hours, or instantly, even.

Possible psychic abilities aside, advanced ETs might very well have psychotronic and psychotropic weapons with which to attack the mind, or even weapons that target specific parts of the body, both external and internal—even the heart or brain—causing targets to fall down dead en masse, and all without inflicting so much as a scratch on the skin. There would be no resistance from us, and minimal effort on their part. For Hollywood’s purposes, however, such scenarios are utterly lacking in spectacle and drama.

In his later years, Stephen Hawking remained firm in his stance that the universe is likely teeming with life, some of it intelligent, but he was less optimistic about the inherent benevolence of advanced ET civilizations, believing that advanced technology does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with moral and ethical enlightenment.

Jill Tarter, former Director of SETI.

Before Hawking died, former SETI director Jill Tarter (the real-life Ellie Arroway from Contact) voiced her disagreement with the Cambridge professor about the probable nature of any future alien contact scenarios. Tarter also advised the public to disregard Hollywood entirely as an even remotely realistic representation of what to expect on contact day. “Often the aliens of science fiction say more about us than they do about themselves,” Tarter remarked on the SETI website in 2012. “While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree. If aliens were able to visit Earth that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food, or other planets. If aliens were to come here it would be simply to explore.”

Tarter added: “Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn’t be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either. We should look at movies like Men in Black, Prometheusand Battleship as great entertainment and metaphors for our own fears, but we should not consider them harbingers of alien visitation.”

“Is there life on Mars?”

David Bowie asked the question. Last week, Barry DiGregorio looked at rover photos of the surface of Mars and decided the grooves in the surface are the same type of fossilized trails and tracks left by bacterial life forms on prehistoric Earth … and NASA is covering up this fact to protect its upcoming manned space missions to allow humans to “discover” life on Mars. Now in a new interview in the Daily Star Online he’s warning NASA – not to mention Elon Musk — that sending humans to Mars would cause the late Mr. Bowie to write a sequel to his song, calling it “Is There Death on Mars?” and the girl with the mousy hair will find out why America has a tortured brow … the life on Mars will kill us.

“Astronauts could be exposed to unknown pathogenic microbes and viruses that we have no idea how to control. That is why it is so important to fly additional life detection instruments to Mars – to make sure it is safe to send human beings or to return samples to Earth.”

Dr. DiGregorio has a point – one that NASA dealt with during the Apollo lunar missions by quarantining everything that they brought back until it was determined there was no life on the astronauts, their equipment or their rocks. Since they were only there for a short period, covered a small area and never breathed the atmosphere – what little there is – NASA felt comfortable nothing would happen to the astronauts while on the Moon. That won’t be the case on Mars and DiGregorio singles out Elon Musk first, since he seems to be leading the way to not just visiting but establishing permanent colonies on the Red Planet.

“He’s totally ignoring the fact that there could be microbial life on Mars, and as far as being a scientist goes, the one thing you want to make sure of is that your people have a degree of confidence that the surface of Mars is sterile.”

Musk might be impressed that DiGregorio thinks he’s a scientist, but he’d most likely disagree that Mars needs to be “sterile” before going there. Livable, breathable and non-fatal are probably good enough for Elon. However, DiGregorio points out another thing that has nothing to do with science.

“If you sent astronauts to Mars and they die of pathogenic diseases from indigenous microbes, you’re not going to have another mission go back there, the publicity would be terrible.”

Have humans really evolved from the days of massive Earth exploration to the point where it will not take on a non-military mission with the near-certainty that some people won’t come back? DiGregorio wants NASA to reduce that risk to near-nothing by sending more robots and autonomous exploration vehicles to Mars with the equipment onboard to find and identify life forms without the need for humans on the Martian surface.

Not everyone in the Martian exploration community believes DiGregorio’s theory that the tracks on Mars are indications of bacterial life. However, his arguments for continued robotic exploration make sense. Is a robot discovering life forms on Mars really anathema to NASA management? NASA public relations? Elon Musk?

Are they spitting in the eyes of fools as they ask us to focus on the best-selling show?

The demise of honey bee populations worldwide has become one of the most pressing ecological concerns of our time. Over the last decade, it’s been estimated that some 30–70% European honey bee colonies have collapsed or disappeared, prompting fears of agricultural collapse due to the vital role honey bees play in pollinating crops. Scientists still aren’t sure what the exact cause of colony collapse might be, although it is believed pesticides, genetically modified crops, or even electromagnetic radiation from cellphone towers might be factors.

Selective commercial breeding is also suspected as contributing to a diminished bee gene pool, opening the doors for many diseases.

To help stave off agricultural catastrophe, engineers around the world have begun tossing around ideas to create tiny droneswhich might pollinate crops in the absence of real bees. While this idea sounds like exactly like a recent Black Mirror episode, things got even more dystopian with the recent discovery of the filing of patent applications for robo-bee systems on behalf of retail giant and all-around nefarious corporation Walmart. What exactly might Walmart be up to?

The same thing they’re up to every night, Pinky: trying to take over the world.

The patent was found and posted online by CB Insights, a market research firm which leverages artificial intelligence to analyze trends and identify future disruptions. The patentdescribes a pretty straightforward centralized network which can control legions of tiny bee drones which go from flower to flower pollinating crops. The patent lists many variations of the same system of pollinating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), some of which do not require human control whatsoever:

In some embodiments, the UAV deployed in the exemplary system does not require physical operation by a human operator and wirelessly communicates with, and is wholly or largely controlled by, the computing device.

Hmm… hordes of tiny autonomous flying bee-bots controlled by the world’s largest retailer…say it with me now: what could go wrong?

A lot, once Wal-Bee version 2.1.0 rolls out.

Walmart has already been aggressively pursuing the grocery market, and many analysts believe these patents show that the massive multinational corporation might be attempting to control the food supply chain. While many of us (myself included) tend to view anything Walmart does with disdain and loathing, CB Insights notes that such a drone bee system could help the retailer “manage crop yields more effectively” and “increase its emphasis on transparency and sustainability to attract shoppers.” Still, is it wise to allow a retailer to have so much control over such a vital part of our society? Time, as always, will tell.

On Saturday, March 3rd, two men armed with instructions on how to contact extraterrestrials and a protocol on what to do if they show up tried to contact aliens on the shore of a lake in Sicamous, British Columbia, Canada. After a few hours of meditating and watching, they left without a successful contact. Did they leave too soon?

On the morning of Sunday, March 4th, a woman walked to the very same lake and spotted a series of mysterious ice circles on the lake’s frozen surface. Coincidence? Contact? Something else?

Let’s start with the location. Shuswap Lake is in south-central British Columbia, Canada, and is known for (among other things) its odd shape – the four fingers of the lake look like the letter H from the air. The name comes from the Shuswap or Secwepemc First Nations people and it’s now a popular recreational lake centered around the city of Salmon Arm, which gets ITS name from the fish and the lake’s appendage. Besides salmon and trout, Shuswap Lake is Like many other lakes, Shuswap Lake has a legendary 25-foot long monster known as the Shuswap Lake Monster or Shuswaggi.

Does it also have close encounters of the third-thru-fifth kind? The Salmon Arm Observer reports that local (Sunnybrae) area resident Grace Edwards was walking on the lake shore in nearby Tappen when she spotted and photographed the ice circles on the frozen lake. These were not ice discs, which are circular pieces of ice formed in cold rivers as the chunks break off and are swirled and worn into circles. What Edwards saw were more like swirling patterns made in the ice – kind of like frozen crop circles. One thought is that they were made by spinning snowmobilers who someone managed to make perfect circles without leaving any other visible tracks. Another thought might be …

Aliens!

Grace Edwards’s photos (see here) were published by the Salmon Arm Observer and other local media, where they eventually were shown to Dan Berg (Berg? As in iceberg? Another coincidence?). Berg is the man who attempted to contact aliens on the night of March 3rd in Sicamous, another small town on Shuswap Lake. He told the Observer that he and a friend from Salmon Arm he met through SETI social media decided to celebrate International CE-5 day by conducting a Close Encounter of the Fifth Kind (direct communications with ETs) using the CE-5 protocol developed by Steven M. Greer of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CSETI). For Berg, that was “meditation through consciousness.”

“In my meditation all I did was concentrate on the edge of the Rocky Mountains and Shuswap Lake for 40 minutes nonstop.”

After scanning the skies and their minds for a few hours and seeing nor hearing nothing, Berg and his friend left and thought no more about the incident until someone showed the article about Edwards and the ice circles to Berg. What did he think now?

“I think it was kind of cool and kind of ironic that something as strange as those circles that no one has ever seen before showed up the night that we were out here.”

As with crop circles, the Shuswap Lake ice circles could be explained by humans making very precise patterns in the dark on snowmobiles. Possible? Yes, but the perfection leaves an opening. Is the lake’s H pattern a beacon or marker for aliens? What about the Shuswaggi? Some crytozoologists believe these creatures are visitors from other planets.

Berg has piqued the interest of others and will probably have a crowd with him the next time he tries a CE-5. Let’s hope they bring cameras and a net for the Shuswaggi.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }