December 10, 2024 • 40 mins
From the late 1970s to the 1980s, the US Government paid for intelligence officers to undergo weeklong training sessions at a remote place called the Monroe Institute. Training sessions themselves aren't particularly abnormal -- but these officers weren't learning new languages, the latest news about satellites and so on. Instead, the Institute was using hypnosis to teach them astral projection, ESP and clairvoyance. The news went public via a declassified CIA document released in 1984, but questions remain: Was this all a waste of money? Or was there something else to the story?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Tonight's classic episode is one of our favorite continuing obsessions. Okay, okay,
have you guys ever done astral travel? Can you do it?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I thought you were gonna say acid.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I mean, you know, there's a Venn diagram there. There
might be astral projection, like of my consciousness out into
the cosmos to places that I don't belong or perhaps
have not experienced corporeally.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Have you guys not seen me hang out in y'all's bedrooms?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Oh no, I was wondering what that ghostly outline was. Yeah,
that's why. That's why you can see be suddenly performing
acappella carriok maat, that's that parts for you?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh okay, so we are.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
We are talking about not just the fun thought experiment
conversations regarding what is called remote viewing, But in this
episode we explore the very true story of how Uncle
Sam paid for intelligence officers as part of their job,
to attempt remote viewing at a place called the Monroe Institute.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Let's get right into it.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff. They don't want you to know a
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
My name is Matt Noel is on an adventure.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
They call me Ben, and you're joined as always with
our super producer Paul, Mission control decand most importantly, you
are you. You are here and that makes this stuff
They don't want you to know. Uh mission control quick
check in thumbs up, thumbs down, Oh wow, a thumbs
up with a with an on and onward and upward motion.
So someone's excited about the weekend. It is Friday as
(02:04):
we record this. How about you, Matt, any big plans? Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I'm so excited to mow my lawn and clean the
house and do things that I don't always get to do.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Hey, you're not going to storm Area fifty one.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I thought about it and find them aliens. No, and
probably not.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Just a shout out here. There's a there's a I
guess a petition going around right now as we are
recording this. That was just popping up in the news, CNN,
Times Magazine. Everybody's talking about it. Just a heads up,
if you're gonna storm a secret government facility, don't give
them a giant heads up that they're gonna be thousands
(02:45):
of you coming.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, maybe it is.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Smart to give them a heads up so you don't
get shot. But at the same time, if there are
extraterrestrial bodies kept somewhere on Groom Lake, they're not going
to be there when you when you get there.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
That's a very good point. Let me perhaps comment on
this with an anecdote from a friend of mine who
attempted to visit Area fifty one with his brother once
on a road trip, and interest of anonymity, I'm not
going to give their names. This is, however, a true story.
So they wanted to on a great trip out west
(03:17):
see how close they could get to Area fifty one.
The place is surrounded by signs that do you know,
do notify you of when something is considered trespassing, and
also notify you that it is legal for Uncle Sam
to use lethal force on anyone Past that point. There
(03:39):
will be no legal repercussions, there will be no class
action lawsuit, there will be no help for you if
you cross that line and get popped. So this guy's
experience went the following way. They had taken believe his
brother's truck and they had driven up as close as
they could get and they kind of got out in
(04:01):
front of one of those signs. But as they're getting out,
they see a glint in the distance that they would
later recognize as a sniper rifle. They were also they
were also approached by very aggressive military vehicles driving at them.
(04:24):
Oh actually wait, no, they didn't manage to get out
of the truck. I think they stopped the truck they
saw the glint, and then the vehicles came after them,
so they turned around and started to high tail it out.
They got rammed, they got fish tailed, and then like
what I mean by fishtailed is one of the military
vehicles purposely swiped the back end of their truck such
(04:46):
that they almost lost control.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Of the vehicle a pit maneuver.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So it was exactly exactly so, Matt. So they escaped
with a lesson learned, and I'm sure they will never
visit again. But if you are one of those people
who genuinely thinks that you will storm Area fifty one
with thousands and thousands of others, or if you are
(05:11):
one of those people who thinks you will storm it
and die in the process and you survived, let us
know how it goes. Today's episode is about another nefarious
activity of Uncle Sam. Internationally speaking, the Central Intelligence Agency
is one of the United states most well known, and
(05:31):
some would say infamous, branches of government.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
It was created on Paul's birthday on September eighteenth, although
he is not this old, it was a nineteen forty
seven when it was created, and the official duty of
the CIA is to collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate foreign
intelligence to assist the President and senior US government policymakers
in making decisions relating to national security. That's pretty Legit
(06:00):
seems pretty good, seems like something that we would want
to do as a country, as a state government.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Right on the offset, this doesn't sound too egregious, does it.
After all, governments need to know what's happening in the
world around us, especially when it may have an effect
on domestic affairs, and these days, in the globally interconnected
society in which we live or maybe survive as a
better word, these sorts of foreign affairs nearly always have
(06:27):
some sort of measurable effect on domestic affairs. However, if
you have checked out any episode of this show ever, ever,
ever in the past, then you know that the CIA
has been involved in multitudes of less than above the
board activities over the past six decades. We're talking assassinations,
corporate corruption like overthrowing a country to help the bottom
(06:52):
line of a US based corporation, covert activities not approved
by Congress, and frankly bizarre expers. Today's episode is about
that last one. So here are the facts. The CIA
has done tons and tons and tons of stuff. Not
all of these activities seem directly related to foreign intelligence
(07:15):
and national security. They're kind of a to C thinking
rather than a to be thinking.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, how do we get to that end goal?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Sometimes that end goal is how do we make a
person who is being interrogated more susceptible to telling us
all the information we want? As in mk Ultra. That's
that's the CIA mind control program that we made I
believe two episodes about recently. Check those out. You can
also find some videos on that that we've covered. How
(07:46):
do we take out a large number of people, perhaps
in a way that wouldn't indicate traditional weaponry traditional munitions.
There you go, here's some biological warfare for you. Perhaps
finding a way to kill someone without letting anyone else
know that the CIA was involved or the United States
(08:06):
or anyone else. In fact, unorthodox assassinations, poisoning wetsuits, exploding
cigars like we talked about on the Fidel Castro cube episode,
or how about just biological warfare experiments on the citizens
of the United States, which is a true story.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
There are various accounts of the Central Intelligence Agency dispersing
contaminants or substances meant to impersonate contaminants over large swaths
population centers here in the US, more or less to
see what would happen. The CIA has also experimented with hypnosis,
(08:45):
and honestly, in comparison to some of their other research avenues,
this is pretty tame. This is sort of a slow
news day for the CIA, one would think, at least,
But what exactly is hypnosis? What do we mean when
we say hypnosis? Nowadays it's widely misunderstood, and this is
due primarily to its depiction in works of fiction. One
(09:09):
film that I love in particular is a real blockbuster
when it came out. It's a Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,
in which a somnambulist or a sleepwalker is turned into
a monster, sort of a predecessor of what we call
the Manchurian candidate today, and through the power of hypnosis,
(09:31):
the epononymous villain of the film creates this killing machine.
That's not how hypnosis works. That's at least that's not
what the science shows us. Hypnosis is not a process
wherein someone can be turned into a killing machine, forced
to harm themselves, or really even forced to do something
that they wouldn't have done normally, you know what I mean,
(09:55):
sort of like the reason why being drunk is not
a good excuse use for someone's behavior. It's not something
you would never have done. It's just something that you
would do when you were less inhibited or less aware
of the consequences of your actions. Hypnosis is also not
a good tool for researching hidden trauma or suppressed memories, because,
(10:17):
as long time listeners know, you can implant false memories
in people very, very very easily. So what is hypnosis instead?
What do we mean when we say that the CIA
was experimenting with real hypnosis? What are we talking about.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Well, it's really a trance state that you can put
somebody in, and you know, it is characterized by extreme suggestibility,
and that's where you bring in being able to plant
memories into somebody by, you know, just leading someone down
a path of a suggestion.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
It also has to do with relaxation heightened imagination, But
it isn't exactly the way because when you hear that,
maybe you think about sleep or that sleepy feeling that
you'll get sometimes when you're a bit out of it,
as you might put it, as I would put it,
But it isn't really like sleep because the subject, to
the person who is under hypnosis, is alert the entire
(11:14):
time that they are undergoing hypnosis. It's a lot of
times compared to daydreaming, or at least the feeling of
losing yourself in a book or a movie, or maybe
that kind of feeling you get when you come to
alertness again after you've been driving in a car for
a long time and you realize, oh wow, I've gone
three or four miles and I can't recall any of
(11:36):
the exits or any of the things that just occurred,
and have to reiterate this. You are fully conscious when
you are under hypnosis, but you do tune out all
of the other stuff that's occurring around you, all the stimuli.
You focus intently on whatever is at hand, the subject
at hand. If someone's speaking to you and leading you
through hypnosis. That is the only thing that's occurring. Those words,
(11:59):
the sound basically coming towards you.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, think about flow state. Flow state is when, for
the athletes in the audience, you feel that you are
in the zone. Maybe you're so focused the time seems
to slow a bit, maybe you don't hear things the
way that you would normally hear them if you are
outside of the flow state. In the everyday trance of
(12:25):
say a Walter Midiesque flight of fancy, or let's say
watching a film that you're very into, an imaginary world
seems somewhat more real. We suspend our disbelief, and this
primarily translates to a work of fiction or unreality fully
(12:45):
engaging our emotions. That's why people have a cathartic experience
when they see tragedies or when they watch love stories.
These imaginary events can cause you to experience genuine fear, sadness,
or happiness. This is also, by the way, the reason
that jump scares and horror films work. You know that
(13:06):
you're in a theater with maybe eighty or more people,
or you know that you're the only person in your house,
but Ooh, that creepy girl from the ring? Am I right?
Some researchers categorize all of these trances as forms of
self hypnosis. There's a hypnotism expert back in the twentieth
century named Milton Ericsson. And Ericson believe that most people
(13:29):
hypnotize themselves on a daily basis. And for those of
us listening who say, oh, well, I am unhypnotizable, I've
never been in a trance state. If you've ever been
on a road trip for more than about three hours,
I can guarantee that you have entered something like this.
It is the way the human mechanism works. Most psychiatrists
(13:52):
don't focus on this accidental sneak up on utrance state.
They focus on intentional relaxation, focusing exercises. Do you know
what I mean? Like breathe deep counter breaths, Imagine that
there is a waterfall, or you're slowly floating away from
your body as we count down from ten to one,
(14:15):
things like that.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah, it's almost the focused meditation kind of things, or
guided meditation or ASMR kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
This deep hypnosis is often compared to that sort of
reverie we encounter between wakefulness and sleep, which is for
a lot of people the most amazing part of their day.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah, and I would say that all of this we're
discussing right here reminds me of the feeling you get
when you're deeply immersed in a video game. And I
think it's probably almost more powerful in that respect, because
even though your body is reacting, your fingers are touching
some control mechanism, your entire consciousness is existing in whatever
(14:58):
that imaginary world is on your screen. However you're experiencing
the video game, especially in a VR setting or something
to where all of the external stimuli, especially if you're
wearing headphones, just goes away. That's just what I'm thinking
about when I'm hearing.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
All of this agreed.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
In conventional hypnosis, we approach the suggestion of our hypnotists
or yourself if you're the hypnotist, as if they were reality.
But on some level we are always aware that this
is not the concrete, you know, baseline reality. It's it's
like we're playing pretend, similar to when you would play
(15:39):
games as children, but on a more intense level. And
in this particular mental state, people do feel uninhibited, it
do feel relaxed, Presumably this is because you get a
bit further away cognitively from the worries and doubts that
usually keep our actions in check. This all leads to
(16:01):
subjects of hypnotism also being highly suggestible, which is how
you can hypnotize someone and convince them that they had
an experience they just now remembered right, and then boom,
you can write a book. So this has been the
path for a lot of unethical therapists, especially in the
(16:21):
nineties and eighties. By the way, this is how stage
magicians can get people to do things that are endearing
but not dangerous. However, the CIA did not research hypnotism
to make people squawk like chickens or learn to chill
axe and be laid back af Instead, they did this
(16:42):
to teach their agents psychic powers.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And we'll get into that right afterword from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, that is correct. The
CIA researched psychic powers or extrasensory perception AKAESP.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah, it's a lot like something we've discussed on the
show before.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Remote viewing.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Remember this remote viewing in Project Stargate, that whole military
program from seventy eight. Probably seen the movie the menu
steric goats. Loosely based on that, or somewhat based on that,
the CIA had this whole separate program specifically to research
potential of remote viewing and you know, in this like
(17:36):
kind of weird sci fi way, to unlock those powers
of the human mind, the ones that have been hidden
away or that we forgot about, or we just don't
realize when we're on this corporeal plane that we have.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
And they did not go into this endeavor alone. They
partnered out, They contracted out. They went to a place
called the Monroe Institute. From the late nineteen seventies into
the nineteen eighties, the CIA paid for intelligence officers to
go on week long excursions to an out of the
(18:08):
way place called the Monroe Institute. The Monroe Institute specialized
in out of body experiences and astral projection. And Matt,
you had done a little bit of digging on the
namesake of the Monroe Institute.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Correct, Yeah, yeah, I did.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
There's this guy named Robert A.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Monroe.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
He is a fascinating subject. He was an executive for
broadcast radio in several different respects, several different I guess
you can call it stations. He ended up making his
own company, and as part of his company that he created,
he was doing a lot of research into audio and
one thing that just kind of happened to occur. As
(18:53):
he's doing all this research on how audio effects listeners,
other new things we can do with audio, how can
we influence people who are listening, he stumbled upon this
idea that perhaps through tones we can influence the way
people experience either other audio or even get someone to
(19:16):
encounter what he would later coin in one of his
books and out of body experience.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Right right in his nineteen seventy one book Journeys Out
of the Body? Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yes? Correct?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
And in far Journeys is another one of his books,
Ultimate Journey, lots of journeys, Journey out of the Body,
that's that's the big one. It's really I mean, he's
a fascinating character. And if you go to the Monroe
Institute's website, which is m Nroeinstitute dot org, you can
actually find YouTube videos of this man, Bob Monroe as
(19:52):
he's called a lot of times where he's giving talks.
And I started going down this rabbit hole today with
this guy. He has some kind of I guess what
would be considered out of their ideas about what human
consciousness is. I guess what he's discovered through his explorations
of his own technology and his own techniques. I don't
(20:16):
I actually don't want to describe them in full detail here.
I would just encourage you to listen to some of these,
because if I just told you in a bulleted point
what he believes experience is as consciousness, you would just
probably sigh, roll your eyes and then leave. But I
think after hearing what we're going to tell you today,
then maybe watching these your mind might be a little
(20:37):
more open or susceptible to suggestion.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, and just I agree with that, Matt. Just to
give everyone a taste of where we're where we're coming
from with this, let's describe Bob's findings not in his
own words, but in an excellent short summary by journalist
Caroline Haskins writing for Motherboard on Vice. She says, human
(21:02):
consciousness is nothing but an intersection of energy planes that
forms a hologram able to travel through space time all
one word, across the universe and into the past, present,
and future. That's the elevator pitch for the nature of
consciousness is seen by the Monroe Institute. There's a lot
more to it, so check it out, I guess before
(21:24):
you make your final call. This was very out there
for some people, but it was also very promising for others,
including people like Army Commander Wayne M. McDonell, who, in
June of nineteen eighty three was asked to give his
commander an assessment of the psychic services provided by the
(21:45):
Monroe Institute. This was doing something called Project Center Lane.
The Monroe Institute is known for not just Bob's opinions
on the nature of human consciousness and its interactions with
what we call reality, but for the patented technology that
he and his associates had created. They call it hemi
(22:07):
sync short for hemisphere synchronization, and it uses audio to
quote synchronize the brain waves of the left and right
sides of the brain. According to the website, this makes
the brain more receptive to hypnosis and all of the
other potential things they believe the human mind can do
(22:27):
while in that state.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
And you may have heard of this before a lot
of times, it's referred to as binormal beats. On the Internet,
you can find YouTube videos of purported binoral beats, and
generally it has to do with two different, similar but
not the same, tones that are being played in stereo
into both of your ears.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Right, and as we established before, audio has tremendous power,
some effects of which are more apparent than others. So
Wayne was asked to provide this assessment after he had
completed the week long psychic program at the institute a
month prior. And this institute, just for reference, is located
(23:13):
in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in a small
town called Faber Is about thirty miles east of Charlottesville.
That probably gives our US audience a rough sense. For
everyone outside of the US, I think they're just this
series of names. But if you pop on Google Maps
you can see. The point we're making is this is
relatively isolated. So here's the question. What did McDonald say. Well,
(23:39):
his report formed the basis of a twenty nine page
Army document that featured detailed explanations of hypnosis, holograms, and
out of body experiences. The documents placed these phenomena in
the context of these larger ideas of consciousness, energy, space, time,
(24:00):
them subatomic particles. The astral projection. Right, of course, astral
projection is the idea that one can uncouple the mind
and the body and send the mind free throughout all
sorts of places and doesn't have to travel through linear time.
I do want to note here that we primarily focus
(24:22):
on this being a CIA activity, but a lot of
this was the CIA and the Army functioning sort of
hand in glove. They were sharing a lot of research
on this. So McDonald's cites a metaphor penned by a
Monroe Institute employee named Melissa Jagger or Jaeger, in order
to illustrate the nature of hypnosis. The metaphor says that
(24:46):
the normal state of consciousness is kind of like a lamp,
and that means it emits light in a chaotic, incoherent way,
but in which.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
We kind of in a way disagree with that because
it's just more of like an omnipresent singles source of
light that goes in all directions.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
But but we agree.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, But a hypnotized state of consciousness, by contrast, would
be like a laser beam and thoughts and energy are
as you had said earlier, Matt describing hypnosis, they're like
a disciplined stream of light or like a laser. So
when they're doing project Center Lane when when they're working
(25:24):
on this, the big question here is how they found candidates, right,
How how did they How did they get officers to
participate in Project Center Lane.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, the first thing you got to do when you're
going to bring someone on into some kind of hypnosis
study and or learning and training technique is to hypnotize them.
That's of course first and foremost, and then after they're
under hypnosis, they would practice like reaching this place this
(26:00):
of consciousness considered the astral plane. And the whole goal
is to learn foreign languages, like basically be able to
teach yourself things at a faster pace, to enter the matrix,
if you will, in a way, and to also do
this thing that the documents referred to as habit control training,
which you can assume has to do with, you know,
(26:22):
training each of these people who are going to take
part in this to do certain things, to not do
certain things, although the details of that are lost to us.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
According to one of the declassified files, two hundred and
fifty one Army Intelligence candidates were selected for the first
year of experimentation, and of those candidates, one hundred and
seventeen were initially interviewed under the impression that they were
just taking a survey, right. McDonald was trying to find
people who were in the middle of the Bell curve
(26:53):
regarding credulism versus skepticism. So people who objected military use
of what they called psycho energetics categorically were not considered
to be good candidates. And then on the other side
of the spectrum, people who seemed incredibly gassed and excited
about psycho energetics, or people who, by whatever measure they
(27:18):
had this study conducted, considered to be occult fanatics or
mystical zealots, were also out of their running. But for
the people who were accepted, they were shipped off on
a real weird field trip. They went to the Monroe
Institute and then they would listen to this Heemi sync audio.
After this, one of the institute's research associates would do
(27:40):
the guided meditation that you mentioned earlier, Matt. They would
guide intelligence officers into the astral plane, the psychic space,
in which the Institute maintained that officers could heighten their
sensory experiences, accelerate their healing, travel into the past or
the future, or even solve real world delay as without
(28:01):
the restraints of a physical body whoa I know, right.
Another technique known as remote viewing was also employed, and
this is something that should be familiar if you caught
our earlier interview with the scientist Russell targ or some
of our work on Project Stargate. According to a declassified
(28:22):
document from eighty two, which doesn't specifically explicitly mention the
Army or the Monroe Institute.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, because they didn't go until the next year, right right.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
This does, however, follow the precise description of remote viewing
as explained by the as explained by the nineteen eighty
three doc that does mention Monroe by name. So what
were they doing exactly? What was their first big milestone
(28:53):
test goal. The answer will surprise you, we promise, and
we'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Well, according to the documents that we found online, the
goal of all of this remote viewing, all of the
energy that all of these people put in, was to
remotely view Mars in the year one million BC, basically
to find out if there was a human civilization or
(29:31):
another extraterrestrial civilization of intelligent beings that lived on Mars
back then.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
According to the transcript and interviewer read coordinates and verbal
cues to a subject, and the subject claimed to see
dust storms, alien structures, and even an ancient alien race.
You can, by the way, you can see all of
the stuff we're describing at CIA dot gov just searching
through their reading room and you'll you will see this
(30:00):
written out explicitly. We're not stiling on this nor paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
You heard that it's on the CIA's website.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
It's true. So some people did say that they saw something.
You could either you know, you can read the transcript
and decide for yourself whether they're just hyper suggestible and
maybe they're just kind of improvising and riffing on cues
that the research associated or already gave them. But here's
here's one description from a subject who certainly saw something.
(30:31):
He says, very tall, again, very large people, but they're
they're thin. They look thin because of their height, and
they dress like, oh hell, it's like it's like a
real light silk, but it's not you know, flowing type
of clothing. It's it's cut to fit their they're ancient people.
They're they're dying, it's past their time or age. They're
(30:53):
very philosophic about it. They're looking for a way to
survive and they just can't.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
This is just one example, to be fair, That is
a direct quote, but there are other examples out there.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Was he was he from Georgia or Alabama?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Where was he from?
Speaker 1 (31:10):
It maybe lost to history. I don't know if it's
the source, but it sounded like he went through being
from maybe four or five very different places in the
course of that description.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, I guess he was a military brat, moved around
a lot. But this is all real. This all definitely happened,
And the big question is what happened next after they
sent these people for these things? What did they find?
What did the Army and the CIA find with HEMI
(31:42):
sink technology.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Well, there's this guy who was described as a personal
management analyst named Ray Ray Waldkoter. He wrote this article
for the nineteen ninety one HEMI Sink Journal. So they've
got an entire journal here. And again, the Monroe Institute
was a research arm created through his research and development
(32:05):
efforts through his broadcast company. Okay, so he's reviewing the
army's uses of HEMI sync technology. So he had the
Army looking at their technology. Now they're looking back on
how the Army is going to be using it. And
in this he states that the Army variously used HEMICNK
technology for stress reduction, psychological counseling, and enhanced learning abilities
(32:30):
for various levels of personnel, as well as training for
people seeking officer level positions. So really, they truly are
at least in several ways here attempting to use it
like the matrix, to teach people skills as fast as
they can and as efficiently as possible.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
And Waltcotter wrote also that several intensive Army military training
programs have been conducted using the technology. This is where
it gets this. This is pretty fascinating because he said
these programs demonstrated positive results, which means that in one
or more than one of the fields of research that
(33:10):
they were conducting this technology, Hemisinc. Was found to be successful.
We don't know which fields, we don't know how successful.
We just know that they felt there was something to it,
and as a result, research continued until nineteen ninety five,
when the Defense Appropriations Act directs the program to be
(33:31):
transferred to way for it the CIA, and the CIA
keeps working with this. We're not sure exactly what they
did with it, because we don't know what did or
did not make it into a written report. But the
CIA itself later said remote viewing had not been proven
to work by a psychic mechanism specifically, and they assured
(33:56):
us or assured themselves internally, that it had not been
used operationally. Furthermore, the CIA concluded that there was nothing
striking or surprising about its findings after doing research of
their own. Yeah, so now we're at another than a
(34:20):
fork in the road.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Over twenty million dollars was sunk into this project, of
which we're aware, and to be fair, that is not
a huge figure in comparison to many other strange Army
and CIA projects. But let's remember that the US public
footed the bill here, and this was at a time
when people were, as they are now still in need
(34:42):
of education, medical care, food, and so on. So is
it money well spent? Was it foolish? Is there more
to the story? I don't know, But maybe you're saying, hey, guys,
I'm I'm a person who learns through experience. I want
to fight follow in the footsteps of the CIA and
(35:02):
Army intelligence and figure this out for myself while we
have good news for you friends and neighbors. The Monroe Institute,
as we record, is still operating. It's still around, it
is still selling it's Hemisinc. Program Today. So you can
take a week off yourself and go find out what
all the hubbub is about.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Yeah, and there's everything from many one day programs, or
you can jump on one of their five to six
day consciousness programs and you guys, the Monroe Institutes and
kind of in a silly way, but also in I'm
genuinely interested in this about You could take a class
about energy medicine. You can take a class that's described
(35:45):
as event horizon conscious presence. We could all probably use
a little bit of that nowadays. Or something called animal
and interspecies communication. Now that one I'm into. If I
could talk to my dog, like really know what's going on,
that would be huge.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
That's your pick, that's my pick.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Awesome or event horizon whatever that is.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
So let us know your experience with this, if you
decide to engage in this sort of activity, or if
you take a field trip to the Monroe Institute, let
us know if you've been to this or something like this,
in the past, we would love to hear your stories.
Most importantly, like all classified projects, this was technically a conspiracy,
(36:35):
not a theory. They really spent the money in secret
the Army and then later of the CIA. Yet for
fringe researchers, the admitted conspiracy is simply a distraction, sort
of a red herring to throw you off the trail.
And they'll argue that this sort of experimentation continues today.
(36:57):
So if we took a lot little bit of time
to speculate, to engage in some what iffery, let's see
what would be the best way to conduct this sort
of experimentation without the usual legal limitations imposed by domestic
(37:19):
and international law. First, if we throw morals to the wayside,
you would probably want to set up an institution or
a laboratory of some sort in a place that the
US controlled but was not legally obligated towards, so like Diego,
Garcia maybe, or one of the islands where so many
(37:41):
people have been black bagged in the War on Terror.
And then you would want, of course keep it out
of the news. You would also you would also want
to make sure that you could dope the subjects up
as much as you wanted to see how far into
that state you could get them before there were deletorious
(38:04):
cognitive or physical effects, and then probably just to get
a baseline, you would keep going until if you died.
That's the kind of stuff that you will see fringe
researchers arguing is happening now as we record today. There
isn't proof of that, but that is some disturbing speculation
and just saying that that could happen, which absolutely good.
(38:29):
For all we know it could be happening now. Just
saying that could happen is not the same thing as
saying any of that would result in actual remote viewing,
you know what I mean, or reproducible astral travel and
so on. I'm just saying it is completely possible for
the US and other powerful governments do kidnap people, take
them into a place where ethical constraints do not apply,
(38:51):
and experiment on them.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
There you go, Or you could just, I don't know,
pump some of that binaural stuff the HEMI sink stuff
into the radio waves and see how it plays on
the public overall. Does it have any effects on humans
while they're driving or while they're listening to their podcasts?
Speaker 1 (39:13):
That's very good.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Did you guys notice the the hemi sink technology happening
in your ears while you're listening to this?
Speaker 2 (39:22):
You didn't because we weren't using it.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
But.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Wouldn't that be cool if we did?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
You can reach.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
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Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say, then can fit in
that voicemail. Why not instead send us a good old
fashion email.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
We are the entities that read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Tonight's classic episode is one of our favorite continuing obsessions. Okay, okay,
have you guys ever done astral travel? Can you do it?
Speaker 2 (00:12):
I thought you were gonna say acid.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I mean, you know, there's a Venn diagram there. There
might be astral projection, like of my consciousness out into
the cosmos to places that I don't belong or perhaps
have not experienced corporeally.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Have you guys not seen me hang out in y'all's bedrooms?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Oh no, I was wondering what that ghostly outline was. Yeah,
that's why. That's why you can see be suddenly performing
acappella carriok maat, that's that parts for you?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Oh okay, so we are.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
We are talking about not just the fun thought experiment
conversations regarding what is called remote viewing, But in this
episode we explore the very true story of how Uncle
Sam paid for intelligence officers as part of their job,
to attempt remote viewing at a place called the Monroe Institute.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Let's get right into it.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff. They don't want you to know a
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
My name is Matt Noel is on an adventure.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
They call me Ben, and you're joined as always with
our super producer Paul, Mission control decand most importantly, you
are you. You are here and that makes this stuff
They don't want you to know. Uh mission control quick
check in thumbs up, thumbs down, Oh wow, a thumbs
up with a with an on and onward and upward motion.
So someone's excited about the weekend. It is Friday as
(02:04):
we record this. How about you, Matt, any big plans? Oh?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I'm so excited to mow my lawn and clean the
house and do things that I don't always get to do.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Hey, you're not going to storm Area fifty one.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
I thought about it and find them aliens. No, and
probably not.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Just a shout out here. There's a there's a I
guess a petition going around right now as we are
recording this. That was just popping up in the news, CNN,
Times Magazine. Everybody's talking about it. Just a heads up,
if you're gonna storm a secret government facility, don't give
them a giant heads up that they're gonna be thousands
(02:45):
of you coming.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Well, maybe it is.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Smart to give them a heads up so you don't
get shot. But at the same time, if there are
extraterrestrial bodies kept somewhere on Groom Lake, they're not going
to be there when you when you get there.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
That's a very good point. Let me perhaps comment on
this with an anecdote from a friend of mine who
attempted to visit Area fifty one with his brother once
on a road trip, and interest of anonymity, I'm not
going to give their names. This is, however, a true story.
So they wanted to on a great trip out west
(03:17):
see how close they could get to Area fifty one.
The place is surrounded by signs that do you know,
do notify you of when something is considered trespassing, and
also notify you that it is legal for Uncle Sam
to use lethal force on anyone Past that point. There
(03:39):
will be no legal repercussions, there will be no class
action lawsuit, there will be no help for you if
you cross that line and get popped. So this guy's
experience went the following way. They had taken believe his
brother's truck and they had driven up as close as
they could get and they kind of got out in
(04:01):
front of one of those signs. But as they're getting out,
they see a glint in the distance that they would
later recognize as a sniper rifle. They were also they
were also approached by very aggressive military vehicles driving at them.
(04:24):
Oh actually wait, no, they didn't manage to get out
of the truck. I think they stopped the truck they
saw the glint, and then the vehicles came after them,
so they turned around and started to high tail it out.
They got rammed, they got fish tailed, and then like
what I mean by fishtailed is one of the military
vehicles purposely swiped the back end of their truck such
(04:46):
that they almost lost control.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
Of the vehicle a pit maneuver.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
So it was exactly exactly so, Matt. So they escaped
with a lesson learned, and I'm sure they will never
visit again. But if you are one of those people
who genuinely thinks that you will storm Area fifty one
with thousands and thousands of others, or if you are
(05:11):
one of those people who thinks you will storm it
and die in the process and you survived, let us
know how it goes. Today's episode is about another nefarious
activity of Uncle Sam. Internationally speaking, the Central Intelligence Agency
is one of the United states most well known, and
(05:31):
some would say infamous, branches of government.
Speaker 3 (05:35):
It was created on Paul's birthday on September eighteenth, although
he is not this old, it was a nineteen forty
seven when it was created, and the official duty of
the CIA is to collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate foreign
intelligence to assist the President and senior US government policymakers
in making decisions relating to national security. That's pretty Legit
(06:00):
seems pretty good, seems like something that we would want
to do as a country, as a state government.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Right on the offset, this doesn't sound too egregious, does it.
After all, governments need to know what's happening in the
world around us, especially when it may have an effect
on domestic affairs, and these days, in the globally interconnected
society in which we live or maybe survive as a
better word, these sorts of foreign affairs nearly always have
(06:27):
some sort of measurable effect on domestic affairs. However, if
you have checked out any episode of this show ever, ever,
ever in the past, then you know that the CIA
has been involved in multitudes of less than above the
board activities over the past six decades. We're talking assassinations,
corporate corruption like overthrowing a country to help the bottom
(06:52):
line of a US based corporation, covert activities not approved
by Congress, and frankly bizarre expers. Today's episode is about
that last one. So here are the facts. The CIA
has done tons and tons and tons of stuff. Not
all of these activities seem directly related to foreign intelligence
(07:15):
and national security. They're kind of a to C thinking
rather than a to be thinking.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Yeah, how do we get to that end goal?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Sometimes that end goal is how do we make a
person who is being interrogated more susceptible to telling us
all the information we want? As in mk Ultra. That's
that's the CIA mind control program that we made I
believe two episodes about recently. Check those out. You can
also find some videos on that that we've covered. How
(07:46):
do we take out a large number of people, perhaps
in a way that wouldn't indicate traditional weaponry traditional munitions.
There you go, here's some biological warfare for you. Perhaps
finding a way to kill someone without letting anyone else
know that the CIA was involved or the United States
(08:06):
or anyone else. In fact, unorthodox assassinations, poisoning wetsuits, exploding
cigars like we talked about on the Fidel Castro cube episode,
or how about just biological warfare experiments on the citizens
of the United States, which is a true story.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
There are various accounts of the Central Intelligence Agency dispersing
contaminants or substances meant to impersonate contaminants over large swaths
population centers here in the US, more or less to
see what would happen. The CIA has also experimented with hypnosis,
(08:45):
and honestly, in comparison to some of their other research avenues,
this is pretty tame. This is sort of a slow
news day for the CIA, one would think, at least,
But what exactly is hypnosis? What do we mean when
we say hypnosis? Nowadays it's widely misunderstood, and this is
due primarily to its depiction in works of fiction. One
(09:09):
film that I love in particular is a real blockbuster
when it came out. It's a Cabinet of Doctor Caligari,
in which a somnambulist or a sleepwalker is turned into
a monster, sort of a predecessor of what we call
the Manchurian candidate today, and through the power of hypnosis,
(09:31):
the epononymous villain of the film creates this killing machine.
That's not how hypnosis works. That's at least that's not
what the science shows us. Hypnosis is not a process
wherein someone can be turned into a killing machine, forced
to harm themselves, or really even forced to do something
that they wouldn't have done normally, you know what I mean,
(09:55):
sort of like the reason why being drunk is not
a good excuse use for someone's behavior. It's not something
you would never have done. It's just something that you
would do when you were less inhibited or less aware
of the consequences of your actions. Hypnosis is also not
a good tool for researching hidden trauma or suppressed memories, because,
(10:17):
as long time listeners know, you can implant false memories
in people very, very very easily. So what is hypnosis instead?
What do we mean when we say that the CIA
was experimenting with real hypnosis? What are we talking about.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Well, it's really a trance state that you can put
somebody in, and you know, it is characterized by extreme suggestibility,
and that's where you bring in being able to plant
memories into somebody by, you know, just leading someone down
a path of a suggestion.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
It also has to do with relaxation heightened imagination, But
it isn't exactly the way because when you hear that,
maybe you think about sleep or that sleepy feeling that
you'll get sometimes when you're a bit out of it,
as you might put it, as I would put it,
But it isn't really like sleep because the subject, to
the person who is under hypnosis, is alert the entire
(11:14):
time that they are undergoing hypnosis. It's a lot of
times compared to daydreaming, or at least the feeling of
losing yourself in a book or a movie, or maybe
that kind of feeling you get when you come to
alertness again after you've been driving in a car for
a long time and you realize, oh wow, I've gone
three or four miles and I can't recall any of
(11:36):
the exits or any of the things that just occurred,
and have to reiterate this. You are fully conscious when
you are under hypnosis, but you do tune out all
of the other stuff that's occurring around you, all the stimuli.
You focus intently on whatever is at hand, the subject
at hand. If someone's speaking to you and leading you
through hypnosis. That is the only thing that's occurring. Those words,
(11:59):
the sound basically coming towards you.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, think about flow state. Flow state is when, for
the athletes in the audience, you feel that you are
in the zone. Maybe you're so focused the time seems
to slow a bit, maybe you don't hear things the
way that you would normally hear them if you are
outside of the flow state. In the everyday trance of
(12:25):
say a Walter Midiesque flight of fancy, or let's say
watching a film that you're very into, an imaginary world
seems somewhat more real. We suspend our disbelief, and this
primarily translates to a work of fiction or unreality fully
(12:45):
engaging our emotions. That's why people have a cathartic experience
when they see tragedies or when they watch love stories.
These imaginary events can cause you to experience genuine fear, sadness,
or happiness. This is also, by the way, the reason
that jump scares and horror films work. You know that
(13:06):
you're in a theater with maybe eighty or more people,
or you know that you're the only person in your house,
but Ooh, that creepy girl from the ring? Am I right?
Some researchers categorize all of these trances as forms of
self hypnosis. There's a hypnotism expert back in the twentieth
century named Milton Ericsson. And Ericson believe that most people
(13:29):
hypnotize themselves on a daily basis. And for those of
us listening who say, oh, well, I am unhypnotizable, I've
never been in a trance state. If you've ever been
on a road trip for more than about three hours,
I can guarantee that you have entered something like this.
It is the way the human mechanism works. Most psychiatrists
(13:52):
don't focus on this accidental sneak up on utrance state.
They focus on intentional relaxation, focusing exercises. Do you know
what I mean? Like breathe deep counter breaths, Imagine that
there is a waterfall, or you're slowly floating away from
your body as we count down from ten to one,
(14:15):
things like that.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
Yeah, it's almost the focused meditation kind of things, or
guided meditation or ASMR kinds of things.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
This deep hypnosis is often compared to that sort of
reverie we encounter between wakefulness and sleep, which is for
a lot of people the most amazing part of their day.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah, and I would say that all of this we're
discussing right here reminds me of the feeling you get
when you're deeply immersed in a video game. And I
think it's probably almost more powerful in that respect, because
even though your body is reacting, your fingers are touching
some control mechanism, your entire consciousness is existing in whatever
(14:58):
that imaginary world is on your screen. However you're experiencing
the video game, especially in a VR setting or something
to where all of the external stimuli, especially if you're
wearing headphones, just goes away. That's just what I'm thinking
about when I'm hearing.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
All of this agreed.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
In conventional hypnosis, we approach the suggestion of our hypnotists
or yourself if you're the hypnotist, as if they were reality.
But on some level we are always aware that this
is not the concrete, you know, baseline reality. It's it's
like we're playing pretend, similar to when you would play
(15:39):
games as children, but on a more intense level. And
in this particular mental state, people do feel uninhibited, it
do feel relaxed, Presumably this is because you get a
bit further away cognitively from the worries and doubts that
usually keep our actions in check. This all leads to
(16:01):
subjects of hypnotism also being highly suggestible, which is how
you can hypnotize someone and convince them that they had
an experience they just now remembered right, and then boom,
you can write a book. So this has been the
path for a lot of unethical therapists, especially in the
(16:21):
nineties and eighties. By the way, this is how stage
magicians can get people to do things that are endearing
but not dangerous. However, the CIA did not research hypnotism
to make people squawk like chickens or learn to chill
axe and be laid back af Instead, they did this
(16:42):
to teach their agents psychic powers.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
And we'll get into that right afterword from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, that is correct. The
CIA researched psychic powers or extrasensory perception AKAESP.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah, it's a lot like something we've discussed on the
show before.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
Remote viewing.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Remember this remote viewing in Project Stargate, that whole military
program from seventy eight. Probably seen the movie the menu
steric goats. Loosely based on that, or somewhat based on that,
the CIA had this whole separate program specifically to research
potential of remote viewing and you know, in this like
(17:36):
kind of weird sci fi way, to unlock those powers
of the human mind, the ones that have been hidden
away or that we forgot about, or we just don't
realize when we're on this corporeal plane that we have.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
And they did not go into this endeavor alone. They
partnered out, They contracted out. They went to a place
called the Monroe Institute. From the late nineteen seventies into
the nineteen eighties, the CIA paid for intelligence officers to
go on week long excursions to an out of the
(18:08):
way place called the Monroe Institute. The Monroe Institute specialized
in out of body experiences and astral projection. And Matt,
you had done a little bit of digging on the
namesake of the Monroe Institute.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Correct, Yeah, yeah, I did.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
There's this guy named Robert A.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Monroe.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
He is a fascinating subject. He was an executive for
broadcast radio in several different respects, several different I guess
you can call it stations. He ended up making his
own company, and as part of his company that he created,
he was doing a lot of research into audio and
one thing that just kind of happened to occur. As
(18:53):
he's doing all this research on how audio effects listeners,
other new things we can do with audio, how can
we influence people who are listening, he stumbled upon this
idea that perhaps through tones we can influence the way
people experience either other audio or even get someone to
(19:16):
encounter what he would later coin in one of his
books and out of body experience.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
Right right in his nineteen seventy one book Journeys Out
of the Body? Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yes? Correct?
Speaker 3 (19:27):
And in far Journeys is another one of his books,
Ultimate Journey, lots of journeys, Journey out of the Body,
that's that's the big one. It's really I mean, he's
a fascinating character. And if you go to the Monroe
Institute's website, which is m Nroeinstitute dot org, you can
actually find YouTube videos of this man, Bob Monroe as
(19:52):
he's called a lot of times where he's giving talks.
And I started going down this rabbit hole today with
this guy. He has some kind of I guess what
would be considered out of their ideas about what human
consciousness is. I guess what he's discovered through his explorations
of his own technology and his own techniques. I don't
(20:16):
I actually don't want to describe them in full detail here.
I would just encourage you to listen to some of these,
because if I just told you in a bulleted point
what he believes experience is as consciousness, you would just
probably sigh, roll your eyes and then leave. But I
think after hearing what we're going to tell you today,
then maybe watching these your mind might be a little
(20:37):
more open or susceptible to suggestion.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Yeah, and just I agree with that, Matt. Just to
give everyone a taste of where we're where we're coming
from with this, let's describe Bob's findings not in his
own words, but in an excellent short summary by journalist
Caroline Haskins writing for Motherboard on Vice. She says, human
(21:02):
consciousness is nothing but an intersection of energy planes that
forms a hologram able to travel through space time all
one word, across the universe and into the past, present,
and future. That's the elevator pitch for the nature of
consciousness is seen by the Monroe Institute. There's a lot
more to it, so check it out, I guess before
(21:24):
you make your final call. This was very out there
for some people, but it was also very promising for others,
including people like Army Commander Wayne M. McDonell, who, in
June of nineteen eighty three was asked to give his
commander an assessment of the psychic services provided by the
(21:45):
Monroe Institute. This was doing something called Project Center Lane.
The Monroe Institute is known for not just Bob's opinions
on the nature of human consciousness and its interactions with
what we call reality, but for the patented technology that
he and his associates had created. They call it hemi
(22:07):
sync short for hemisphere synchronization, and it uses audio to
quote synchronize the brain waves of the left and right
sides of the brain. According to the website, this makes
the brain more receptive to hypnosis and all of the
other potential things they believe the human mind can do
(22:27):
while in that state.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
And you may have heard of this before a lot
of times, it's referred to as binormal beats. On the Internet,
you can find YouTube videos of purported binoral beats, and
generally it has to do with two different, similar but
not the same, tones that are being played in stereo
into both of your ears.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Right, and as we established before, audio has tremendous power,
some effects of which are more apparent than others. So
Wayne was asked to provide this assessment after he had
completed the week long psychic program at the institute a
month prior. And this institute, just for reference, is located
(23:13):
in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in a small
town called Faber Is about thirty miles east of Charlottesville.
That probably gives our US audience a rough sense. For
everyone outside of the US, I think they're just this
series of names. But if you pop on Google Maps
you can see. The point we're making is this is
relatively isolated. So here's the question. What did McDonald say. Well,
(23:39):
his report formed the basis of a twenty nine page
Army document that featured detailed explanations of hypnosis, holograms, and
out of body experiences. The documents placed these phenomena in
the context of these larger ideas of consciousness, energy, space, time,
(24:00):
them subatomic particles. The astral projection. Right, of course, astral
projection is the idea that one can uncouple the mind
and the body and send the mind free throughout all
sorts of places and doesn't have to travel through linear time.
I do want to note here that we primarily focus
(24:22):
on this being a CIA activity, but a lot of
this was the CIA and the Army functioning sort of
hand in glove. They were sharing a lot of research
on this. So McDonald's cites a metaphor penned by a
Monroe Institute employee named Melissa Jagger or Jaeger, in order
to illustrate the nature of hypnosis. The metaphor says that
(24:46):
the normal state of consciousness is kind of like a lamp,
and that means it emits light in a chaotic, incoherent way,
but in which.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
We kind of in a way disagree with that because
it's just more of like an omnipresent singles source of
light that goes in all directions.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
But but we agree.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
Yeah, But a hypnotized state of consciousness, by contrast, would
be like a laser beam and thoughts and energy are
as you had said earlier, Matt describing hypnosis, they're like
a disciplined stream of light or like a laser. So
when they're doing project Center Lane when when they're working
(25:24):
on this, the big question here is how they found candidates, right,
How how did they How did they get officers to
participate in Project Center Lane.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, the first thing you got to do when you're
going to bring someone on into some kind of hypnosis
study and or learning and training technique is to hypnotize them.
That's of course first and foremost, and then after they're
under hypnosis, they would practice like reaching this place this
(26:00):
of consciousness considered the astral plane. And the whole goal
is to learn foreign languages, like basically be able to
teach yourself things at a faster pace, to enter the matrix,
if you will, in a way, and to also do
this thing that the documents referred to as habit control training,
which you can assume has to do with, you know,
(26:22):
training each of these people who are going to take
part in this to do certain things, to not do
certain things, although the details of that are lost to us.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
According to one of the declassified files, two hundred and
fifty one Army Intelligence candidates were selected for the first
year of experimentation, and of those candidates, one hundred and
seventeen were initially interviewed under the impression that they were
just taking a survey, right. McDonald was trying to find
people who were in the middle of the Bell curve
(26:53):
regarding credulism versus skepticism. So people who objected military use
of what they called psycho energetics categorically were not considered
to be good candidates. And then on the other side
of the spectrum, people who seemed incredibly gassed and excited
about psycho energetics, or people who, by whatever measure they
(27:18):
had this study conducted, considered to be occult fanatics or
mystical zealots, were also out of their running. But for
the people who were accepted, they were shipped off on
a real weird field trip. They went to the Monroe
Institute and then they would listen to this Heemi sync audio.
After this, one of the institute's research associates would do
(27:40):
the guided meditation that you mentioned earlier, Matt. They would
guide intelligence officers into the astral plane, the psychic space,
in which the Institute maintained that officers could heighten their
sensory experiences, accelerate their healing, travel into the past or
the future, or even solve real world delay as without
(28:01):
the restraints of a physical body whoa I know, right.
Another technique known as remote viewing was also employed, and
this is something that should be familiar if you caught
our earlier interview with the scientist Russell targ or some
of our work on Project Stargate. According to a declassified
(28:22):
document from eighty two, which doesn't specifically explicitly mention the
Army or the Monroe Institute.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Yeah, because they didn't go until the next year, right right.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
This does, however, follow the precise description of remote viewing
as explained by the as explained by the nineteen eighty
three doc that does mention Monroe by name. So what
were they doing exactly? What was their first big milestone
(28:53):
test goal. The answer will surprise you, we promise, and
we'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Well, according to the documents that we found online, the
goal of all of this remote viewing, all of the
energy that all of these people put in, was to
remotely view Mars in the year one million BC, basically
to find out if there was a human civilization or
(29:31):
another extraterrestrial civilization of intelligent beings that lived on Mars
back then.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
According to the transcript and interviewer read coordinates and verbal
cues to a subject, and the subject claimed to see
dust storms, alien structures, and even an ancient alien race.
You can, by the way, you can see all of
the stuff we're describing at CIA dot gov just searching
through their reading room and you'll you will see this
(30:00):
written out explicitly. We're not stiling on this nor paraphrasing.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
You heard that it's on the CIA's website.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
It's true. So some people did say that they saw something.
You could either you know, you can read the transcript
and decide for yourself whether they're just hyper suggestible and
maybe they're just kind of improvising and riffing on cues
that the research associated or already gave them. But here's
here's one description from a subject who certainly saw something.
(30:31):
He says, very tall, again, very large people, but they're
they're thin. They look thin because of their height, and
they dress like, oh hell, it's like it's like a
real light silk, but it's not you know, flowing type
of clothing. It's it's cut to fit their they're ancient people.
They're they're dying, it's past their time or age. They're
(30:53):
very philosophic about it. They're looking for a way to
survive and they just can't.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
This is just one example, to be fair, That is
a direct quote, but there are other examples out there.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
Was he was he from Georgia or Alabama?
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Where was he from?
Speaker 1 (31:10):
It maybe lost to history. I don't know if it's
the source, but it sounded like he went through being
from maybe four or five very different places in the
course of that description.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Yeah, I guess he was a military brat, moved around
a lot. But this is all real. This all definitely happened,
And the big question is what happened next after they
sent these people for these things? What did they find?
What did the Army and the CIA find with HEMI
(31:42):
sink technology.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Well, there's this guy who was described as a personal
management analyst named Ray Ray Waldkoter. He wrote this article
for the nineteen ninety one HEMI Sink Journal. So they've
got an entire journal here. And again, the Monroe Institute
was a research arm created through his research and development
(32:05):
efforts through his broadcast company. Okay, so he's reviewing the
army's uses of HEMI sync technology. So he had the
Army looking at their technology. Now they're looking back on
how the Army is going to be using it. And
in this he states that the Army variously used HEMICNK
technology for stress reduction, psychological counseling, and enhanced learning abilities
(32:30):
for various levels of personnel, as well as training for
people seeking officer level positions. So really, they truly are
at least in several ways here attempting to use it
like the matrix, to teach people skills as fast as
they can and as efficiently as possible.
Speaker 1 (32:48):
And Waltcotter wrote also that several intensive Army military training
programs have been conducted using the technology. This is where
it gets this. This is pretty fascinating because he said
these programs demonstrated positive results, which means that in one
or more than one of the fields of research that
(33:10):
they were conducting this technology, Hemisinc. Was found to be successful.
We don't know which fields, we don't know how successful.
We just know that they felt there was something to it,
and as a result, research continued until nineteen ninety five,
when the Defense Appropriations Act directs the program to be
(33:31):
transferred to way for it the CIA, and the CIA
keeps working with this. We're not sure exactly what they
did with it, because we don't know what did or
did not make it into a written report. But the
CIA itself later said remote viewing had not been proven
to work by a psychic mechanism specifically, and they assured
(33:56):
us or assured themselves internally, that it had not been
used operationally. Furthermore, the CIA concluded that there was nothing
striking or surprising about its findings after doing research of
their own. Yeah, so now we're at another than a
(34:20):
fork in the road.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
Over twenty million dollars was sunk into this project, of
which we're aware, and to be fair, that is not
a huge figure in comparison to many other strange Army
and CIA projects. But let's remember that the US public
footed the bill here, and this was at a time
when people were, as they are now still in need
(34:42):
of education, medical care, food, and so on. So is
it money well spent? Was it foolish? Is there more
to the story? I don't know, But maybe you're saying, hey, guys,
I'm I'm a person who learns through experience. I want
to fight follow in the footsteps of the CIA and
(35:02):
Army intelligence and figure this out for myself while we
have good news for you friends and neighbors. The Monroe Institute,
as we record, is still operating. It's still around, it
is still selling it's Hemisinc. Program Today. So you can
take a week off yourself and go find out what
all the hubbub is about.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Yeah, and there's everything from many one day programs, or
you can jump on one of their five to six
day consciousness programs and you guys, the Monroe Institutes and
kind of in a silly way, but also in I'm
genuinely interested in this about You could take a class
about energy medicine. You can take a class that's described
(35:45):
as event horizon conscious presence. We could all probably use
a little bit of that nowadays. Or something called animal
and interspecies communication. Now that one I'm into. If I
could talk to my dog, like really know what's going on,
that would be huge.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
That's your pick, that's my pick.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Awesome or event horizon whatever that is.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
So let us know your experience with this, if you
decide to engage in this sort of activity, or if
you take a field trip to the Monroe Institute, let
us know if you've been to this or something like this,
in the past, we would love to hear your stories.
Most importantly, like all classified projects, this was technically a conspiracy,
(36:35):
not a theory. They really spent the money in secret
the Army and then later of the CIA. Yet for
fringe researchers, the admitted conspiracy is simply a distraction, sort
of a red herring to throw you off the trail.
And they'll argue that this sort of experimentation continues today.
(36:57):
So if we took a lot little bit of time
to speculate, to engage in some what iffery, let's see
what would be the best way to conduct this sort
of experimentation without the usual legal limitations imposed by domestic
(37:19):
and international law. First, if we throw morals to the wayside,
you would probably want to set up an institution or
a laboratory of some sort in a place that the
US controlled but was not legally obligated towards, so like Diego,
Garcia maybe, or one of the islands where so many
(37:41):
people have been black bagged in the War on Terror.
And then you would want, of course keep it out
of the news. You would also you would also want
to make sure that you could dope the subjects up
as much as you wanted to see how far into
that state you could get them before there were deletorious
(38:04):
cognitive or physical effects, and then probably just to get
a baseline, you would keep going until if you died.
That's the kind of stuff that you will see fringe
researchers arguing is happening now as we record today. There
isn't proof of that, but that is some disturbing speculation
and just saying that that could happen, which absolutely good.
(38:29):
For all we know it could be happening now. Just
saying that could happen is not the same thing as
saying any of that would result in actual remote viewing,
you know what I mean, or reproducible astral travel and
so on. I'm just saying it is completely possible for
the US and other powerful governments do kidnap people, take
them into a place where ethical constraints do not apply,
(38:51):
and experiment on them.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
There you go, Or you could just, I don't know,
pump some of that binaural stuff the HEMI sink stuff
into the radio waves and see how it plays on
the public overall. Does it have any effects on humans
while they're driving or while they're listening to their podcasts?
Speaker 1 (39:13):
That's very good.
Speaker 3 (39:14):
Did you guys notice the the hemi sink technology happening
in your ears while you're listening to this?
Speaker 2 (39:22):
You didn't because we weren't using it.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
But.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Wouldn't that be cool if we did?
Speaker 1 (39:28):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. It's right let us know
what you think.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
You can reach.
Speaker 1 (39:35):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
Facebook X and YouTube on Instagram and TikTok or Conspiracy
Stuff Show.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK. That's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say, then can fit in
that voicemail. Why not instead send us a good old
fashion email.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
We are the entities that read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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