In recent years, I have had a number of childhood memories
emerge that disturb me very much. These memories are like
the memories of many other people. And I have also found,
buried in some old news stories, startling corroboration for
one of them.
I have also found, in our society, an institution that was
created by two accused child abusers, and has on its board
advocates of pedophilia and CIA officers, which exists to
discredit anybody who has such memories. This institution is
called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. I will be
addressing it later.
I believe that, beginning after World War II, children began to
be recruited for various experimental efforts to
create 'perfect' spies, and to study the effects of the
development of dual and multiple personalities in them.
The idea was that a child would be placed under intense
pressure, abused both physically and emotionally, until, as a
defense mechanism, the child developed a second personality
that the first was not aware of. This second personality
would then be used by the child's handlers in all sorts of
ways. Some of these children were hypnotically triggered to
recruit for CIA on their own when they came of age, and their
hidden personalities were then activated and used by
informed handlers.
I believe that this program started in 1947 or 1948, and
continued on, perhaps into the seventies and even into
current times. It involved the abuse and destruction of many
thousands of children, and the ruin of many lives. I do not
think that it resulted in much long-term success. If that had
been the case, the United States would not have seen its
covert intelligence operation fail during the seventies and
eighties, and would never have had to turn to electronic
eavesdropping as its primary means of gathering intelligence.
But a price was paid in ruined lives, and it is high time
for the
United States to expose the records of this that remain, and
offer the victims the restitution and support that they need.
The government has admitted that it methodically abused
innocents in the MK-ULTRA mind control program and in the
various AEC programs that exposed unwitting victims to
radiation. The book the Plutonium Files, for which its author
won the Pulitzer Prize, exposed the radiation abuses. The CIA
itself admitted the existence of MK-ULTRA under pressure
from congress, and released thousands of pages of
documents that implicated hundreds of institutions, including
many colleges and universities, and many hundreds of
individual scientists and doctors, in the most outrageous
abuse of their fellow citizens, including the secret dosing of
psychiatric patients with LSD.
However, a number of boxes of documents were held back by
the CIA, and its refusal to release them was upheld by a
court order. I believe that at least these documents
contained information about the methodical abuse of children,
and I believe that the CIA takes an interest in the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation because, like sexual abusers
and members of child abuse cabals, it has a vested interest in
keeping the lid on.
I do not believe that the current management of the CIA
shares the concerns of the officials who are hiding this
information. However, it is also true that its disclosure could
have unforeseeable effects, which I will discuss when I refer
to the way in which this abusive training not only developed
alternate personalities, but also ?cracked the cosmic egg? and
made some of these children into very unusual beings.
Nevertheless, the unforeseeable are not likely to be
devastating, or even particularly dangerous, so it's time for
the intelligence community to face up to these abuses, and
admit that children were ferociously victimized as well as
adults, during and before MK-ULTRA.
I believe that pederasts became involved in these programs,
and that they have woven a web of blackmail and intimidation
through many areas of government and society in an effort to
keep their secrets hidden. So far, I believe that they have
been extremely effective, and I wonder if our society will ever
have the institutional energy to face this problem and bring it
to the surface. There have been a number of past attempts.
So far, they have all failed.
Before I continue on, I would like to detail the memories that
I have. They are very fragmentary. I would be the last
person to say that they represent any sort of a smoking gun.
However, one of the problems with dealing with traumatic
childhood memories is not present in my recollections. I am
aware of the problem of dramatization, and have carefully
controlled for it.
Dramatization takes place when a relatively fragmentary
memory is elaborated due to the fact that, as the person
matures, its emotional content is much more intense than the
available memories would seem to justify.
Here's an example: a two year old gets burned on the hand.
To a baby, understanding nothing about fire, the pain is
inexplicable. And the tender young flesh, filled with new and
extremely sensitive nerves, communicates pain vastly more
intense than adult care-givers may realize.
A less than sympathetic caregiver, angry at the fact that the
child has repeatedly ignored warnings, flies into a rage and
beats the child. Initially, the child buries this trauma,
largely
because the child cannot afford to reject the caregiver upon
whom life depends. A few hours later, all appears forgotten.
But, thirty years later, perhaps during a psychotherapy
session, the memory emerges, and along with it the volcanic
emotions that were evoked at age two. The memory is
distorted by time and the baby?s limited understanding that
originally captured it. But emotions on this scale couldn't be
connected with something so minor as a burned hand, could
they? Of course not. So there must be more there. Soon, the
nightmares march, as the mind attempts to find events that
fit these towering emotions.
Over the course of a few more therapy sessions, mother's
moment of weakness becomes a whole childhood of abuse
and sadomasochistic torture.
In order to avoid this kind of thing, I am going to confine my
description of my memories only to the recollections that
came to me spontaneously, suddenly and vividly. I will not
include all of the ?filler? that my mind has conjured up to
explain the memories, because I simply do not trust it.
However, the memories themselves took place spontaneously
and unexpectedly. They were strikingly similar to the
memories of buried trauma described in books like Dr. Leonard
Shengold?s Soul Murder and Dr. Jennifer Freyd?s Betrayal
Trauma.
The first one took place on my first day at a new day camp.
It was June of 1948. I was barely three. I had been removed
from my very placid kindergarten because the nuns could not
control me. This new daycamp had horses, a swimming pool,
trampolines and everything a highly active little boy could
enjoy. However, on the first day, I was tricked into going
naked into a public area during the lunch break. All of the
other children, ranging in age from four to twelve, laughed at
me. I knew that I was younger than any of them, and now I
was being made a fool as well. This agonizing memory has
remained burned into my mind since the day it happened.
By itself, it wouldn?t mean much. Perhaps an older child
tricked me. Perhaps a teacher misdirected me, or I got lost
on my own.
The daycamp has long since been closed down, but a few
years ago I went and walked in its ruins. The old concrete
bath house where this had happened was still there, and I
relived the event again?as well as many other events at the
camp, all of them wonderful. I had a terrific time there.
And then, one night thereafter, another memory flashed into
my mind. This memory was visual. In it, I am in the living
room of a house with one of the teachers from the camp, a
woman who I respected and trusted entirely. My relationship
with her was very southern. I was raised in an archaic
manner with a mammy, and was used to both obeying and
controlling adult authority figures who were not my parents. I
assumed that this same relationship existed with this woman,
so I felt entirely safe and in control of the situation. I
would
obey her, but she would take me where I wanted to go and
let me do as I wished, within limits that she would establish.
A man was there, who I believe was called Dr. Antonio
Krause. I have been unable to find any trace of him. They
gave me coffee out of a demi-tasse cup, richly sweet coffee.
Then I noticed that my teacher was gone. I did not care for
the man, who would not speak to me. I went to look for my
teacher. I wanted to tell her that it was time for me to go
home.
There followed an extraordinary shock. I went into a bedroom
and found her tied hand and foot, with a gag in her mouth.
Her eyes were terrible to see. A blast of absolute terror went
through me. I saw that my control over this situation was
false. I ran back into the living room. I demanded that the
man take me home.
He stood between me and the front door, blocking my way.
At this point, I can remember no more of this incident. I have
been trying to do so for years, but there has never been
another spontaneous blast like the one I have just described.
The next memory involves this same teacher, another
teacher and, once again, Dr. Krause. We drive through the
iron gates of a large estate in the school?s station wagon. We
are taken onto a sun porch. There are about six of us
children. Unfortunately, I remember nothing of the others,
except that they were there. We are given stuffed bears and
told that they are a gift from Stalin. We are then regaled with
stories about how wonderful Stalin is, and how we should all
love and respect Stalin. The other children are delighted with
their bears. They?re happy to hear about Stalin. I am
shocked. I try to explain that Stalin is evil. I won?t touch my
bear. I want nothing to do with Stalin or my teachers or
anybody else who likes Stalin.
For a long time, that was all of that memory. But then, one
summer about four years ago, there occurred another
memory that may be connected to it. I think it is what
happened to me after I declared myself to be against Stalin.
In this memory, I am looking down on myself from above. I am
lying in the lap of a figure who appears a number of times in
these memories. He is completely blacked out, as if covered
by black paint. He is a portly man, and he is spanking me very
harshly. I am suffering so much that I have gone out of my
body and am watching this from above.
I believe that this was a clumsy, stupid and sadistic test to
determine our level of loyalty. Because nothing would
convince me to say that Stalin was good, not even a
devastating beating, I ?passed? the test. Too bad for me.
In another memory of this dark figure, I am at the house of a
childhood friend. I have been stripped of my clothes and I?m
terrified. It?s all wrong. Somebody dreadful is there. I run
out
of the house into the street, holding my clothes in front of
me. My friend, a demonic smile on his face, follows. Hiding in
the doorway is the dark figure.
I do remember who this friend was. He seems to have no
memory of this incident, but he has never really had much
contact with me since we were adults. Once he confessed to
me that there were things he had done in childhood that he
found extremely painful to remember. Other than that,
nothing.
Another memory involved going down to Monterrey, Mexico. I
remember flying in a wonderful plane at one point, a great,
noisy thing that must have been a Ford Trimotor of the
Mexican airline. I recall going to a school that was located in
a villa in the foothills above the city. This was described to
me as a school for brilliant children, and I was quite proud to
go there.
I have very little recollection of what happened there. There
is one flash of memory of seeing another child holding a
bloody saw. I was told that this child had killed somebody
with it. The child appeared absolutely terrified. While this
person, whom I still know well, seems to have no memory of
this incident, she has lived a ruined, disturbed life. She has
never been healthy, either physically or mentally. My wife
tells me that I have mentioned seeing Jewish babies there,
and that I once said that the school was located in a villa
owned by somebody connected with the Pan American
Sulphur
Company. I have no recollection of saying either of these
things. The Pan American Sulphur Company did indeed exist,
and was once a powerful influence in Mexico.
In general, I have found very little corroboration for these
memories, beyond the mysteriously destroyed lives of the
people I recall being with. Of the two who were most
involved, one is a physical and mental wreck, and there
appears to be no reason for it, unless there was conventional
child abuse in this person?s life. The other lived a wasted
life,
dying in his early fifties after he went to the VA hospital
with
a back injury, and was injected with a lethal dose of steroids.
However, there is one very telling piece of corroborative
evidence. Chilling, actually. A few years ago, and some years
after the memories described above, I came across
information about the Finders controversy. My memories
came to me in 1998 and 1999?after I wrote the Secret
School, or I would have included them. I discovered the
Finders material in 2000.
My memory of going to Monterrey, Mexico predates the
discovery of the Finders material. As you will see, this is an
important clue, at least in my research into my own personal
past.
The story of the Finders is a strange one indeed. It may be
the only place where this hidden process involving children
was briefly brought to light. On Saturday, February 7, 1987,
the Washington Post published an article about a strange
case out of Tallahassee, Florida. It seems that six children
were observed in a local park and reported to police because
they seemed to be in a dirty and unkempt condition. The
police found that they were under the care of two men who
identified themselves as Douglas E. Ammerman and Michael
Houlihan.
These men told police that they were conducting the children
to ?a school for brilliant children in Mexico.? The men were
charged with child abuse and the children were taken from
them, and attempts were made to identify them. The children
were traced to a warehouse in Washington, and to a group
called the Finders.
There the story ended, for seven years. Then, on December
27, 1993, there appeared in US News and World Report a
follow-up story. The story stated that no allegations of abuse
were ever proved against the Finders, the charges against
the two men were dropped, and the six children were
eventually returned to their mothers.
That would have seemed to be the end of it, except in 1993,
the Justice Department reopened the investigation into the
Finders, saying that there were ?unresolved matters? relating
to the Finders. The Washington D.C. police had termed the
case ?secret,? and it appeared to investigators that this had
been done at the request of the CIA.
Representative Tom Lewis of Florida elaborated. ?Could our
own government have something to do with this Finders
organization and turned their backs on these children? That?s
what all the evidence points to.? He went on. ?And there is a
lot of evidence. I can tell you this: we?ve got a lot of people
scrambling, and that wouldn?t be happening if there was
nothing here.?
Marion David Pettie, the founder of the Finders, maintained
that there was no connection between the group and the
government, and that the group had never been involved in
child abuse.
US News?s sources, however, said that some of the Finders
were listed in the FBI?s classified counterintelligence files.
Later, all investigations into the Finders were ordered stopped
by the Justice Department, as the case was determined to be
a national security matter. It was referred back to the CIA.
Since then, silence.
For a detailed account of an effort to investigate the Finders,
click here.
I believe that the school in Mexico existed in 1987, and in the
early fifties or late forties when I was there. I think that it
was in Monterrey. In 2001, I drove through that city, and
spent some time attempting to find it. I was unable to make
any progress.
What do I think this was all about? I do not believe that it
involved pedophilia and sex slavery. I have no memory of
such things, and I do not exhibit the behaviors of a person
who has suffered childhood sexual abuse. However, I have a
rich lode of fragmentary memories of the most horrendous
kind, many of them involving Dr. Antonio Krause.
Dr. Krause used to pick me up and take me to classes at a
place called South Gate. I believe that we entered the South
Gate of Randolph Air Force Base for these classes. At
Randolph in the early fifties, Dr. Hubertus Strughold and many
other former Nazi scientists worked on aerospace medicine.
Dr. Strughold has been called the father of American
aerospace medicine. He also headed the Third Reich?s
Institute of Aviation Medicine. At Dachau and other places,
this institute carried out cold water experiments in which
Jews were slowly frozen to death, and hyperbaric
experiments in which they were subjected to lower and lower
air pressure until they exploded. In these experiments, people
routinely died in hideous agony.
Strughold was named Chief Scientist of the USAF Aerospace
Medical Division in 1961. He received the Americanism Medal
from the Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 1985, the Texas Senate declared June 15, 1985 to be Dr.
Hubertus Strughold Day.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League protested when a library
at Randolph AFB was named for Dr. Strughold. "Paying tribute
to Dr. Strughold was an obscene mockery of the pain and
death suffered by his victims," commented ADL National
Chairman Richard Strassler. The Air Force changed the name
of the library.
My memories of what happened to me at Randolph are so
horrific that I can scarcely credit them. I will not repeat the
details here, because I cannot tell the degree to which they
have been dramatized via the process described above.
However, there are a few of those spontaneous, sudden
glimpses that seem undistorted.
In the first of these, I am being dressed by my mother, my
hair being carefully combed. Suddenly, I see out the front
window of her bedroom that Dr. Krause is coming up the front
walk. He is wearing a uniform. I know that I am going to the
school. Then I see my sister running down the driveway,
trying to save herself by going to the neighbors across the
street. I run into my own room and get out onto a single
story porch roof that abuts the back of the two-story part of
the house. I run across this roof and onto another roof. From
this roof, I am able to clamber up onto the highest roof. I go
up there. I stand there, expecting the visitors to save me, to
take me up into the sky. But Dr. Krause comes up on the
roof. There is another recollection, which could be from that
or any other time, of sitting in the back of an old Dodge?his
car?and wishing that the doors hand handles.
This event must have happened after I was nine. Before that
age, I would not have been able to get onto the high roof
because I didn?t have enough reach to make the climb
between levels.
In another snatch of memory, we are leaving the school. I
ask where my friend Mike is. Dr. Krause laughingly says ?he?s
getting a fast spanking.? I am filled with fear, because I
know what this really means. ?Fast? doesn?t mean quick, it
means extremely brutal, ?fast? in the sense that the
implement of torture is being struck with great speed.
In October of 1952, my immune system shut down,
apparently due to extreme stress. I was aged seven years
and four months. Anne and I found my second grade report
card. It indicates that I was out of school due to
ill-health for
six weeks. As I recounted in the Secret School, I again
became ill in my ninth year, and it was during this illness
that
I began to have close encounters.
A psychologist I have worked with tells me that she thinks
that the close encounters were real, and that they involved
literally breaking through into another level of reality in
order
to escape the hell I was enduring in this one. Modern
research suggests that parallel universes may be very real,
and that they may exist all around us. (For a story on this,
click here.)
I think that making this very type of breakthrough was the
purpose of the school. Probably while interrogating
and ?testing? Jewish children during the holocaust, people like
Krause found that certain strange things would happen to
them. I believe that these children would sometimes develop
a second personality that could be used by their captors in
various ways. I think that this same effect was induced in
children here for the purpose, as I have stated above, of
creating adults who would be available as unwitting assets to
people who knew how to control them.
A woman I met in London when I lived there in 1968, who had
survived two years in Nazi death camps, told me some vivid
stories. Among them, that the gas chambers were not
soundproof, and workers on the outside could hear the
screams of those being gassed. ?It sounded like the wailing of
a great wind,? she said. She also said this: ?Sometimes,
children would disappear.? These were children who were
known to have gone into the chamber. But when it was
opened, they were not there. At first, the Nazis accused the
Jewish kapos of stealing the corpses. Some of these people
were broken to bits with clubs and tortured in other ways,
but nobody knew where these children had gone.
Among my worst memories, one that has come back to me
again and again and again over the course of my life, is of
waking up and finding that I am in a coffin. A box. I wake up
when I try to move, and my head bounces against the top of
the thing. I cannot get out. I?m trapped. The silence is
absolute. The air is heavy. Soon, my breathing is agonizing.
I?m in torment. But it doesn?t end. It keeps on and on and on.
I remain for what seems like hours at the edge of suffocation.
I scream, I see demons staring at me, I see angels, I see my
grandfather Strieber there, then I see a long horizon, the sun
either rising or setting.
At first in fits and starts, I am walking. Then I am walking
down a path. There is foliage around me.
The memory ends.
During the Korean war, it was reported that the Chinese used
to torture American POWs by pretending to bury them alive.
Just enough oxygen would be fed into the coffin to keep the
man at the edge of suffocation, until he went mad with the
suffering. When they let him out, sometimes, he would end up
totally dependent on them.
In other words, they were using the same technique. Where
did they get it? From the Russians, perhaps? And where did
they get it? We had Project Paperclip to bring Nazis to work
in the US, but the Russians imported them in droves.
I have returned to San Antonio, in part, to explore my lost
past. Most of what I remember of my childhood is delightful.
But there is this dark side that will not go away. Perhaps it?s
all dramatization. I don?t know. My parents were good folks.
They weren?t perfect, but they certainly would not have
allowed what I am describing to happen to me, not if they
had known. In fact, I think that they got me out of it when I
was about nine or ten, perhaps after years of trying.
Or maybe it never happened at all. I cannot discount that
fact. Looking back, it seems impossible that anything so
outlandish could have happened to me. But then there is this:
About two months ago, Anne and I were going to meet my
brother out near Randolph. I had not been there in years, not
since those days, in fact. We did not go onto the base.
Coming home down IH-35, something very odd happened. I
was driving along the crowded, eight-lane interstate when I
suddenly found myself on an empty two-lane road surrounded
by farmer?s fields. For a moment, I was completely
disoriented. How had we gotten here? What happened to the
interstate? Anne had not even been aware of going off the
highway. She was as surprised as me.
Then I realized where I had gone. At the end of this road lay
South Gate, the south entrance to Randolph. I was going
down a road I had last traveled as a little boy, deep in the
mystery of my childhood, in the lost past. I realized that,
back in those days, you could have gotten from my daycamp
to that place inside of twenty minutes. Or from our house in
under half an hour.
I could not continue on, not then. I turned around. But I felt
my past calling me, the little boy in the box pleading that by
some miracle he will get to enjoy the life God gave him. I
looked at the woman beside me. I took her hand.
Added 8 October, 2006: This journal was intended originally
to be continued. I never did so, because I just don't know
what to make of these memories. Can they be real? If they
aren't, then why do I remember being taken to a school in
Monterry, Mexico, for super bright children, a school at
which horrific things happened, and then seeing this same
claim made by the two men who were stopped in Tallahassee
with a van load of tattered children in 1985?
I just don't know, honestly. But I strongly suspect that the
United States has for years been experimenting on children,
among other things subjecting them to extreme trauma in
order to split their personalities and create secondary
personalities who can be accessed by controllers and used as
agents, but without knowledge of the first personality.
There was a book written some years ago, the Plutonium
Files, by Eileen Welsome, which won a Pulitzer Prize and led
to the United States government apologizing to and
compensating people who had been exposed to plutonium in
outrageous and extraordinarily cruel experiments.
What has been done to children is even more cruel, and
because the people involved have also engaged in
pederasty--probably not sanctioned by their official
employers--an extreme effort has been made to conceal this
abuse behind the usual campaign of disinformation and lies
that our government uses whenever it is in trouble.
We urgently need a competent investigative reporter to look
into this matter. I am sure that much of the record has been
destroyed. But there must be people with better documented
stories than my own, who can be found and induced to come
forward.
But, above all, our responsible media, such as the New York
Times, the Washington Post and all the other important
papers, the news magazines and blogs, and the broadcast
media, need to stop listening to the blather of cover
organizations such as, in all probability, the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation, and start looking under this rock in a
determined and professional manner.
Our government has fallen off a moral precipice in this
matter. It needs to be reminded that it belongs to the
people, not the people to it, and that our children are sacred.