← Haunted Cosmos
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- [00:02]
A
This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap Company Backwards Planning Financial, New Dominion Design Company Stonecrop Wealth Advisors Gray Toe Tallow, the Kings Ridge Elderberries, Reformation Heritage Books, Squirrelly Joe's Coffee, Zilli Creative Works, LLC and our supporters@patreon.com it it's.
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In 1959, a newly published book hit the shelves in the United States under the title the Manchurian Candidate. The book's conceit is a fascinating one. What if you create the perfect assassin? One who does the bidding of a higher order flawlessly but remembers nothing about what he's done? No loose ends? The story follows one Bennett Marko, an intelligence officer and former army major who begins having a recurring nightmare. In it, he and his platoon members are seated still and in perfect order in a shabby room. They're surrounded by nice little old ladies ministering to them and saying things, but things begin to flash to something different, like a glitchy TV screen. The old ladies fizzle out with static and are revealed to actually be Soviet and Chinese soldiers giving them macabre orders. The dream always concludes with the same thing. The old ladies Communist soldiers order Marco's friend Sergeant Shaw to pick up his pistol and kill two of his platoon members. As his dreams increase in frequency and worsen in horror, Marco decides to seek out Shaw and see if he struggles with the same things. Shaw, due to his and Marco's exploits and near death experience in the Korean War, won a Medal of Honor upon their successful return home. This earned his family great honor, which his parents exchanged for political points and favors. Thus, Shaw's father is a prominent senator and Shaw himself lives in a beautiful home with a manservant at his disposal. The old war buddies reunite and rekindle their friendship right away, but Marco cannot escape the sense that something is off about Shaw. He just doesn't seem like himself some of the time. The reader is then made aware of just how right Marco's funny feeling is. It is revealed that Shaw is actually a sleeper agent for the communist powers of the Soviets and Chinese, and that thanks to a psychological trigger, serves as an elite assassin for them who forgets his missions right after they are accomplished. The dream that Marco always has, the nightmare where the old ladies become enemy officers, ordering his friend to kill two of their other friends is actually a repressed memory. It is revealed that the story the platoon remembers from Korea, the story that earned Shah a medal of Honor, was actually a fabrication that the communists had brainwashed them all into believing in reality. They'd all been captured, and Shaw had, granted, against his will, killed two of his own men so that the Communists could have a puppet to use in the States. Marco discovers the trigger that activates Shaw and uses it on him to learn when the next assassination will occur. Shaw, now a mindless drone, tells Marco that his mother, who is revealed to be Shaw's KGB handler, ordered him to kill the presidential candidate so that Shaw's father, who was the vice presidential candidate, can take his spot and gain the White House. Upon hearing this, Marco attempts to reprogram Shaw, but he doesn't know if his efforts are successful, or at least he didn't find out until the fateful day arrived. Marco looked on with triumph as he saw bullets fly past the presidential candidate and instead into the heads of Shaw's own father and mother. But Marco's victory dissolves from his hands when he races up to Shaw's sniper nest just in time to watch his friend turn the gun on himself and take his own life. It's a dark tale, one that elicits some of the strongest fight or flight impulses in its readers. Can you imagine being a pure puppet in the hands of another? Such futility to life, such brute determinism. It's not a human way to live. And look what comes of it. Death. Death for all. Luckily, this story is fictional. We're safe from the dreadful task of having to reckon with these sorts of things in the real world. Or are we? Frank Olson was born to Swedish immigrants in the northern rolling hills of Wisconsin. He lived an average life as a teenager in the 1920s Midwest before earning his Bachelor's of Science and PhD in Bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin. Olson's relationship with his parents is rich and storied and does not come into this tale. The young man would go on to marry his college sweetheart, Alice, and the two would have three children. As the budding family walked the shaky transition between academic life and the real world, Olsen enrolled in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps to add income and pay off college debts faster. Of course, his timing could not have been worse. And when the US finally entered World War II, Olson was called up to active duty and received orders to head south to Fort Hood in Texas. As the prodigious chemist slaved away, eventually reaching the rank of captain, the day would come when Olson would receive a fateful phone call from one of his old college mentors, Ira Baldwin. Baldwin had recently been tasked by the government to head up a secret research program that was aimed at developing new biological weapons. For the European front. Of course, given his impressive reputation as a university student, Olson was at the top of Baldwin's list of recruits to aid him in the program. The whirlwind of military scientist life continued to storm down on the budding Olson household, and it would be a lie to say that tensions did not flare every now and again, But Alice proved to be loyal, loving and respectful to Olson. Thus, following his instincts, the family packed up yet again and moved to Fort Detrick in Maryland. Once there, Olson dove headlong into the shady and gray work of applying his expertise to the ever worsening conditions on the modern battlefield. Here, as with all of his previous work in the field, the man proved to be a master. After his successful partnership with ex Nazis who had been brought into government service via Operation Paperclip to study the validity of an aerosolized anthrax that could be deployed in battle, the army gave Olson an honorable discharge, complete with a civilian contract that would allow him to remain on base and do essentially the same work he had grown so accustomed to. This change in status coincided with an elevation in Olson's responsibility at work. He began to receive invitations to join more and more secretive teams on more and more secretive studies, studies that steadily waxed in both severity and danger to the lives of researchers and bystanders alike. He traveled to Antigua to test the vulnerability of different livestock to toxins released in poisonous clouds over large areas of land. He joined Operation Sea Spray, which saw the US Government release tons and tons of toxins into the coastal mists of San Francisco in order to see how the westernmost city might fare against such an attack from enemies. This particular experiment, which was done without the knowledge of San Francisco health or other civil authorities, resulted in the hospitalization of 11 and death of one US citizen. Olson's outstanding performance in all of these instances led his higher ups to invite him into the inner circle of Camp Dietrich's Special Operations division, a hyper secret team of biological weapons experts tasked with discovering the most effective ways to implement the use of chemical weapons in covert warfare. Within a year of sod's creation and Olson's subsequent appointment, he found himself in the position of acting chief of the organization. As these things tend to spiral ever downwards, Olson's covert studies quickly caught the CIA's attention. And it wasn't long before the man who had been a young husband, father and scientist so few years prior was now an army civilian contractor and a CIA operative in the deepest bowels of the United States. Forays into experimental chemical methods of war. But something happened from the commencement of this dual enrollment in the army and CIA in May of 1952 and the beginning of the new year in 1953 that disaffected Olson. Perhaps it was merely the increasing pressures from the job, perhaps something else. But the result was the same. Frank Olson resigned his position as chief of SOD and and officially cut ties with the army for the sake of a new CIA position. But this change did not actually take him away from the familiar offices and hallways of sod. He still worked closely with the division and kept his family in Maryland. But somehow the nature of his work changed. His children noted that this was the period when they began to notice the dramatic effect their father's work was having on his psyche. He would come home with a deadpan expression and failure to really connect with his kids. It wasn't that he didn't love them or love coming home, but he just seemed incapable of really leaving work. In the times when their dad was able to free himself from this sort of trance, he would tell them stories from work that horrified them to the core. Olson said that his lifeless moods were a product of his daily task of witnessing and assisting in the poisoning, gassing and torture of lab animals. He was in charge of studying the effectiveness of various experimental interrogation methods, determining how effective they might be on people. To this end, he had to start with lesser creatures. He frequently came into work only to find a pile of dead monkeys greeting him beside his desk. His son later commented that his father was just not the right kind of guy for that sort of work. Unfortunately, though, the unsavory aspects of his job only worsened as everything became more gruesome. Olson would travel to international CIA safe houses to observe his experimental interrogation methods being used on real subjects in real time. Prisoners would suffer the administration of drugs, hypnosis, and more classical torture methods in order to see what worked and what didn't. Olson watched countless subjects die due to the torture before the actual endgame was made clear to him. In all of this, the government was trying to find a way to take total control of the human mind. The unwanted side effects of all of this was Olson's ever growing conviction that based on the testimony of these prisoners exacted by horrible violence, the US had been using unlawful and viciously painful chemical weapons against their enemies in the Korean War. Family, friends and co workers all alike began to notice a growing shift in Olsen from dedicated patriot to soulless and disenfranchised cog in the wicked machine of industrialized war. Desperate for some release from the guilt of the hand he'd played. Olson visited a praised psychiatrist in England to get some help. All that resulted from these sessions was the psychiatrist. A man named Sargent reported Olson to the US government, warning them that he was a security threat and ought to have his clearances revoked. The US took this report seriously, but did not remove Olson's clearance or change his mission in any way. Thus it was that a depressed and apathetic at best, Olson was invited by his higher ups in the CIA to attend a special upper Clearance Only Leaders retreat at a mountain cabin in Maryland's Deep Creek Lake. Of course, Olson could do nothing but accept the invitation. When your boss and his boss and his boss all tell you to attend the same little vacation they're all attending, it's no longer an option for you. Nor is it a vacation anymore either. He therefore made the drive and put on a happy and diplomatic professional face for the three days they were all up there. Even he could not deny the incredible career opportunity this was, but ultimately left feeling even more discouraged than he had felt before. In fact, to those closest to Olson, the thing they had thought was mere discouragement and discontentment began to betray a new character. After his little work getaway, Olson's constantly devolving attitude devolved all the more. On his first night back at home from the lake, Olson refused to eat his dinner. He just sat mechanically in his chair and stared blankly at whatever was in front of him. His wife glared back at her husband with a puzzled expression and attempted by her own display of obvious disapproval, to snap her husband out of his strange stupor. Of course, she failed. But over the course of the odd meal, her husband suddenly seemed to come to for just long enough to blurt out, I've made a terrible mistake, before falling back into his cage like a man falling backwards down a set of stairs. She didn't say it then, but the whole scene terrified Alice. It scared the children, too. Imagine the person you love and trust most in the world leaving and never coming back. Imagine what it must have felt like to see some doppelganger return to take his place, some lifeless changeling who reminds you of everything except your husband or your father. One can understand the underlying tension that laced the home with unseen, but also felt discomfort and uncanny apprehension. Anytime Olsen left for work, his disconnected and emotionless lack of care for anyone and everything turned into overflowing frustration and aggression. He hated going into his office. He hated his boss. He hated his job. He hated his co workers. He asked to be fired, and he asked to quit. But Both requests were denied. People described him as appearing disoriented and lost. During this time, he told many people that he felt horrible about his life and incompetent in his field. On the morning of Tuesday, November 24, Olson went to work with his new normal, gruff about him, and immediately tried to resign again. Upon arriving, Alice remembered in tears the strange sight of her husband walking like an Android back down their home's entry walkway that day before lunch. He was accompanied by a CO worker Alice had never met. He never came home for lunch, so she knew something was very wrong. In this way, she learned again, fighting back tears at her own feeling of total helplessness, that he had tried to resign, but they wouldn't let him outside of his normal and healthy state of mind. Instead, they sent him home with a friend to keep an eye on him. They were apparently worried he would try to hurt Alice and the children. He waited there a few hours before his boss arrived with another CO worker, a man named Lashbrook, to take him up to New York to visit a special psychologist that the CIA trusted. Whatever happened between his arrival in New York on the night of the 24th and the black morning hours of the 28th is something mostly lost to us. What we do know is that at 2am on that final day, the Hotel Pennsylvania's attendant watched in horror, as if it was all in slow motion, as a man wearing only underwear and a T shirt flew out of a 10th floor window. The window looked like a mouth. The glass looked like mucus and spit surrounding the man whose face he could not see. The hotel was vomiting Olson out to die, a cursed and broken thing on the unfeeling pavement below. He flew with grace, as if he wanted to dance with the crystalline shards around him that refracted the orange light of the street lamps. It was an image of what had been happening to Olson for many days already. He fell and fell, surrounded by glassine fire, until his body slammed into the concrete sidewalk with an unceremonious thud. The sound of cracking bone and exploding organs, the sound of heavy flesh beaten to a pulp in a single instance, gave the attendant a shock that paralyzed him for seconds that felt like minutes before he finally steeled himself and ran to the man. Olson, now unrecognizable, was still suffering his final, agonizing and paralytic breaths. It sounded like someone drinking a thick syrup through a wide straw. The attendant knelt close to him and told him it would be okay, that he would help him. The the former was a lie and the latter was unnecessary but then he stopped his babbling and knelt ever closer. Olson was saying something. Some dark whisper of secret things escaped his dying lips. But the attendant could never discern what he was trying to say. He died immediately thereafter, long before medical help arrived. When the police stormed onto the scene, breaking into the solemn silence of the world with shouting and lights and sirens, a group of them ran directly up to the man's room, room 1018A, and.
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Broke down the door.
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They saw the broken window, flanked on either side by sheer curtains, caught in the claws of broken glass all around them and pushed outward towards the night by the air inside. They looked down as if to confirm that this was the right window. Foolhardy verification. Then they searched the room and found almost right away another man inside. Sitting on the toilet was a middle aged man in his underwear. He was holding his face in his hands and looked himself to be half dead. The police asked his name. He didn't answer at first. They shouted it again. He said in a monotonous drone that his name was Lashbrook. He had been the dead man's co worker. He went on to say that he had been sleeping when he heard a loud crashing noise that woke him up. He went to the window and saw his friend. He told them Olson's name before walking weakly to the toilet where the police found him. The death was ruled a suicide. The family was told that Olson had clearly had a nervous breakdown that sent him raging and longing for all of it to just end. But that's just where the story begins. You see, the hotel attendant, a gentleman named Pastor, thought it was odd that a man would commit suicide in this way. I mean, why would a guy put on his PJs and then go to sleep, only to wake up at a random hour, run across a dark room as fast as he could, missing two beds, before jumping through the closed curtain in front of a closed window. He didn't like the smell of it all. On top of that, the hotel switchboard operator stepped forward to report something to the police. She said that she had connected a call that night, just after the 2am timestamp of when Olson had supposedly jumped. Since she was on the boards and it was an incredibly short call, she had heard the whole thing. Once the other line was picked up, the caller said, well, he's gone. The recipient replied, well, that's too bad. The operator said that the call had been made from room 1018A, Frank Olson's room, and that the name registered to the room who had received the call was one Abramson as in Dr. Harold Abramson, the psychologist Olson had traveled to New York to see. It would take over 20 years for the truth about Olson to emerge from the fog of lies and official obfuscation. His work in the SOD and CIA, it turns out, had been far more serious and grievous than anyone had known. He had gotten mixed up in something far darker and far larger than he could have thought possible. Those above him, you see, were not merely trying to come up with painful new and creative ways to torture prisoners or soldiers, but into giving up their secrets or succumbing to the American onslaught. No, they were trying to find a way to control someone's mind. They wanted to brainwash people completely and turn them into puppets on their own strings. What's more, they thought they were getting close to figuring it out. But they needed more trials. They needed to practice on someone who really didn't know he was being practiced on an unwitting pawn in a macabre game. So they invited Frank Olson to join them on a work retreat at Deep Creek Lake. They let him get settled in on the first night before throwing a cocktail mixer party on the second. Once Olson was relaxed, they made their move. With neither his knowledge nor consent. The government agency he had given his strength to slipped him a massive dose of lsd. They continued to do this for days as they fed him information and left impressions on him in their most solid, subtle and crafty ways. This, they felt sure, would soon turn him into a mindless slave eager to do their complete bidding once he was fully broken down and won over. And just what was that bidding? Well, they wanted Olson to tell them the truth of how much he knew and what he intended to do with it. Remember, he had been marked as a security threat long before the night of his death, presumably thanks to a second autopsy that revealed trauma to the head and chest, among other signs of struggle that preceded the impact with the sidewalk. They ran the numbers and found Olson wanting. His sentence was secured and his death was therefore a matter of national security. Thus, they kept him subdued and ferried him up to New York, where he was disposed of in a most barbaric fashion. It all had to look right and believable. And it all did. Frank Olson was one of the first test trials and first victims of the CIA's shadow operation known as MKUltra, a program designed to perfect the art of brainwashing its subjects. MK Ultra continued for another 20 years after Olson's death, completely under wraps and shielded from the eyes of all save A precious few at the highest levels of government until it was officially halted in 1973. But what was MKULTRA really? And more importantly, did it really stop in 1970?
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Well, welcome everyone, to the first episode of season four of your favorite podcast of all time and television show and.
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The Joe Rogan exp. Wait, I'm just kidding.
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A
Haunted Cosmos. We're really glad that y'all are all back.
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B
Yes, it is so good to be back here in, I don't know, October.
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A
Yeah, we don't know. We think that this is going to be dropping on October 16th. Like 90% sure.
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We're. We're here in the deeps of time in the year of our Lord 2024.
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A
It is August 6th and we're recording this first episode, so hopefully we're all still around. Hopefully we're alive by the time the world is around.
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We got an election coming up. Really interesting times.
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A
It is interesting times. Perfect time, actually. What a time for the CIA to start wilding out on some more MKULTRA stuff.
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B
This is one of my favorite genres of this sort of. It's not really fortean, but it is strange. When you think about Haunted Cosmos, what are we talking about? We're talking about the nature of the world. We're talking about the nature of the battle between good and evil. We're talking about the nature of that battle as it plays out on a spiritual and a physical plane and how these two are so intermeshed that sometimes it's hard to know where the human begins and the demonic ends, or vice versa. And this is one of those topics. You're going to hear us do these sorts of episodes from time to time that kind of like Dyatlov Pass had some mystery, but it's mainly just a story of mystery from history.
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Yeah, it's really just like this is a story that no one really knows the full answer to. Let's talk about it.
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Yeah, let's talk about it. And I think these are deeply interesting. They're very important for us to understand, really the nature of our own fight for good and evil, even in the nations and times that we live in. And some of the things that the powers that be whom I am convinced are communing with demons on various levels. By the way, when it comes to the elite globalist powers of darkness, these are not just powers that engage in what I would call ordinary human evil, but. But also powers that I believe 100% on various levels, whether they know it or not, in some cases are actually communing with Spiritual forces and being influenced by demons, by dark evil forces that hate God and hate his image bearers and are interested in turning the course of history towards chaos and destruction, much like they were interested in Job's day, in turning Job's life of peace and prosperity into a life of chaos and death. And MK ultra, I think, is a prime example of one of these mysteries that we'll never fully know every detail in our lives because the Deep State is so good at hiding things, but I think these are things that are good for us to be aware of.
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A
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that you really hit the nail on the head of what this whole episode is about and why we're exploring it. It's because the government is not just stuff. Yeah, of course that's right. Because it's part of the world and the world is not just stuff.
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Yeah.
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So there's really a twofold thing here. There's the cool. You know, I'm using scare quotes around.
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Cool.
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The interesting. Yeah, human story, that is what happened with MK Ultra and related programs that are. Yeah, exactly.
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Just as evil, if not more so.
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Exactly. And maybe what's still happening with MK Ultra, whether it's a different name or whatever. But then I really do think that there's a spiritual or if you want to call it a theological aspect, where you can start to ask questions about. Well, if we think that this is. Which I agree with you that this is an example of the Deep State communing with demons, which I believe they're still doing today. Well, how far can we take that? How uncomfortable should we be with the way that the world just is? What does Christ's victory on the cross have to do with these things? His ascension to the right hand of the Father, where he's ruling over the world, like, how far can they go? Are there rules? So we really can actually start to hit on some theological topics that are extremely relevant to discerning how much we should even enjoy. Again, scare quotes, stories like this, and conspiracies like this. Because that's what it is. It's a conspiracy theory that actually was 100% true.
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Well, and you know that the difference between truth and a conspiracy theory at this point is actually just about six months. So.
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Used to be 20 years.
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B
Yeah, it used to be 20 years. Now it's accelerating. Before we continue in MK Ultra, I do want to plug a couple things and just point out a few things. The first is just thank you to our patrons. You guys make this show possible, as hopefully you'll see this season. We continue to up the ante and quality of our production and really put our strength into making this the best possible show that is helpful and interesting and well crafted. And really our goal at New Christen Impress is this is both, like, it's aspirational. We haven't necessarily. I could back up and say we've hit this on every single level, but we're always trying to say what is the best example of a thing that someone in the world is doing in terms of media. Let's not just in the Christian world, but in media generally, can we make something as good as that? And the reality is we couldn't do this without the patrons who support our show every month chip in everything from like the cost of a cup of coffee to some folks, even more than that every month to make the show possible. So thank you to everybody. There's thousands of you at this point. We're very thankful to you. We don't take it for granted that you help us make this show possible.
- [29:19]
A
Yeah, it's unbelievably humbling. And on top of the patrons, you know, we've had corporate sponsors that have come in to sponsor the show. They're an insanely massive help, not only just to us, but to New Christian Impress as a larger project. And that's not possible without just the normal listener. So it really is, it's a team effort. Everyone from the listener that listens every now and then doesn't really care that much to the one who's telling all his friends about it, to the patron, to the corporate. Seriously, thank you to all of you. It is completely a waste of time without you.
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B
And hey, speaking. Speaking of one of the things I wanted to plug, speaking of one of our great sponsors, I actually don't know anybody who has been lured into the MK Ultra program and brainwashed into doing horrific acts of violence. Who was using Indigo Sundry soap.
- [30:05]
A
Exactly.
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And I do just want to say that they recently launched subscriptions, so now you can sign up for a six bar deal. All their handmade seed oil free, Deep state free soaps, you can get them and they've got, if you like that gobbledygook, Dr. Bronner's soap with all the crazy stuff on the bottle. They do castile soap now. They do all of this and you can get all subscriptions, just no code needed. They're all 10% off if you subscribe, so check them out.
- [30:34]
A
I'm going to subscribe because I use that soap all the time.
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B
Absolutely. It's the only thing I use.
- [30:38]
A
I mean, like, I'm not saying that seed oils are the deep state, but I've never seen them in the same room together.
- [30:43]
B
Look, that's a good point.
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A
So I think it's worth. I think it's worth exploring.
- [30:48]
B
It's worth exploring. And secondly, speaking of our patrons, we are doing a special giveaway with this episode. We're going to do it in two directions. Same, same, same prize or reward, but one, we'll give a handful of these away to anybody who signs up for any tier of Patreon support the day this episode drops, whatever day that ends up being. If you sign up today, we'll put you in a random drawing to get this thing. And then we'll also do a handful for our existing patrons as well and put you all in a hat as well, because we don't want to just, you know, say thank you to our new patrons, but our existing ones as well. And we're going to be giving away.
- [31:27]
A
Our book, House of Cosmos, Doing youg Duty in a World that's not just stuff.
- [31:34]
B
75,000 words. Yeah, we're at the time of recording. We're deep in the production and copy editing and all this, but it should be very close to release by the time this episode comes out in, we're going to be doing a couple different editions of it and we'll be giving away, at least, depending on the timing, one of those additions to a handful of both existing. So sign up, support the show. And the giveaway is worth multiple times the monthly.
- [32:01]
A
We can't promise that you'll get the book the day after you sign up. Yeah, it'll probably be a couple weeks. Yeah, it'll probably. But you will. It'll be reserved.
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B
We'll get it for you.
- [32:09]
A
We'll set it aside, it will be yours. And we're really excited. We worked hard. We just sent the manuscript to copy editing. And I think that I can speak for both of us when I say that we're proud of the product and we're excited to see what everyone thinks about it.
- [32:24]
B
Yeah. And it's really a look in the book at what is the nature of this world, of the seen and the unseen, and what should we do about it? A lot of these questions, these stories we tell, they don't always give you, so what do you do and so what do we actually do about it? How do we do our duty as an image bearer?
- [32:40]
A
Yeah. What does the sword that you pick up and run into the fray look like when You're a Christian in God's world because it looks, looks like something. I mean, you have to join the battle somehow. But let's start to hone in on the real point of this whole show. I said that the government is not just stuff. 100% believe that that's true. But why are we talking about this, apart from it just being a fascinating story? Well, I think that it's because MK Ultra gives us an example of the government, in this case the CIA, this large conglomerate of powers that be. They recognized something true. And that is at a really like minuscule level that drugs, psychedelics specifically open up doors and pathways that man can walk in and actually find real things inside of. Now, of course what you find is horrific and satanic, but you find something nonetheless. And so whether you think that this is all just nonsense or a massive waste of money and time or not, you do have to reckon with the fact that over the course of 20 documented years, countless men gave their entire professional lives to this idea that you could give someone LSD or some other psychedelic drug and end up controlling their minds.
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And these just when you see all the reports about government waste, the government spent $135 on a roll of toilet paper, just know that. No, they didn't. When the Department of Agriculture spent X billion dollars on some whatever, just know that they didn't. Some cases they did, but many cases they're funding black programs. And we know this, this isn't speculation.
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A
We know they do this.
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B
That are national security type programs, production and development of advanced weaponry and advanced intelligence gathering operations and all that sort of thing. But you're right, I think one of the things that they recognize is that we're in a war. Maybe they don't recognize, this is not the best way to put it, but we're in a war over the human soul. There's a war that is not just as old as America. It's older. It's as old as the serpent in the garden. There's a war for the soul of man. And it's tempting for the foes of God to believe that if they can control the human mind, and if they can take captive the human soul to their ends, that they can defeat the living God in this cosmic war. And so whenever I see the intersection between human evil and mind control, the degradation of image bearers of God, it's always tempting for me immediately to draw a connection and say, there are some gods whispering in human ears, there are some false gods, there are some demons here. And if you refer Back to our episode on psychedelics, season two, episode ten. Then you're familiar already with the reality of this, with Ayahuasca and LSD and some of these psychotropic and psychedelic drugs. People intentionally use this themselves to commune with the machine elves and with the demons and the spirit of Ayahuasca and the serpents. And it's always connected with death and human sacrifice and all this stuff. But that's not the only vector that it goes in.
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Right?
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Yeah, here's another one that's a more.
- [36:05]
A
Like individual approach to using these things. This is a corporate approach, if you will, a national approach, where they're seeing what can we do if we attempt at least to deceive an entire people. And there's this great quote from Dune by Frank Herbert. It's this saying that the hero and his mother keep using throughout the story. And it's that fear is the mind killer. And I think that that's close. I've said, though, and I think that this is right, that fear is actually the thing that you give your mind to. Whatever you fear the most is what will control you. So it doesn't kill you, it just now uses you. And so this is why that you have to fear the Lord. You have to fear the Lord and therefore fear nothing else, because then therein lies true freedom. But if you give your fear to something lesser than that, or something completely antithetical to that and evil, then you're going to get into some really, really ugly stuff. And so this is kind of the point, I would say that America was founded as a Christian nation. However, even at the founding of America, there was some esoteric stuff in some of the founding fathers personal faith that I think does creep in early on into American culture. And so what you get is this metastasized, matured version of an America that has apostatized and now America is no longer Christian. But here's the thing. People still, even if they're non Christians, they still believe in this American dream, in the higher levels of government, and they think that they're doing a really good thing when they tell people to hope in America alone. Now, they're not necessarily wrong for saying that so far as it goes, that you should actually want good for your nation as a member of your nation, but it can't be your ultimate hope. And so what you get is this apostate America, that the government has now become the sort of statist God where they're telling people to look for them for all of their good, both earthly and Heavenly. And you can't do that to a nation. And so I think that MK Ultra, at least some of the people that ran it, is an example of a person who actually is godless, but they have all, quote, unquote, good intentions. And so they're seeing this tool that can be used in psychedelics, and they're stepping into their role, whether wittingly or unwittingly, and saying that I have to lead these people as if I'm their God, because they're depending on the state for everything. And so they're now willing to tap into any tool. No tool is now off the table because they have to spare no expense for the good of their people. So I think that genuinely with MK Ultra, you have some examples of people that thought they were doing very good things.
- [38:55]
B
Oh, yeah, absolutely. This whole story of Frank Olson, for example, if you are at all familiar with C.S. lewis's essay on Inner Rings, or with the story arc in that hideous strength of the protagonist, you'll notice parallels where the temptation for Frank Olson at first is just, I'm a normal man doing my duty to my country. I'm going to pay off my student bills, I'm going to do honorable work for my people. And it's like you creep up through these rings, these increasingly small rings, where the temptation is always, if I can just do this thing, I can earn the approval of the next smaller ring of concentrated power and influence if I could get into that ring. And then it's like, hey, well, you have to become one of us. You have to adopt our ethical framework and our vision for the good. And that's what happens with programs like this, is that they're not just three or four elite evil psychopaths at the top. There are elite evil psychopaths involved in these things who are absolutely demonized. But you also have thousands upon thousands of workers. Like, the average person working at the CIA isn't, I don't think, bent on destruction of the human soul. Absolutely not. The vast majority of people in these positions, and I grew up in a military family, and all these are just normal, good men and women trying to do their duty. And what happens, though, is that when you unmoor yourself from the good and the true and the beautiful, which are inflexible things that are inflexibly defined by God's character, if you unmoor yourself from those things, then what you do is you end up establishing in midair your own version of the good and the true and the beautiful. And what tends to happen is that you develop some vision for the ultimate triumph of good, and you will ultimately do anything to achieve the triumph of whatever good it is. So if, for example, in these cases, the ultimate good you can achieve is to defeat communism in the KGB and to defeat Soviet Russia and defeat Communist China, and you're in US Intelligence or you're in military, then all of a sudden, what's a drone strike on children in another country? What is invading a foreign land and toppling their ruler unlawfully against the laws of nations? What is the sacrifice of a few dozen people to test some method of warfare that might kill hundreds of thousands? Thinking of that. Operation Sea Spray. What is the destruction of one man and scientists and his three children? What if we learn through this LSD experiment how to save a million lives, and all of a sudden what you've done is you've become God. Hey, Ben, I just read that our great grandparents probably experimented with butter on their dry skin as a moisturizer. Is that why you look so radiant?
- [42:07]
A
Maybe it's Grandma's Butter recipe. Or maybe it's Gray Toad Tallow.
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B
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A
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B
For more information and to get a sample pack, check out gray toad tallow dot com. Don't forget to use the code COSMOS15. That's all caps. Cosmos15 for 15 off your order.
- [42:44]
A
Bing.
- [42:51]
B
Ben, do you know what's weird?
- [42:53]
A
The fact that Gobekli Tepe contains advanced technology far beyond the time period in which it was made.
- [42:59]
B
Okay, nerd, I was thinking more in the vein of health and wellness in this cold and flu season.
- [43:05]
A
Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elderberries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and antiviral compounds that our bodies crave.
- [43:20]
B
And that Trevor and Autumn at the King's Ridge grow and produce the freshest elderberries and elderberry syrup known to mankind?
- [43:28]
A
Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that, but did you also know that they're running a special for haunted cosmonauts? That's right. If you use code haunted, all caps haunted, you can get 10% off your first order@tkrfarm.com.
- [43:45]
B
Dude, absolutely the best news I've heard today. Want to start reading the Puritans? But don't know where to begin. Puritan Treasures for Today from Reformation Heritage Books makes the riches of these godly writers of old accessible for the modern reader.
- [44:05]
A
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B
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A
Foreign Escape Master the fantasy speed card game made by Christians with Christian families in mind is now live on Kickstarter. There are only two days left in Zach and Lily's campaign, so act now to unlock years of family fun for the price of one day's dinner. Click the link in the description and help Zilli Shape culture for Christ.
- [45:07]
B
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A
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B
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- [45:53]
A
In the Description Investment advisory services offered through Stonecrop Wealth Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission. It actually is. It's kind of like the Temptation of Boromir where he sees the ring, this tool that the enemy's using and he can get his hands on it. And so he therefore assumes that it actually is a gift and a tool that he can use rightly. There are some tools in the world that are just innately evil because we live in a fallen world and they're so twisted and so corrupted that man doesn't have the capacity to redeem them with his own efforts. It's something that is just off limits. Like magic for example. Witchcraft is something that is just off limits. It's not because it doesn't work, it's.
- [46:44]
B
Not because you couldn't do things with.
- [46:45]
A
It, but it's because it works well and man doesn't have the capability of rightly using it.
- [46:50]
B
Man it wasn't a tool that was put into the hand of man.
- [46:53]
A
Exactly. And I think that this is one of those things where with all good intentions, for some of them, some of them just absolutely evil, but some of them, I think, you know, like you're saying normal guys, even in a machine that's evil, there are cogs.
- [47:07]
B
Yeah.
- [47:07]
A
And cogs don't tend to be the ones that are deeply bought in, you know, to the demonic influence. But nonetheless, it's still being pushed in this one direction. And so I think that that actually is a really good point. And the whole episode, we should be thinking to ourselves, why any of this at all? Like, what's the motivation behind wanting to control someone's mind, behind wanting to brainwash? Well, it's all to achieve some end that is being marketed as the greater good. And so you should just ask yourself, even in your own life, just to get pastoral for a second, what's the small steps that you're taking in the wrong direction, but that you're justifying for some greater good?
- [47:53]
B
Oh, it justifies the ends justify the means here.
- [47:57]
A
And this is the whole thing with the inner ring in that essay from Lewis is it's just. It's one little step at a time. And they feel so reasonable when you're doing them, and they're so easy to justify on paper, but there's that little tinge in your conscience that reminds you that, yeah, but that actually isn't good, but it seems like it's gonna achieve some good. And so you do it, and then it's the next step. And before you know it, you're like, you're killing your friend, you're killing your.
- [48:23]
B
Family, even the people that covered up the death of Frank Olson, whether it was. It was murder one way or the other, murder via driving him insane and him killing himself, or directly pushing him out a window and telling him to kill himself, or whatever it was. You can think that even at a point of evil that extended in the back of your mind, you've installed this new operating system that says, this is bad, but it's for something that is worth it, and so it's justified. We have to protect all of the people in America, therefore, we have to. We have to take up this tool. And tools aren't neutral. Tools aren't neutral things. A sword can be used to fight for good or for evil, but taking up the sword is an act in itself that shapes you. You think about King David, who was a man who wasn't allowed to build the temple because he had blood on his hands. Most of the blood on his hands was blood of enemies who needed killing.
- [49:14]
A
It was just blood.
- [49:15]
B
It was justly shed in just war in many cases. But the taking up of the sword in itself actually does something to the person taking it up. These are not just neutral acts. The way that we use tools affects us.
- [49:32]
A
Yeah.
- [49:33]
B
So things like medical interventions can be used for wonderful good, but also they can be used for great evil. But either way, the taking up of the thing does change you.
- [49:45]
A
It's another Tolkien reference. You see this with Boromir. Obviously, he wants to take up the sword, the Ring. And for that desire, he's willing to eventually kill Frodo or harm Frodo. Betray Frodo at the very best. Obviously, he repents. But you also see this in another Tolkien story, the Children of Hurren, where. And it's sort of a subplot, but there's this black sword. And the name escapes me, but there's this black sword, and it's this amazing gift that an elf receives from his king. And the Queen says, you know, you should be cautious with the sword. It's hungry for the blood of the one who wields it. And we see that there's all these twists and turns in the story, and it ends up being that this elf's best friend, because he took up this sword, is actually led through, like, mania and confusion to use that sword to kill his best friend. And then he takes up that sword in respect for the friend that he killed. Cause it was an accident, but then he ends up taking his own life with the sword. And you get. It's this amazing part where the end of the story, it's so sad, but he's looking at the sword and he asks the sword, you know, will you do it swiftly? And the sword replies with this hissing breath, I will gladly drink your blood fast, and you won't feel a thing. And so there's this sense in which, like, tools can sometimes just like, you don't want to take this idea too far, but tools can sometimes be so persuasive in what they lead you to do. Like, they're. It's like you're saying they're not neutral.
- [51:18]
B
No, they're not neutral.
- [51:19]
A
They actually shape you as you pick it up and then as you use it. And if you're not careful, they can shape you in the completely wrong direction.
- [51:26]
B
Yeah, absolutely. You see that? And it's not to say that, like, people make this stupid conclusion sometimes where they say, like, the ring represents civil like the use of power at all. And so we have to forsake the wielding of power. No, that's not true at all. But the ring represented evil and corrupted power in its nature. It was irredeemable, the Ring, because it was the essence of the strength and power of basically a demon of a demon God.
- [51:53]
A
And what does the ring do, just to take this metaphor to the very end? Well, it ends up changing the mind of the person who's corrupted by it. And it makes them hunger for things and lust for things and want things that they normally would never have thought of. You see, this was Smeagol, even with Frodo. But of course you see it with, with, with Sauron.
- [52:11]
B
And so ultimately in MK ULTRA they certainly succeeded in mind control. But one of the things that is important to see is that the people perpetrating the evil had been successfully controlled in their minds and souls by evil and powers above them, and also by their own inner growing evil, fed often through good intentions, but into wickedness.
- [52:39]
A
And I actually think that just looking at the history, the bullet point type history of MK Ultra will help show how true that that is.
- [52:47]
B
Yeah, why don't you take us into this with unit 731 and some of the lead up to the MK Ultra program.
- [52:54]
A
Glad. After the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, they decided to set up a biological research facility named Unit 731. The Empire thought it would be an ideal test facility for chemical weapons research, among other things, like testing the effectiveness of psychological methods of interrogation. Unfortunately, it quickly evolved, fueled by the sadism of Japanese leadership and rules of engagement at that time, into a final form that is simply too grotesque to outline on this show in its fullness. And I really mean that. I would not feel good about telling you everything that was done to the Manchurian subjects forced to undergo the trials at this facility. Instead, we'll have to settle for the knowledge that Unit 731, far from an innocent biological warfare research center, was actually one big torture chamber. Let a general overview of the atrocities suffice. Chinese civilians would be taken from the streets of Manchuria only the healthiest ones before being exposed to lethal toxins or viruses. After observing the immediate reactions of the subjects bodies, the bulk of them would be euthanized in order to have their bodies autopsied as quickly as possible. Men, women and children would suffer unanesthetized surgeries, sometimes even removing major organs from fully lucid subjects in order to see the human reaction to such stress and trauma unsurprisingly these experiments were almost always fatal. In addition to the vivisection, prisoners would have limbs amputated again with no anesthesia, so that the doctors could study rates of blood loss and its effect on the survivability of a wound. Prisoners were used as living targets in weapons testing. These weapons included grenades, flamethrowers and bayonets or knives. Subjects were placed in freezing temperatures with no clothing for long periods of time so that the doctors could study the rate of frostbite spread and how fast it killed whatever appendage got onto it. People were deprived of food and water, were buried alive, had seawater injected into their bloodstream, were exposed to massive X ray machines with no protection, were spun to death in centrifuges, and were variously electrocuted. It was a living hell for the prisoners, none of whom survived. That's right. As far as we know, there was not a single human survivor of unit 731. When the top brass learned that the Allies had won the war, they rounded up all the remaining prisoners who were still alive at the time and unceremoniously murdered each one. The bodies were cremated, and the remains were then buried beneath the floor of unit 731. But why bring up this especially evil place at all? Well, it is for the reason that there was another kind of torture that took place there, one that served as a seed for the leviathan that would someday become MK Ultra. It turns out that the men at the helm of unit 731 were constantly looking for opportunities to practice various methods by which they might brainwash their subjects and take complete control of their minds. Of course, this was done by the administration of psychedelic drugs, the psychological and physical breakdown of the victim, and other methods of torture that are too gruesome to mention. This information came out during the trials that followed the war and the discovery of what had already taken place in Manchuria. Thus, the CIA became privy to the fact that the Japanese had likely made great progress in this field. In 1951, a small group of CIA scientists and operatives arrived in Tokyo for a most grisly affair. A group of four doctors who had worked in the upper levels of unit 731 needed to be executed for their heinous crimes. But both governments thought it would be best to get some information from them before losing them forever. The group therefore took the four doctors to a secret location where they were given a cocktail mixture of depressants and stimulants, something they clearly hoped would work as a sort of truth serum. As the line of Questioning turned from technical things regarding successful mind control to deeper questions of espionage. In the Cold War that started right after the treaties were signed for war, World War II, the American agents learned that these mind control experts had been recruited by the Soviets to help them develop their own forms of brainwashing and Manchurian Candidacy, so to speak. Now, holding on to the information they wanted, the CIA operatives took the prisoners on a ferry and into the harbor, shot them and dumped their bodies overboard. Unfortunately, though, the story of unit 731 does not stop there, for not all of the doctors involved in it were punished, thanks to the still effective Operation Paperclip, which began as a way for the US Government to smuggle Nazi scientists into the US to help us technologically in the war effort. Some of the most well practiced perpetrators of Unit 731 were smuggled into the US and given intelligence positions at all levels. One such man was actually the operational head of unit 731, a man named Shiro Ishii. For his crimes, he was punished with a one way ticket to America's Central Intelligence Agency. And now I think it's important for us to outline the facts about MKUltra, including key events in its history and key players in making it into the infamous thing that it became. And in order to get to MKUltra's genesis, we actually have to start years earlier with something called Project Bluebird. During the Korean War, the US Intelligence community became shocked at their enemy's apparent ability to turn the mind of American POWs completely around, so that after a time in the prisoner of war camps, they ended up hating America. Upon their return home, the American POWs acted so much like security threats that the US started to treat them as such. In conjunction with this, the CIA learned that Soviet agencies were growing more and more adept at mind control with each passing day. As these two facts coalesced at the high level, America's leaders realized that they were far behind in the arms race of psychological war as any good leader does. CIA Director Allen Dulles sought to turn this weakness into a strength by killing two birds with one stone. They needed to win the Cold War in the and that meant espionage and covert assassinations just as much as it meant technological one upmanship. Ergo, the call to develop sleeper agents, super assassins that could be placed anywhere in the world and could act at a moment's notice, rang out in this same call. Dulles alluded to the growing field of brain warfare that America would need to engage in. This laid the groundwork for Project Bluebird which later went by the name Project Artichoke. The CIA had intel about Soviet methods of mind control and publicly recognized its wickedness and antithesis to American values. But behind closed doors, the CIA performed similar techniques on foreign enemies in France, Germany, and South Korea. This meant that Project Artichoke was a deep state shadow project funded by the blackest money imaginable. But it was funded well. The endgame of this project was stated in documents that were later released as a measured attempt to see whether or not a person could be made to involuntarily perform an assassination or other major crime. The project, because of this goal and the intel gathered from the Doctors of unit 731 and other POWs who had escaped Soviet and Korean torture soon began to dabble in methods of brain reprogramming that included hypnosis, forced addiction to morphine, lsd, and other psychedelics. These things assisted the team in developing amnesia into a tool that they could use on the human mind. An example of just how dark this MK Ultra predecessor got can be found in the case of Kurt Blohm. Blohm had been a leading Nazi cancer research during World War II who had stood at the helm of Germany's version of Unit 731. After the war, he was eventually arrested by the US Counterintelligence Corps, but was able to hide his identity for at least a while. Nonetheless, he was taken to the Corps secret headquarters so they could have time to figure out what to do with him. Once better intel arrived informing them of Blohm's status as Chief Deputy Health Minister of the Third Reich, the Americans decided he should be held for interrogation before eventually being executed. The subsequent interrogations eventually led to a doctored acquittal at the Nuremberg Trials. Lo and behold, just a few months later, Blohm was working under Sidney Gottlieb on Project Artichoke. His past records were completely wiped clean, and the CIA employed his expertise in wiping the minds of prisoners in order to learn how to create a perfect assassin. Eventually, he stopped working for the CIA and just went to resume his medical practice in West Germany, where he died a free man in 1969. But as this more elementary program was operating in the background, Director Allen Dulles was already hard at work finding ways to hide funding for what he hoped would be artichokes big brother, MKUltra. And while this is all a product of Dulles leadership, he of course employed means to accomplish it. Chief among those means was the man I just mentioned, named Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a lead doctor in the CIA and chief of the newly formed Chemical Division, Gottlieb would go on to become the face most often associated with MK Ultra's terror. Following direct orders from his boss to forego the usual channels of experimental CIA program operations and approvals, Gottlieb began working on moving the introductory Project Artichoke into the grown up and very real MK Ultra. The program that would lead to hundreds of clandestine mind control experiments over the following two decades on subjects who were unaware and unwilling to participate. The underlying question motivating all of the work remained. Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation. In one famous case, two 19 year olds were found to have multiple different personalities implanted into the psyche of each one. These personalities had been created by the doctors of MK Ultra and could supposedly be engaged via keyword, even spoken through the telephone. Once in the mindset of these other quote unquote persons, the subject could be hypnotically controlled to do anything. Once he was brought out of his trance state, he would be fed foggy memories bordering on complete amnesia that made it impossible for him to properly remember what had happened. Another case was that of a young woman who was hypnotized and given a gun despite having displayed a crippling fear of guns just before. She was then told to wake another subject up from a deep sleep. By any means possible, the first woman in her trance decided to fire a shot shot right beside the sleeping woman without any hesitation or second thought. When the test was over, the woman who had shot the gun vehemently denied ever doing so and reverted back to being afraid of the firearm. As MK Ultra fully absorbed Artichoke, it also added 149 other classified projects beneath its banner and funding. Thus, MK Ultra became one of the largest shadow operations to have ever taken taken place. One such sub project, numbered 54, was led by the Navy and sought to find a low enough sound frequency impulse that could be aimed at a person's head and whose impact would wipe a certain amount of memory without the victim knowing. In all of this, almost none of the experimental subjects had any idea what was being done to them. The CIA gave chemical cocktails to mentally impaired boys at a special school to see how they would react. They performed hypnosis on American soldiers and included a memory wipe in the hypnosis so that they couldn't remember it. They even gave psychedelics to sexual psychopaths imprisoned at state hospitals to see if it would change their sexual appetites or behaviors in order to find a true Manchurian candidate. Soldiers who excelled in high stress environments were brought in for testing. High performing men from submarine crews or paratroop companies were sought out, but so were military criminals, men who had murdered fellow soldiers and had been court martialed. One soldier who had been trained to become the perfect assassin, a man named Bishop and codenamed Benchwarmer, recalled the drugs they gave him as being powerful enough to turn any average Joe into a heartless robotic killer of anybody else, and powerful enough to leave no memory at all of these acts once they were done. Early on, Dr. Gaultly hired a man named George White to assist him in carrying out these experiments. Gottlieb was initially attracted to White due to his apparent lack of all human sympathy and decency. He liked that he was a psychopath. But as you might expect, this didn't come without its costs. White, in addition to employing sex workers in his trials to overwhelm male subjects until they totally gave their minds over to the drugs that he was administering, also personally, personally kidnapped dozens of citizens in New York before taking them again personally back to his own house to be drugged and interrogated in various ways by him. He would then wipe their memory and White would send his report back to Goldlieb after putting the subject back onto the streets. As MK ultra matured, the experimental methods started to change. Dr. Ewan Cameron, a Canadian turned American citizen, was brought on and immediately started brainwashing and reprogramming or remapping trials on children. The kids would be brought in, given a heavy dose of LSD, and then would be locked in a tiny confined room called a sleep room. They would be sensorily deprived and rendered nearly lifeless. In most cases, the children were stripped of their memories and sanity and were forced to live out their days in an institution. This led to more ambitious experiments with adults as well. In one case, Cameron brought in a married woman to be remapped after breaking her down into a sort of vegetative state. She was then strapped to a chair and forced to watch hundreds of hours of reprogramming footage on the television. Or she'd have reprogramming audio blasted through headphones into her ears. Eventually, she was so well wiped clean that she couldn't remember a single thing from her birthday up to the moment treatment had begun. Not only did she no longer know her husband, she didn't even know what the word husband meant anymore. Much of this culminated in things like Spellbinder and Project Monarch, which brought in 10,000 scientists from Germany and Japan, which is no coincidence, to finally create the first super assassin who could operate on six different levels. Those levels were as follows. Alpha level, which improved memory retention. Beta level, which was sexual programming that eliminated moral values and personal inhibitions, along with deadly force programming. Theta level, psychic programming via mind control and implanted devices in the brain. Omega level, a self destruct feature that would prompt the assassin to commit suicide if he or she believes he's compromised. And then, Gamma level, heightened awareness of when one is being deceived by another person. And here's the thing. They were successful in all of this. They did all these things. And they did many more things too. Time fails to talk about every little piece of sordid and disgusting history in this corner of the world. And while it was ultimately the continued investigation into Frank Olsen's death that led more eyes to Gottlieb and MKUltra in the 1970s, the program was officially halted and Gottlieb was brought before Congress. Of course, he was able to broker a deal to save himself, but his baby, MKUltra, was finally dead. At least on paper. You see, documentation clearly shows that the closing of MK Ultra in the 1970s was not the end of the CIA's attempts at mastering mind control over subjects. Things like MK Search and MK Naomi made that very clear. This paper trail is so obvious, admittedly scant, but nonetheless obvious, that an author named Tom O'Neill presents a compelling case in his book Chaos, that the CIA actually never stopped their practice of mind control, but rather perfected it. After all, why would they stop something so useful to their ends and something they had become so, so good at? So the thing to really point out is when you're tracking all that history, you should think about what we said after the cold open. Yeah, that. It's just. It's these small steps. It's like, oh, what they did in unit 731 was so horrible, but they were also onto something real, which is the complete mind control of someone else. This is a tool, a weapon that our enemy is going to be using against America. We need to try to get ahead of it. The only way that we can get ahead of it is by working with Doctors from unit 731 or working with Nazi scientists. But what they're failing to understand is that it's a tool that's wicked on its own to begin with.
- [70:49]
B
Right?
- [70:50]
A
And so immediately what happens? Well, they stop using it on America's enemies, like political enemies in France and Germany and Korea, and instead they just Immediately realize we have to use it on people that don't know that it's happening. Well, if we go over to Russia, the Soviets are gonna understand that these American scientists are doing something funny. But if we just do it in America to existing psychiatrist clients or to soldiers that are already going through these psych evaluations or to random people on the street, like that guy was kidnapping and giving LSD to.
- [71:25]
B
Unbelievable.
- [71:26]
A
Like all of it was with this idea that we're gonna protect our people from this horrible enemy. But it quickly devolved into we're actually just becoming worse than the enemy would have been anyways.
- [71:37]
B
Yeah, it's. I mean, you can do thought experiments on this that I think are interesting. Like. Cause it's all about an arms race. What drives it is an arms race. If we could. They're developing this so we can't fall behind, so we have to develop this. So then it's a vicious cycle where you end up developing increasingly evil. And then when you add into that the monetary and power value of military industrial complex and how much money is at stake in these things and how much power brokerage can happen if you're the person who can provide these services, and pretty soon the meta question of good and evil and what a society ought to permit at all gets completely lost.
- [72:23]
A
Yeah.
- [72:23]
B
So I mean, you could do a thought experiment where it's like, let's say that you had some kind of technology that if you could torture one person that it would destroy an enemy army. And the better you tortured that one person, the more effectively you won. It's ridiculous. Example. But you could see how. Oh well, then the US government's gonna find out. How can we keep a guy alive and keep torturing him more horrifically and more horrifically? And it's all for the greater good, guys. It's also that we can. But that's the kind of tool that you just go, no, no.
- [72:57]
A
Like the purely materialist and even humanistic calculus would say, yeah, you should torture that guy.
- [73:05]
B
It's like utilitarianism would say, yeah, absolutely right.
- [73:07]
A
But the thing, like the thing is that since the world isn't just stuff, it transcends this mere materialist calculus. It trans. This mere utilitarianism. It has to.
- [73:17]
B
It's like doing math inside of the parentheses in a longer equation and thinking that, you know all the information to get the right result. Well, there's stuff outside the parentheses. Like in this example, you have God in heaven looking down and judging the hearts of men and directing the course of history. So it's like, you can't just go materialist utilitarianism. Otherwise, there's nothing you can really say about any of these things.
- [73:46]
A
Right? And, I mean, some of that gives you hope and comfort, because there is God. He is transcendent. He is good. And Christ is also reigning right now over the world. So ultimately, these plans come to nothing in the grand scheme of God's history. Like, they aren't going to win at the end of the day, but that doesn't mean that what they are able to do and what they are able to accomplish isn't genuinely tragic and isn't genuinely sad. And you can easily see how this train of thought of, like, okay, I'm gonna do it to protect my enemies. Oh, I've become kind of like the enemy myself. But I'm getting really good at this now. Suddenly, someone's in the White House that is disagreeing with me on an issue that I really care about as a Defense Intelligence Director. Well, maybe he should just be eliminated.
- [74:34]
B
Maybe I could just take that person out.
- [74:35]
A
Exactly. One of the authors of one of the books that I was reading, who I can't remember, said that it was commonly believed at that time that Allen Dulles, the director who really started MKUltra, was the most powerful man in the world.
- [74:52]
B
I believe it.
- [74:52]
A
It wasn't the president. It was Allen Dulles. And so you can understand how he might start thinking again, you know, maybe for the greater good. Well, actually, that person in Congress or in the White House that's getting a lot of power, I know that they disagree with me about this thing, that I know that I'm right on. So what's more important? The life of my family and the life of all the families in the country or that man's life? Brian, I got bad news the other day. I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself, and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in, like, a heavy wool blanket. And then also I started googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts.
- [75:42]
B
Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone disrupting chemicals? They're probably turning you into a girl.
- [75:51]
A
Well, I know that that now, but what am I supposed to do about it then?
- [75:54]
B
You ignorant normie? All you've needed to do is go to indigosundrysoap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties.
- [76:07]
A
Okay, I am literally going to indigosundrysoap.com right now. Tell me what to buy.
- [76:12]
B
Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you. You could get the men's six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle.
- [76:20]
A
Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men's six pack, cuz that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't.
- [76:28]
B
So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show, Indigo Sundry Soap Company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps, discount code Haunted Cosmos, no spaces.
- [76:40]
A
Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Description?
- [76:45]
B
Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description.
- [76:48]
A
Okay, so I'm gonna go to indigosundrysoap.com I'm gonna pick the men's six pack bundle and I'm gonna use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout. All caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show.
- [77:01]
B
Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified.
- [77:10]
A
We are living in the beginning of a new Reformation. Christian content is being produced at a rapid rate. Art businesses, publications, ministries and a thousand other mediums are acting as agents to get us out of our current anti Christian world. And all of these mediums are going to need marketing to help them get more eyes and ears on them.
- [77:29]
B
New Dominion Design Company is ready to provide that help. Unashamedly Christian, New Dominion Design Company exists to labor alongside fellow members of the body of Christ as we engage in this great work of reformation.
- [77:41]
A
With over 15 years of design and marketing experience spanning across multiple industries, new Dominion Design Company was launched in 2024 to help like minded businesses, ministries, institutions, publishing houses and other content creators around the globe raise the bar of excellence in our Christian culture.
- [78:00]
B
If you're ready to build new new Dominion Design Company is ready to work with you. Visit newdominiondesignco.com that's newdominiondesignco.com and reach out to Jenkins for all your graphic needs. And as always, that link will be in the description.
- [78:15]
A
If you have a young family like me, then you work hard every day to ensure that you care properly for them. Providing for a young family is challenging with rising costs and it doesn't look like things are going to change in the near future. Maybe you've thought like I have that I wish I had started investing years ago. Maybe then my family would be in a better financial position. Well, like they say, the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago, but the second best time is today. Don't let the benefit of time go to waste on your financial planning for retirement or inheritance for your children. Joe Garrisey with Backwards Planning Financial works hard to help families achieve their goals. He's a Christian who works with one of the largest and most trusted financial service companies in the world. Whether you have millions in assets or are just starting to invest, Joe Gerrise can help you reach your goals to grow the kingdom and leave a good legacy for your generations. Visit backwards planning financial.nm.com that's backwardsplanningfinancial.nm.com or call Joe at 615-767-2555 to prepare for the future. The testimonials presented may not be representative of the experience of other clients and are not a guarantee of future performance or success. Brian, you know what's a bummer? There aren't many skincare products that are both good for you and also not super flowery or feminine in how they smell. Sometimes I want to smell more earthy but still good. You know what I mean?
- [79:49]
B
Totally my guy. But actually our friends at Gray Toad Tallow just dropped a new option for their skin product called Sandalwood and Vanilla that ticks those boxes to perfection.
- [79:59]
A
Dog, please tell me it boasts a less aggressive scent that doesn't smell like potpourri. And can it be used on sensitive areas like your face?
- [80:08]
B
Of course it can. Just head over to greytoedtalo.com and that's greytoetalot.com to explore this new product and more, including their brand new Tallow Sunscreen.
- [80:18]
A
What?
- [80:19]
B
Enter code COSMOS15 that's COSMOS15. All caps for 15% off your order.
- [80:26]
A
Are you a Christian struggling to find companies that align with your values and beliefs? Well, Squirrelly Joe's has you covered for at least all of your coffee needs.
- [80:36]
B
All of their coffee is hand selected and roasted fresh every day by a family of fellow believers. Try them out and you'll savor exceptional coffee while knowing that your investment supports a company committed to following God's teachings. And upholding truth and righteousness, ensuring your hard earned money contributes to the growth of God's kingdom.
- [80:54]
A
So stop giving that hard earned money to pagans who support evil. Instead, buy Christian. And right now Squirrelly Joe's has a fantastic offer for our listeners. You get your first bag of coffee. Coffee for free.
- [81:07]
B
What?
- [81:08]
A
All you have to do is cover shipping. Are you kidding?
- [81:10]
B
What?
- [81:10]
A
So head over to squirrellyjoes.com haunted cosmos that's squirrelyjoes.com haunted cosmos to claim your free bag of coffee. Let's flip and go link in the description below. I'm a poet, didn't even know it.
- [81:26]
B
And this is the reasoning we the thing people might hear this and go, that's crazy because I, my conclusion is that there are certain people or like if a person with certain positions, political positions, like let's say national self interest, like some kind of nationalism, Christian nationalism sort of thing that were genuinely an amazing Christian nationalist that was going to say we're a Protestant nation, we're going to secure our borders, we're going to secure our homeland, we're going to do all these things. And I think that currently that person could not make it to the White House because they would kill him. Yeah, like in the current state of affairs, it's highly likely that that person would be killed somehow, some way before they got there. And it's funny because people might hear something like that and what we're talking about and say like, wow, this is crazy. You know, all these wild, unhinged conspiracies. But here's the thing, guys. We know that the CIA and the US government does this in other parts of the world. We know we topple regimes, that we replace leaders with ones who are convenient to us, whether that's for economic reasons. Maybe a leader is attacking the US dollar, maybe a leader is attacking an oil exchange. Maybe a leader, whatever it is, we've done this. Not a few times. I mean, we've done this. This has been one of our main strategies in terms of global like over.
- [82:53]
A
A dozen times this is happening that we know of.
- [82:57]
B
We'll fund this army, we'll fund this assassin. We'll do this. So making the leap to oh, but they would and then saying all of a sudden, but they would never do that in America.
- [83:06]
A
That's absurd. That is the place that they would most do it because they care most about it. You know, care.
- [83:12]
B
It's like the fourth Amendment. Oh, except we're allowed to basically surveil our own citizens without warrants, without their Knowledge continually on every level, all the time, in league with large corporations as well.
- [83:26]
A
Right.
- [83:27]
B
Which we know they do. This is all stuff. We just know that they do this.
- [83:30]
A
Yeah.
- [83:30]
B
Oh, and we'll just, you know, Patriot act, it's all legal. Cause it's to fight terrorists.
- [83:33]
A
Yeah, they use 911 as an excuse of convenience.
- [83:37]
B
Yeah, convenience.
- [83:38]
A
I'm just gonna say that. Exactly. You know, and again, like, the reason that this isn't fear mongery, the reason that we can still like sleep easy at night as Christians and be cool with it, is because since Christ has one, apostasy never works. I mean, it never worked before, but it especially doesn't work now. So in national apostasy, these evil powers that be, they're like cannibals. They just eat each other. Like evil just eats itself. Now it has nothing more to do than to die the slow death and desperately throw haymakers as it goes down. But that means that over time it just topples itself. So really, I just want you to be encouraged. Christian time is on our side. We got a long time left on this world and all of it's going to work out to the glory of God. That means that these things, they'll ultimately come to nothing.
- [84:27]
B
Yeah. Nations rise, nations fall, the demons lose.
- [84:30]
A
And so this is more a study in like, well, how does the nation fall when it has, you know, taken on this tool of wickedness?
- [84:39]
B
Yeah.
- [84:39]
A
What kind of things might happen? Yeah.
- [84:41]
B
Well, let me take us into a story of something you may have heard about. And maybe you haven't heard all the details, but it illustrates some of our questions here about the extent and possibilities of the results of MK Ultra.
- [84:56]
A
Brian, can you tell us about Sirhan Sirhan?
- [85:10]
B
Just after midnight on June 5, 1968, the aspiring Democratic presidential candidate walked up the steps of the stage where he would be speaking in just a few seconds. His legs felt like Jello and his mind swam with innumerable thoughts. Everything from euphoria to anxiety hit him all at once in a whirlpool of excitement. He was actually doing it. He was actually living out the underdog story that so many people had doubted could be possible. He was, of course, Robert F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. And his primary victories over Eugene McCarthy, his only real opponent for the candidacy after Lyndon B. Johnson dropped out of the race in Indiana, Nebraska, California and South Dakota meant a turning of the tide on a national scale. Although his political career had really taken off upon the death of his older brother JFK some five years earlier, nobody really expected the relatively young Phenom to put up a legitimate fight for the nomination. But as he took the final steps toward the podium to address his supporters on that night, the sense of triumph over naysayers made pride swell up inside the man. His chest grew and he seemed to be taller, as if some ancient God was giving him a glory he had never carried before. Of course, this is all very understandable when one considers how tough a road it had been for Bobby thus far. His professional life began, even for a Kennedy, humbly enough. Sure, he came into wealth and power and prestige, but many other people are born that way, too. The Oval Office nonetheless remains a far off dream for them. No, Bobby started his work as a reporter for the Boston Post, as an investigative journalist in Palestine in the late 40s. The situation there was growing less peaceful and certain by the day, and his dispatches proved invaluable in helping steer American opinion on the affairs there. He continued in similar work for years before his brother, John F. Kennedy, became president and appointed Bobby to the role of Attorney General of the United States. In this role, and as an ad hoc counselor for his brother, Bobby flourished. This let him have his choice for what to do once President Johnson came to power after his brother's death. Ultimately, he chose to finish out the term as attorney general before launching his own campaign for senator, a campaign he ultimately won during the next cycle. His tenure in Congress coincided with the onset of the Vietnam War, a war Kennedy strongly opposed and gave way to some of the most volatile politics America had seen up to that point in her history. Thus, one can understand the sense of achievement and serendipity Bobby felt as he placed his hands against the wooden rails outlining the podium, took his deep breath, and began to speak. Though crowds of reporters and talking heads surrounded him, though his donors filled the auditorium in front of him, though the cameras flashed and fans yelled at wildly unpredictable intervals, all was quiet for the young Kennedy. The world's distractions melted away, as they always did while he spoke words of encouragement to his fellow countrymen. He concluded his speech with the optimistic words, so my thanks to all of you and on to Chicago and let's win there. Then the whirlwind returned with a vengeance. Reporters shouted questions at him, and supporters volleyed shouts of praise. The noise was mayhem, but Bobby was still in his element. He shook hands and shared smiles with everyone he could while his security guards and the maitre d of the hotel he was speaking at grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him through the bowels of the hotel kitchen to his next event. Warm faces of sweaty congratulations streamed by the campaigner ever faster while his people bobbed and weaved him through the narrow corridors of the workplace that served as a beating heart of the hotel. But just in the midmost of all the glory and honor in the world, a 24 year old Palestinian national named Sirhan Sirhan stepped into Kennedy's left flank. He pressed the cold metal through the air until it hovered just next to his target's flowing cloak. He, much like his victim, took one final breath. And then he pulled the trigger on his gun until all of the.22 long rifle rounds he could get off had flown into Bobby's flesh and splayed out into his muscles, organs and blood vessels. The mad rush of joy turned to confused fury, sent both men's worlds spinning. Bobby fell to the ground while men attempted to wrestle Sirhan to the same place. He kept firing. Five more people were wounded. Meanwhile, Bobby's friend cradled his head and slid his folded jacket beneath it to support the man. Bobby opened his eyes and asked if everyone was okay. His friend said, yes. Bobby responded, everything's going to be okay. Robert Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:44am on June 6, 1968. His wife Ethel was three months pregnant with their 11th child. The alleged shooter, Sirhan Sirhan, was of course imprisoned immediately and was subsequently sentenced to death. Only the death by gas chamber never came. A California Supreme Court decision, People v. Anderson, meant that Sirhan could now expect to spend his life behind bars without the possibility of parole. And this added time in prison has led to strange things coming to the surface about this incredibly mysterious man. He and his family had moved to the US when he was 12 years old, and yet Sirhan never gave up his Jordanian citizenship status, despite multiple opportunities to do so. He tried his hand at becoming a horse jockey in Southern California before receiving a head injury that forced him to quit and seems to have also inspired a great interest in religion for the man. He thus drifted in and out of Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist churches before finally finding esotericism and joining the Order of the Rosicrucians. During his prosecution, despite having a tape containing Sirhan's full confession in a context that seemed completely within the realm of law and order, the presiding judge refused to accept the confession and also refused Sirhan's request request to change his plea from not guilty to guilty. Something, so they say, didn't smell right. The judge then rejected Sirhan's request to have his legal counsel withdraw themselves from the case. But then in another strange twist, the judge had to Also deny a request by the legal counsel to recuse themselves from the case. The judge then had all of these requests sealed from the documented proceedings. But the reason real strangeness comes in. When Sirhan's appeals lawyer Lawrence Teeter started looking at the case, something was not adding up. He had heard the theories of there being a second shooter before. He had heard the people crying that Sirhan had actually not fired any weapon at all. He had dismissed those things for his own reasons and yet still could not shake the feeling that something wasn't right. Finally, Titor found it. Combing through old trial transcripts landed him on the account for from one of the shooting's eyewitnesses. The man asked about the appearance of Sirhan before and after the shooting was filled with language that triggered some connection for Titor. The witness claimed that Sirhan was incredibly composed and that he almost seemed completely devoid of emotion both before and after the firing had finished while getting swallowed by a mob of people. Titor then remembered the stories he had heard about MKUltra. He also remembered the stories about how Bobby's brother's assassination was far from a simple case of the one man show. Titor latched onto the idea, especially after getting to know Sirhan more and more over the years, that he had been indoctrinated into a Manchurian Candidate type program and had been brainwashed by MKULTRA operators into killing Bobby Kennedy for the CIA's own interests and ends. His history and personality profile all lined up perfectly with the type of vagrant and troubled individual MK Ultra would have been interested in in those days. Titor took this conviction to his death in 2005, never once wavering from the claim that Sirhan had been brainwashed and hypnotized and was not anywhere near his or anyone else's right mind when he pulled that trigger. Sirhan, for his own part, denied further legal help upon Titor's death, opting instead to live out his days in prison without further appeal. So this is one of those examples where we have a story with no conclusion that we can reasonably draw in terms of our like, certainty. Dude, dude, what a face that you've got.
- [93:50]
A
Flipping rfk, jfk. It was not so simple. It wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald. It wasn't just Sirhan Sirant. It was also like brainwashing.
- [94:01]
B
Yeah, we just. This is one of those cases where if the Deep State is doing these sorts of things, they're also going to make it as hard as possible for you to know for certain that they did these sorts of things, but there are so many, and I hope we get into more of them in this season and maybe future seasons.
- [94:17]
A
100%.
- [94:18]
B
Talking about some of these other cases where maybe what you've heard isn't 100% what happened or even 1% what happened.
- [94:27]
A
Yeah, because there's like the conspiracy theory iceberg, you know, where it's at the top it's like, oh, MK Ultra. But then at the very bottom, it just says, like, Sirhan Sirhan.
- [94:38]
B
Yeah.
- [94:38]
A
And so it's part of MK Ultra because everyone's heard the idea that there was a second shooter.
- [94:43]
B
JFK.
- [94:44]
A
Even Bobby Kennedy Jr. Thinks that there was a second shooter for both JFK and RFK.
- [94:50]
B
Yeah.
- [94:51]
A
But what a lot of people fail to realize is that Sirhan Sirhan's appeals attorney, Lawrence Teeter, was convinced for multiple decades, by the way, that actually what had happened was he had been taken by the CIA, brainwashed with hallucinogenics, and then sent to kill Robert Kennedy. And then apparently he was supposed to forget about it, but maybe he didn't quite forget about it. Maybe it kind of went wrong. Like, that's crazy to me. That's his whole conclusion, this guy's.
- [95:22]
B
And he knew it more than we did, but he's no slouch.
- [95:25]
A
I mean, like, I don't know if I could graduate law school. It seems hard. And this dude just goes in, smart guy, and he's like, no, I know exactly what happened. MK ULTRA happened, baby. MK ULTRA did happen, baby. I'm hanging my hat on this one.
- [95:39]
B
No, I actually. I lean that way too. And I think that when you look at some of the motivating factors surrounding some of these assassinations or murders that seem MK ULTRA related or various programs, whether it's MK Ultra or something, basically the same thing, you constantly notice that a lot of the people they kill are people that are like, hey, we're gonna do something about the military industrial complex. Hey, we're gonna do something about the perpetual globalist war machine. Hey, I don't think that that's in the best interest of the nation.
- [96:10]
A
Hey, I actually don't want to go to Vietnam and die.
- [96:13]
B
And then you have. So you notice that, and then you notice that. Why is it that both on the left and the right, virtually everybody who wins, whether they run this way or not, they will almost always govern towards War Hawk. Yeah, they will almost always govern towards. Oh, yeah, you know what? But you're right. We should topple governments, and we should be involved in perpetual and endless quasi wars across the globe, this police state of the world, this whole. Which are often not in the interests of the nation. And you ask questions like that, and then you get to a guy like President Trump in his first term, who was not a war hawk and hasn't been and has actually been fairly effective in negotiating various ends of hostilities or preventing hostilities, I think.
- [97:00]
A
And then what happened to him?
- [97:02]
B
Well, but even before that, the point I want to make is that he was not a guy that was seriously expected to win.
- [97:10]
A
Right.
- [97:11]
B
He is a total populist outsider, and that's the kind of guy you have to have. Anybody who comes up through this whole system, I think they've shown politicians, like, we'll kill you.
- [97:23]
A
Yeah.
- [97:23]
B
And the other thing I'm curious about, I don't know if I've said this on Hana Cosmos. I have a suspicion, though, that in many political offices, something happens the first. Let's say that you win a campaign and you've campaigned as, like, I'm gonna take on the deep stage and all this stuff. I think the first day you get in your office, you notice the thick manila envelope on your desk, and you go, huh, what's this? And they say, well, this guy dropped it off. The aide said, it's for your eyes only. And so you open it up and it's a dossier full of whether real things that you've done or totally, believably doctored, like, here's what we're gonna do. If you don't just vote this on this. Or if you, you know, you can't change all overnight. But here, just. Here's what. There's a steering wheel.
- [98:04]
A
Yeah.
- [98:04]
B
And if you don't, hey, by the way, we'll kill you. We'll destroy you and your whole family forever.
- [98:07]
A
As Joe Rigney might say, they have their hand on the steering wheel of the guy's life.
- [98:11]
B
Have you seen. I'm convinced that that happened.
- [98:13]
A
Did you ever see that video? So I think that, too. But part of why I think that is because of that video with Matt Gaetz. Have you seen this? Where he's like, they're in the Senate hall or whatever, and they're about to do a vote. I don't remember exactly the context, but anyway, everyone's kind of up and chatting. He's sitting down, he's smiling, talking to his buddies, whatever. I don't know if they have buddies. And all of a sudden, some woman leans over him and shows him something on a tablet or like in a folder, and he just goes, I mean, deadpan. Like you would think that she just showed him a picture of his child dying. Wow. I mean, all the color leaves his face and he's like. And he sits back and starts breathing heavy, gets really visibly uncomfortable. And then I don't remember what happened after that. Like if he voted some unexpected way. I don't know. But I saw that and I was like, okay, okay.
- [99:12]
B
Like, are you flipping getting me right now?
- [99:13]
A
You know, it looked like the way that Bush should have looked when they told him that the South Tower fell, you know what I mean?
- [99:19]
B
In the classroom.
- [99:20]
A
But of course he didn't because he knew that it was going to happen.
- [99:24]
B
Maybe for a future Haunted Cosmo probably just lost about the 30% of normal people.
- [99:31]
A
I'm just saying, like, I'm not just saying just question everything, but not everything.
- [99:35]
B
Not everything. But do just know.
- [99:37]
A
Just question some things though.
- [99:39]
B
Like the deep state's bad.
- [99:41]
A
Yeah, 100% deep state is so bad. In fact, it's so bad that we're going to close out this episode with one of the most mind blowing connections that I did not expect to make at all in researching for this show. So I'm going to go ahead and talk about a little guy that we all might know by the name of Charles Manson.
- [99:58]
B
Yeah, thanks for listening guys. It's been a great episode. We'll keep the conversation going, Let us know what you think. YouTube comment, hit us up on Twitter somewhere and keep telling your friends about the show. And we hope that this season four of Haunted Cosmos is the best one.
- [100:14]
A
Yeah, best season yet. Everyone comment how handsome Brian looks if you're watching on YouTube and hey my.
- [100:20]
B
Guy, get some Indigo sun drinks.
- [100:22]
A
We'll see you guys in two weeks. After the brutal and nuclear ending to World War II, the world fell into a brief period of watchful but utterly paranoid peace. The bombs had opened Pandora's box. Now existential fear hung loosely over everyone's head at every moment. This paranoia, while not solely to blame, is a large reason for the Cold War going on for as long as it did. It is largely to blame for the brutality of the Korean War and even Vietnam as well. Again, paranoia isn't the only factor. Hatred of communism that came too late after World War II is the primary driving force behind these things. And that hatred at its most base level is good. But the paranoia served as jet fuel poured over a smoldering and hot bed of coals. The flames of espionage and war and civilization unrest were stoked to a chaotic degree. And the west was desperately hanging on for dear Life in the midmost of this turmoil sat a number of variables important to our study of MK Ultra. There is of course, the existence of MKULTRA itself. There was also a hyper liberal hippie committee infiltrating the west coast at an alarming rate. And lastly, there was a far left political wing marked by fanatical action activism that at the time was epitomized in the Black Panther movement. Into this fray lurched a character that has gone down in history as one of the wildest psychopaths the world has ever seen. But is there even more crazy to this man than what we have thought before? The character I'm referring to is, of course, Charles Manson. On the clear and quiet night of August 8th in the year 1969, a group of friends were enjoying their evening evening in the home of up and coming Hollywood director Roman Polanski, who was away from his home at the time. His girlfriend, a young actress named Sharon Tate, was the party's hostess and though eight and a half months pregnant, was still eager as ever to live her Hollywood dream to the fullest. Her ex, a man named Jay Sebring, and another couple, Woquetsch Frykowski and Abigail Folger, rounded out the intimate group of cocktail mixers howling at the moon. The sunset gave way to full dark with radiant stars. The music hummed low to those walking outside of the home, and bursts of laughter from the good timing friends rang through the windows sporadically. It was an ideal night for these young stars in the modern Babylon. But doom's footsteps approached with vengeance, tiptoeing along the black asphalt until it stood just outside the front door of Polanski's home in the form of a car driven by one one Tex Watson. Watson, months maybe years prior, had become close to Manson, a man with undeniably massive levels of charisma and gravity toward the hippies that surrounded him. As time passed, he formed a cult following that hung on his every word, especially those which spoke of the Helter Skelter prophecy. This prophecy, given by Manson, was his narcissistic attempt at reading the times in which he lived. He saw the moral and political insanity of his day, the racial tension that lay just beneath the surface of seemingly every conflict, and the growing boldness of the Black Panthers. He saw it and he feared what it could mean to him. It was inevitable. It would all result in a nearly apocalyptic race war in the States that would see whites driven to near extinction and blacks driven to docility by the massive outlet of their aggression towards rich white folks. Sensing this conflict, Manson Prepared a commune near the deserts of Death Valley and informed his followers that when the first shots were fired and the first fists were thrown in Helter Skelter, they were to follow him to an underground bunker in the wilderness. There they could live out the conflict in safety and peace until the blacks were content with what they'd done. After that time again, according to Manson, he would lead his people back to society where they would rule over the remaining blacks in a sort of benevolent dictator type role. It's all very weird, unfortunately, since Manson, despite what he so wanted to believe, was not God, he could not know for certain when this race war would eventually break out and allow him to rise, to rule and usher in the post war utopia. But this did not deter the madman for long. Eventually he started tailoring his message to the grisly truth that since the war was no doubt going to happen sometime, it would actually be better for them to get it over with sooner. Thus the breadcrumbs of brainwashing were laid for Manson's followers. That soon led to him commanding them to start the war themselves before retreating with him into the desert. And so we have the rich soil that sprouted the Tate LaBianca murders that are some of the most prolifically studied homicides in history. And this with good reason. The level of persuasion Manson exercised over his followers was unheard of. These people were willing to do anything for him without apparently much convincing at all. What sort of thing gave this street sweeping man of average intelligence this kind of influence? I mean, at his command, Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Anne Tex Watt Watson. Tied up a family they had never met before, beat them in their own home, and then primitively killed them before dipping their hands in the victim's blood to write messages on the home's walls that read Helter Skelter and Death to Pigs and Rise. On the same night, just after this, Manson sent the same three followers without him to Polanski's home where Tate was partying. There they murdered everyone, including the very precious pregnant Tate. With absolutely no hesitation or second thought. They then used Sharon Tate's blood to write Pig on the Wall. Just months before, these people had been average hippies walking through downtown la, confused and without any sense of how big the world was and how long history had been building up to them. How did the change. How did the change happen so fast? Well, there are some who think they know the answer. For while the prosecution blamed the murders on Manson being highly motivated to begin Helter Skelter for his own personal gain, and for being slighted by one of the victims for what he hoped would be a record deal. These things don't seem to make sense of everything when one digs a little bit deeper. Sure it provides a basic motive. But the murderers did an obviously bad job of framing angry black men if they were hoping to start a race war. And it doesn't explain how Manson was so incredibly effective in getting people to believe him. Indeed, those who settles for the mainstream narrative for it all fail to see a key part of the larger puzzle. In the time between Manson's first crimes and his full blown mass murder by proxy, he spent multiple years either in prison for short times or on parole. And the nature of this parole parole was very interesting in that it was so loosely held that Manson essentially had leave to do whatever he wanted with no punishment. That's right. Petty criminal and ex con Charles Manson was given leave by the state to live a relatively normal life before the mass murders that would eventually make him infamous. But this isn't all the oddity. Manson's parole officer, a man named Roger Smith, seemed to be one of Manson's greatest assets to helping him do this. Manson was arrested multiple times in this period for all sorts of things, and yet his parole was never revoked. Roger Smith was constantly writing letters to D.C. informing them of his lessening the severity of the parole for Manson's sake. At one point he even asked D.C. for permission to let Manson move to Mexico and live out the rest of his life there in in peace. Why was this serial but at the time still petty criminal calling the shots with his parole officer? In the late 1960s, a former Air Force psychiatrist named Dr. Lewis west took up residence in the neuroscience research center at UCLA around the time that the CIA took great interest in the powder keg social structure of liberalizing in hippie infested Southern California. Being the chief experimental psychologist in such a place made the CIA's and specifically MKUltra's microscope zero in on him after all. And again, in the eyes of the CIA, the high volatility of the location made massive civil and political unrest almost guaranteed. This of course means that a handful of perfect Manchurian Candidate like assassins would be very helpful and of great interest to the Agency and the person on the ground that made the most sense for them to utilize in capitalizing on this need was of course, Dr. West. The problem is, Dr. West denied ever having done any work with MK Ultra or the CIA in general at all. It is worth noting just how strange of an assertion this is for Dr. West. When the location, opportunity, skill set, funding, institutional power and agency interest in activity all line up to make him the perfect man for the job. Additionally, no other upper level psychiatrists in the area were ever tagged to assist MK Ultra in anything either. So if not Dr. West, then who? Surely one cannot propose the idea that the CIA just left Southern California to lie untended, to wallow in its ridiculous state. After all, the CIA is the great meddler. Well, one. One man named Tom O'Neill, a man we've mentioned earlier, could sense how bad this all smelled and started to do some digging. Once he learned that Dr. West had passed away, O'Neill reached out to UCLA and requested access to all of West's documents. Once this was granted, and after a full summer of tedious reading through some of the most brain numbing papers O'Neill had ever read, he finally discovered a diamond in the thick rough. A letter from Dr. West to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the man who ran MKUltra. And the letter was dated back to 1952. This breadcrumb led to a proverbial feast of letters between the two doctors that unsurprisingly went well up into and beyond Dr. West's first days at UCLA. The doctor's whole career was built on a lie of telling people that he had no involvement with the torture fortress MK ultra, when in reality MK ULTRA was the demoniac program that made his career. It seems the web of lies built by this thing expands far beyond what everyone expects. But we started this closing story with Charles Manson. So what does this business with Dr. West have to do with him? His weird relationship with the parole officer? And with his supposed helter skelter driven mass cult murders in his 20th, after 20 years or so of being secretly funded by the CIA to try and secretly brainwash unwitting customers, Dr. West opened an off the books kind of safe house in a place called Hite Ashbury. At this place he opened a free research clinic where desperate customers or court ordered clients would be allowed to receive his services pro bono, so long as they agreed to participating in the experiments Dr. West wanted to run. However, he would not always tell them about all the experiments he was running. Thus, he was able to recruit dozens of subjects for MKUltra operations, with the subject still not being privy to what they were actually signing up for. Of course, west was only one man and could not always be at this clinic, but the demographic of people coming into it, the poor, the disenfranchised, the ex con, was perfect fodder for the work that got him his real money from the CIA. So west deployed a right hand man by the name of David Smith to manage this free clinic at Hite Ashbury. And this man, David Smith, was the one whose name really became synonymous with the work done there. But there was another name that eventually also became synonymous with Hite Ashberry. That name was Charlie Manson. In the years between his arrival in LA and his cult leadership, the years that saw him doing whatever he wanted while in and out of prison under the watchful or not so watchful eye of parole officer Roger Smith, Charles Manson would make weekly trips to the clinic in order to actually have his parole meetings with said officer Roger Smith. Remember, the free clinic was also a kind of safe house or a CIA funded halfway house for ex cons trying to reintegrate into society. Isn't that something? The man who would go seemingly seamlessly from low level criminal to cult mastermind who orchestrated the mass Manson murders via the hands of his followers, spent hours each week for many years in a room with psychiatrists who were being paid by the CIA to run mind control experiments on unconsenting clients in order to try and make a perfect killing machine. Obviously it causes one to one wonder whether or not Manson may have been trained in the ways of MK ultra. Maybe he was the subject that got a bit too out of hand, the one that really got away. Maybe. But what do I know? It would be far better to hear from someone closer to the situation. Luckily we have just such a witness. When author Tom O'Neill asked lawyer and psychiatrist Alan Sheflin, the man who wrote one of the first books on MK ULTRA titled the Mind Manipulators, whether or not he thought Manson had been a CIA experiment gone wrong, the doctor replied with the grave and simple. I don't think it was an experiment gone wrong. I think it was an experiment gone right. What other things can be traced back to MKUltra? How deep does this deep state rabbit hole really go? Join us in the next episode to find out. It.