Dr. Ross is also the author of 27 books, including, The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists, Military Mind Control: A Story of Trauma and Recovery and The Great Psychiatry Scam.
In his book, The C.I.A. Doctors, Dr. Ross provides proof, based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained from the C.I.A. through the Freedom of Information Act, that there have been pervasive, systematic violations of human rights by American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. He also proves that the Manchurian Candidate "super spy" is fact, not fiction. He describes the experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects.
In The Great Psychiatry Scam, Dr. Ross provides evidence that modern psychiatry is actually a pseudo-science, with many of the main accepted theses about the causes of human mental illness actually disproven by psychiatric experiments and research.
Running Time: 02:36:00
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Here's the transcript:
Niall: Hello and welcome to SoTT Talk Radio. In the studio this week are myself Niall Bradley, Joe Quinn, say hi Joe.
Joe: Hi there.
Niall: We've also got Pierre Lescaudron.
Pierre: Hi.
Niall: And Jason Martin.
Jason: Bonjour.
Niall: Back by popular demand.{laughter}
Jason: Yeah.
Niall: So this week we're going to be speaking with Dr. Colin Ross. Dr. Ross is a psychiatrist who received his MD from the University of Alberta, Canada in 1981. He completed his specialty training in Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba in 1985. He is the author of over 170 papers in professional journals, most of them dealing with dissociation, physiological trauma and MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder.) More on that later. He is a past president of the International Society for the study of disassociation and trauma, and a former Laughlin Fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists. Dr. Ross founded the Ross Institution for psychological trauma in 1985, a private organization of specializing in treating mental health issues. He's also written 27 books, including The CIA Doctors - Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists, Military Mind Control - A Story of Trauma and Recovery, The Great Psychiatry Scam, and Trauma Model Therapy - A Treatment Approach of Trauma Dissociation and Complex Comorbidity. And now in his book The CIA Doctors, which we've got a copy up here and were reading it this week. Dr. Ross provides proof based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained by the CIA. Excuse me, from the CIA through The Freedom Information Act. There's been pervasive systematic violations of human rights by a American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. He also proves that the Manchurian candidate super spy is fact and not fiction. He describes the experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes and new memories in the minds of experimental subjects. In another book read this week, The Great Psychiatry Scam, Dr. Ross provides evidence that modern psychiatry generally is actually a pseudo science. Something that we've talked about on this show before, that many of the main accepted thesis about the causes of human mental illness are actually disproven by the psychiatric experiments and research. So Colin, welcome to SOTT Talk Radio, are you there?
Dr. Ross: Yeah, I am. Thanks for the introduction.
Niall: You're very welcome. Thanks so much for agreeing to come on. It's a pleasure having you with us speaking with us today. I suspect many of our listeners will be familiar with you to some degree or another. I know that I wasn't so familiar with your name but, I recognized your face before because you've been on TV, in the media, and in fact I first recognized you in a documentary called "Evidence of Revision" - The assassination of America. Which is a... I'm not sure if you heard but it had clips of you speaking to U.S. TV channels about Multiple Personality Disorder, CIA involvement, and so on and so forth. Before we get into that, I thought I'd open this up by asking you, given that you're an expert on this, to explain to our listeners what Multiple Personalities Disorder is. How it develops in people.
Dr. Ross: Sure. There's controversy about it like there's everything about psychiatry. Basically, it's one of the recognized disorders that's in the Manual and it's in the new edition of the Manual that's coming out in a couple weeks. And it's been recognized in the Manual since the 1980 edition. It was kind of tucked away in another section prior to that. There's a history of...in case reports and interests in it going back to the 19th century in psychiatry and psychology. So basically, it's when you have "different people inside." Now, they're not literally different people, they're not literally separate personalities, but they feel, act, look, and behave as if they are. So, it's not true that there's literally a bunch of different people living in the same body. It's a psychiatric disorder. You have a different people of different ages who take turns being in control of the body, and there is usually some combination of amnesia between one part and another part.
Niall: Okay, well that's a key point right there. Quite often one part is unaware that there are other parts. Is that correct?
Dr. Ross: Sometimes there's no awareness. The out-front person is just by convention called a host personality. So, fairly often the host personality doesn't realize these are other people inside. Sometimes those personalities can tell you he is so and so age, this age, and have this color hair and this name and this other person is this age and so it varies. Some people have no awareness whatsoever. Some people have kind of little fuzzy awareness and some people know a fair bit at the time they're initially diagnosed.
Pierre: Maybe you could explain the differences between schizophrenia and MPD because there seem to be some confusion between those conditions, some misdiagnosis. You quote it in your book about CIA experiments. So, is it the same? Or what are the differences between those conditions?
Dr. Ross: Well that question is actually a very complicated problem in the mental health field. One of my books, it's called Schizophrenia - Innovations and Diagnosis and Treatment. It's all about this problem. Which is ninety nine percent ignored in the regular general schizophrenia field. But, in the dissociative disorder field, which is multiple personality as is officially called dissociative identify disorder, so it's one of the dissociative disorders. In the dissociative disorder's field there's quite a literature about this. What are the differences, what are the similarities, how you tell them apart? If you go to the National Institute of Mental Health or any schizophrenia information website, you will hear and read that schizophrenia is a brain illness. It's genetic. It's not caused by childhood trauma and it's got the following symptoms, and it's not multiple personalities. And so, the idea that it's multiple personalities or split personality is just dismissed as confusion in the general public. The psychiatry profession, including all these experts on schizophrenia, act as if the difference is very clear that multiple personalities prove very rare. Most psychiatrists will never see a case and often these people say it's not only rare but, pretty questionable that it's real at all. They just don't think about it on day in day out basis. But, actually many of the symptoms are very similar. I've done a whole bunch of different research studies on this. So if you go to a group of people who have a stable diagnosis of schizophrenia from a physician, psychiatrist, psychologist and you interview them with a standardized interview that inquires about dissociative symptoms, twenty five to forty percent of these people who supposedly have schizophrenia, will come up with the diagnosis of dissociative identify disorder. Other way around, if you interview a large group of people with long lasting stable diagnosis of dissociative identify disorder, using the standardized interview, as many as two thirds will come up with some sort of schizophrenia or schizophrenia related diagnosis. Actually, the reality of the situation is that the official diagnostic criteria and the standardized interviews used for research can't tell the difference. So, what are the differences and what are the things in common would be the next question. So, I'll launch in to that.
Niall: Go for it.
Dr. Ross: The things that are similar and that they have in common are auditory hallucinations, hearing voices and the voices can either be coming from inside the head or from outside the head. They can be friendly, hostile, there's no real feature of the voices that leads you to automatically say for sure, "oh this is a schizophrenic voice", as opposed "this is a dissociative voice". The only research in that regard, that's showing a bit of a hint, is probably people with multiple personalities have more child voices than people with schizophrenia. So, hearing voices is actually a symptom in common and is a whole long workshop to go into why I think voices are dissociative in general. But, that's the number one point of confusion. Then there's several other symptoms and especially if the voices are talking to each other or the voices keep a running commentary on the person's behavior. In the 1994 edition of the Diagnostic Manual, which is now going to be replaced by a 5th edition that's coming out in a couple of weeks. In the prior editions it said if you have any one of those two symptoms. Voices talking to each other or voices keeping a running commentary on the persons behavior, then you have schizophrenia. That's the only symptom you require. It has to last for six months. There has to be some distress and deterioration. But in terms of symptoms, you can get the diagnosis with just that symptom. So, I and others have done research and actually those voices are more common in multiple personality then they are in schizophrenia.
Joe: I was going to ask, you said that specifically that child like voices are indicative of DID?
Dr. Ross: Yeah, they're more common.
Joe: Okay.
Dr. Ross: Nothing proves it one way or another, but they're more frequent, more common in DID. DID being dissociative identify disorder equals Multiple Personality Disorder. So, other symptoms that are supposedly typical of schizophrenia are also more common in DID than in schizophrenia include what are called made thoughts, feelings, or actions. That's where you feel like your thoughts, your feelings, or your actions are made or controlled by some power force outside you. A person who is forwardly psychotic (his thought processes are really mixed up) may interpret this as martians, aliens, {inaudible}, the government, whoever. So, the interpretation of the voices can be even more fantastic in somebody with schizophrenia than somebody with DID. The interpretation of these made thoughts or feelings can be more fantastic. So, in DID it's clearly the alternate personalities influencing controlling the out-front person, the host personality from inside. It's a little fuzzier what's going on in the case of schizophrenia but, it's the same symptom. It's often described in the same way. And then there's other symptoms of psychosis include having thoughts put into your mind, thoughts taken out of your mind, somebody else thinking thoughts inside your head and these are all typical DID symptoms because they're due to the other personalities, thinking, talking and influencing the host personality up front. So, those are the symptoms that are in common.
Joe: Would it be fair to say that schizophrenia, with schizophrenia generally speaking that the voices of the different personalities are largely kept internal? Heard internally? Where as with DID they tend to come out and take on a life of their own externally more?
Dr. Ross: Yes and no. If that happens then by definition, if like in therapy or just in the world, the voice comes out and talks either to the therapist or to the husband or the girlfriend, or the john if it's a prostitute with multiple personality, then that's not schizophrenia that's multiple personality. But, the thing is in the mental health field there are many, many people who have the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the clinicians never asked about or never noticed that the voices do come out and take control. So, the thing that seems to be typical of schizophrenia more than multiple personalities is what are called the negative symptoms. Negative symptoms of psychosis. So, the positive symptoms of psychosis are things that people that are psychotic have, that ordinary people don't. Such as voices, delusions, agitation, mixed up thinking. The negative symptoms are things like normal people have that people with schizophrenia are missing. So it's a kind of burned out, empty, no ambition, social withdrawal kind of emptiness type of symptoms. Those symptoms are more frequent more common in schizophrenia than in DID. It's just a matter of more frequent more common, not exclusive to one or the other. The other thing that you see, in some cases of schizophrenia but not all, is what's called thought disorder. Thought disorder is really jumbled up, mixed up thought processes and when gets really bad you can't even follow the logic of one sentence to the next. That by and large doesn't happen in dissociative identify disorder. People with DID have more childhood trauma to a greater degree and people with schizophrenia frequently have childhood trauma as well. So really, the key differentiating factors are when a person with schizophrenia has these predominant negative symptoms really burned out, empty, no ambition and you have this feeling like there's just nobody there and they have really mixed up, jumbled up, obviously "insane" thought processes that don't make sense. That's going to lean you towards schizophrenia. On the other hand when the person's basic thought processes are pretty typical and normal, they have an rational way of looking at the world. They have more of these positive symptoms, fewer of the negative symptoms, many of them leaning toward multiple personality. The key thing is the amnesia. Amnesia can occur as a transitory symptom with all kinds of things. People with multiple personality frequently have very well defined discrete blank spells, where it's ten in the morning, the next thing they know it's three in the afternoon, and they can't account for what they've been doing or where they've been. Then they look in their closet and there's a whole bunch of things they bought at the mall with their credit card signature or hand writing that looks almost like theirs, but maybe not exactly. They find evidence of things that they've done or people tell them about things they've done or sometimes they'll 'come to' in a new location unable to remember how they got there. These very well formed discrete blank spells, they just are not typical schizophrenia at all. It's not just that the person's like fallen over or passed out from drugs and alcohol or just seeing they're tranced out. They're out doing things in the world driving their car, shopping, interacting with people, talking. When you get that symptom, that's really strongly leads you towards a dissociate disorder and away from schizophrenia. So, that may be a little more detailed that you were hoping for.
Joe: No that's good, that's really good.
Jason: Yeah that was really good because it really makes you think about it.
Niall: It's absolutely amazing when you think about it.
Pierre: I guess we're focused more on MPD and DID in this show. Now, you've clarified the differences in similarities between schizophrenia and MPD. How do you acquire MPD that there seems to be four different ways that are not exclusive or be common? Someone suffering from multiple personality disorder.
Dr. Ross: I have a scheme that's in one of my books called "Four Pathways to dissociative identify disorder". So ,the most common thing that we see is really really horrible, abusive, traumatic, neglectful childhoods. Lots of family violence, death of caretakers, caretaker is absent because their substance abuse problems are out of control or they're in jail or just general chaos. So, lots and lots and lots of chronic severe trauma. And the idea is physically too overwhelming to cope with, so you imagine there's somebody else inside whose dealing with this and dealing with that. And then, although that's not literally true, because literally there's only one person there, it becomes very emotionally and psychologically true. And, so then it's a way of sort of a divide and conquer strategy internally. But, you don't have to feel the full brunt of the trauma, deal with the full brunt of the trauma cause "somebody else is dealing with it." That's the basic common thing that you see clinically a lot. And then there's a self act of abuse. The second path way is what I call neglect pathway. Which is it's not so much what people are doing to you that they shouldn't do, it's what they're not doing that they should. And so the basic...it doesn't have to be like a starving to death level neglect and there are many families, you know there is a roof over the persons head but, the parents are just very emotionally disconnected. They're very involved in their own lives and there's just no real love and nurturing coming across. But, that by itself has to be pretty extreme. We don't see cases where it's just that going on too often, but we see some. And then the a... go ahead.
Joe: I was going to ask you, as far as I'm aware, there are some cases where some people have no history of trauma, but still have DID?
Dr. Ross: Well, then we get into...the quick answer is yes. The next question is okay well, what's our definition of trauma? Though, there is certainly in the literature, I've published a couple series myself to average the five largest series in the literature. And, overall the percentage of cases reporting in child physical abuse or sexual abuse or both ranges from about eighty eight percent to ninety five percent. So, now you have to remember there's probably some people in there who in fact remember being abused, they just don't want to talk about it. Basically, you are somewhere in the ballpark of people who are in treatment; between five and twelve percent are not reporting physical abuse or sexual abuse. There's research studies that we didn't ask about other forms of family violence, watching mom being beat up and then we didn't ask about all the neglect aspect of things. And then you also can have trauma that's not perpetrated by the family. For instance, if you grow up in a war zone, if you live in a country where a huge percent of the adult population has AIDS. If you are the primary caretaker for the family when you're twelve because everybody else is dead. So that's trauma but, it's not abuse. And then there's also sometimes, which we don't see in North America so much, but, we see people with really serious chronic medical trauma. Where they've had multiple surgeries or multiple serious diseases. And so it can be other types of trauma besides sexual or physical abuse. And, then you have to add in the neglect, but then you get down to a few people who just don't seem to have... and this is a very small percentage of the token, just don't seem to have anything really severe or not far from the ordinary. That's a small percentage of cases. And then, you're looking at two possibilities or three, basically. One is, this is just a person who is very genetically or family-wise primed to have a dissociative disorder and didn't require any significant trauma to have developed it. That's one possibility. And that's it. And another possibility is it's what's called a factitious disorder, which is the third pathway to multiple personality. And, so if you can figure out it's a factitious disorder then, by definition it's not actually multiple personality. Factitious is basically somebody who's consciously faking an illness to get some kind of gain. Like to get out of housework, to get some compensation or they might be doing just to get into a relationship with the doctor because they don't have any relationships except when they're in the role of being a patient. So, that's factitious disorder. Then they wouldn't have any necessarily any real trauma in theory. But actually, in reality, people with factitious disorders almost always have horrible childhoods and that's why they've gotten themselves into this desperate situation where the only way they can be a person of value and the only way they can bond with anybody is by being in the sick role.
Joe: So that's a different disorder in a way.
Jason: So, you kind of have to be insane to pretend you're insane?
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: Well, not insane, insane but certainly disturbed.
Joe: Yeah. Conversely then, there obviously probably a lot of people who have been traumatized quite severely even and do not get DID. Do not develop DID.
Dr. Ross: Well, I think when I did that project in Winnipeg in late eighties, early nineties where I surveyed... I didn't personally but, all the research team when out and actually knocked on people's houses and they did interviews in households. And the of all the people who'd been sexually abused in the in the sample, which was five hundred two people in the total sample. Of those who reported child and sexual abuse, only twenty percent had any kind of dissociative disorder. So, clearly the majority of people that have been traumatized don't develop any kind of dissociative disorder. And only a small percent will develop DID. And that's just kind of the way life is, it's a...
Joe: Yes.
Dr. Ross: You can have a whole bunch of people are traumatized. Only a certain percent will develop an eating disorder, a certain percent will become depressed, a certain percent will develop alcoholism.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: And that's just kind of what they bring to the table genetically.
Joe: So that that suggests that there is a genetic component to our probably, or there may well be a genetic component to DID and even schizophrenia. But it's also...
Dr. Ross: Well...
Joe: Activated by social...
Niall: Circumstances. By their environment.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: Right.
Joe: Basically, you know there's this idea whether it's genetic or it's social but maybe it's a mix?
Dr. Ross: Generally speaking on most things is a mix. For instance, if you looked at Michael Jordan, he's obviously genetically endowed to be an incredibly good athlete. But, then he had to be born in the United States in a century where basketball existed. If the exactly the same genetic person was born two hundred years ago, he wouldn't have been a basketball player. So in general, in life it's interaction of genes and environment. The way I look at it which, we can get into it in more detail if you want, but the way I look at it and you know Verton* had book links about this. The genetic part of mental disorders is over emphasized by the profession quite a lot compared to what the evidence actually supports. And the genetic component of mental disorders and even the head of the National Institute of Mental Health agrees with this actually, in a recent statement. The genetic component of mental disorders doesn't kind of map directly on to the DSM categories. So, it's not like there's a genetic risk for schizophrenia and then a totally different set of genes for bipolar and another total set... Really it looks like there's many, many genes that at least contribute a little bit to having mental health problems in general. Not that steer you directly towards one of the diagnosis in particular. And it still looks like the environment in this world of mostly in the form of psychological trauma. But also, you know what your mother eats, what kind of drugs she takes, what kind of infection she gets during pregnancy. All kinds of things come into play.
Jason: It seems there's a there's a active denial of the fact that, any kind of sense, that there may be some sort of traumatic thing about life. Why are you messed up? It must be that there's some genetic flaw in you because the world is perfect type of thing. It's kind of a denial that there are traumatic situations going on. That there's child molestation going on. That there's people growing up in war torn areas. There's this sort of active denial of it. And that's what it seems to me.
Dr. Ross: Well when I was...so I was born in Canada, grew up in Canada, went to medical school, done much of my psychiatry training in Canada, and moved down to Texas in 1991. So, I was in my psychiatry training in Winnipeg from 1981 to 1985. The main text book that I used is called the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry and I still have it on my shelf. Its three volumes, it's like thirty three hundred pages, hence everything you need to know about psychiatry is in there. Way at the back there's a section called "Topics of Special Interest". That's kind of like stuff that isn't really relevant but, they throw it in the back and one of the chapters in topics of special interest is called "Incest". It's very, very short. So this is 1980 and in there there is one paragraph talking about how common incest is in North America. There's a reference to a 1955 study saying that it's one family out of a million. So, this would be scientific medical facts that was fed in my training. And the idea that you would see an incest victim was highly unlikely. When in fact is psychiatric wards are full of people with all kinds of trauma, with incest. The level of denial; One in a million? It's actually more than one in a hundred. So, the profession was out by ten thousand times. So, it wasn't just a little bit of denial, it was a massive systematic denial for most of the twentieth century. And then, you'll still see as I've mentioned on a...if you go to just Google schizophrenia and go to various websites that offer you information on schizophrenia. Almost all of them say it has nothing to do with parenting, nothing to do with childhood. But, there's a whole series of studies just in the last five to seven years showing that childhood trauma, in particular childhood sexual abuse, is a very big risk factor for psychosis. These are studies, mostly in England, with five thousand, ten thousand people. Very big studies. So the denial is... since 1980 it's started to break down bit by bit by bit, still against massive resistance. And so people now will...nobody disputes the post traumatic stress disorders caused by trauma because that's part of the definition.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: You know that borderline disorders example were the role of childhood trauma is...it's denied by some experts but, it's pretty well agreed upon by most experts in borderline personality disorder. But, when you get to schizophrenia and bipolar mood disorder, in North America most of the experts still say this it has nothing to do with trauma.
Joe Yeah... I mean on the childhood sexual abuse thing, I was trying to find some figures and there's very different right there from various different associations in the U.S., for example. Most of them putting it at somewhere between you know twenty five up to fifty percent of kids who are likely to be abused by a parent.
Dr. Ross: I think fifty's high personally, but it all depends again on the definition. And so, the surveys that tend to be twenty five percent, even pushing higher, they were including anything and everything. One episode of being fondled a... outside your cloths at age fourteen, you're a victim of sexual abuse.
Joe: Okay
Dr. Ross: And then, when you restrict the definition to unwanted coercive, digital penetration, oral sex, full vaginal penetration. That's an obvious big time, nobody's going to quibble about the definitions of sexual abuse.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: Then, you're down probably five percent of boys ten percent of girls.
Joe: Yeah...
Dr. Ross: So that that's the low end though.
Joe: And that still... I mean that's a...
Dr. Ross: That's a lot...
Niall: It's still it's still pandemic... I mean it's...
Dr. Ross: Still it's pandemic yeah...
Niall: If that was an illness, AIDS whatever, and ten percent of the population had it...
Joe: I don't think... {several voices at once, inaudible}
Niall: It would be definitely defined as a pandemic.
Pierre: It only includes the patients of the person who remember even.
Dr. Ross: Who remember and are willing to talk about it.
Jason: Yeah.
Niall: Yeah. Well, the flip side of it is; today of which things emerging you know, well, in some cases, they do emerge on a nationwide scale. Joe and I are from Ireland where the past ten years there have been public investigations into the sheer scale of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church.
Dr. Ross: Which is massive.
Niall: It is unbelievable. We're talking tens of thousands, generation after generation in a country with the population at the time of three million. Extrapolate that outwards and you're looking at...
Dr. Ross: There you thought the troubles were your main trouble.
Joe: Yeah, yeah it was from within...
Niall: On the flip side of that then, with these things emerge from time to time; pedophilia scandals and what not and you've got this politically correct obsession that's some how affect people in a way it it. From the other end of the scale where the slightest 'Oh he looked at me the wrong way. I'm going to report him to my employer', and that get's marked down as a case of, maybe not sexual abuse, but sexual harassment.
Dr. Ross: Sexual harassment.
Niall: ...And {inaudible}
Dr. Ross: It's always a balancing act in which way you're going to err, so historically we erred on... again for child and sexual abuse, we use psychiatry, have erred massively far over towards denial, not towards those we're reporting. When you turn the pendulum back the other way, naturally you're going to get little overshoot sometimes and you're going to get false positive reporting where people jumped out 'this is a sexual abuse case' a bit too fast. This is not hard science so there's going to be errors in both directions. It's a question of trying to minimize the errors in both directions, which you'll never be perfect on. Same with sexual harassment. When I was in Canada, I remember a medical student, female,very attractive female medical student, who's doing her rotation in my hospital coming up to talk to me about relentless sexual abuse by a powerful physician in the faculty, and there really was nothing she could do about it because if she said anything she would be kicked out of medical school. Literally. And so, this is late eighties. Because the denial was total, to control this total, nobody would ever be believed and the retaliation would just be to the max. So then we've corrected that, but then that leaves you open to false accusations and this is the balancing act that goes on.
Niall: Yeah, and the process of course be trivializing the deeper real issues and further hiding them or obscuring them.
Pierre: Colin, you listed the first three ways of acquiring MPD which are not mutually exclusive, what is the fourth way you called it, iatrogenic?
Dr. Ross: Iatrogenic. Good memory and good listening skills there {chuckle} So, iatrogenic is where all the controversy is, so that's just a Greek word, the actual meaning doctor "genic" means create or cause. So that's multiple personality that's created or caused by the therapist. That's going to leave us into Manchurian candidate discussion. So...
Pierre: Exactly.
Dr. Ross: We know... I've seen a few cases, like under ten and I've seen cases as an expert witness where I've been the expert witness for the person suing the therapist, for he iatrogenic personality and I concluded that this actually was an example; of where the multiple personality didn't exist before the person got tangled up with the therapist. Through suggestion and hypnosis and medications and putting him in a unit with lots of other people with multiple personality. The therapist unwillingly sort of cooked up this multiple personality that didn't pre-exist. And then when the person gets disentangled from the therapist usually it dissolves fairly rapidly. So now there's some people say that's true of every single case, which I think is absurd. But I have seen some examples of that. So, what does it take to do that? So you can't just, you know you're not the patient's therapist, the person walks in and says I'm here because I've been binging and vomiting and then two sessions later the person's got thirty four personalities and a huge long history of sexual abuse. It doesn't happen that fast or that easily. So, the cases I saw, the person was... this is back late eighties early nineties. And the reason we're not seeing this so much currently is because managed care in the United States has come in and massively clamped down on length of stay in psych hospitals. So, you can only stay days or a few weeks with most hospitals, most insurance policies, which is not long enough to create this sort of iatrogenic multiple personality. Back in the eighties, early nineties when there was these insurance policies with three million dollar limits and you could just stay at the same institution. People would stay for a year or two. Their mail would be monitored and censored by the staff. They wouldn't go outside on the grounds. They'd spend very long periods of time in seclusion rooms, sometimes in physical restraints. They would be "interrogated", which was actually therapy. The massive suggestion hypnosis, asking, asking, asking: "Didn't this happen?" "Didn't that happen?" "What about this, what about that?" Kind of fishing for and suggesting that there are different people inside. Lots of psych drugs. So it was basically sort of like being in Gitmo, but under the guise of being in a psych hospital. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, but it can be done.
Pierre: And the... I guess if incompetent doctors can invariably create MPD's and alter personalities, we can wonder how possible it is? Why doctors having the relevant facilities, techniques, drugs, resources, can create personalities, alter personalities that perfectly fit their objectives?
Dr. Ross: Exactly. Until... when I presented this idea at conferences and at international societies for the study of trauma dissociation, I got a fairly frosty reception from my colleagues cause they were under attack from an organization called The False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Where people who are on the professional board of that foundation attack multiple personality in the literature. They testify in court cases, then they're saying it's all iatrogenic, it's all malpractice. So, naturally people in the dissociation field weren't very happy with those guys. When I started saying; well look, some of our colleagues are ... they have been creating multiple personality by accident, under conditions that are the following. My colleagues from the dissociative disorder field didn't want to hear it because they didn't want to say that there was even a minute kernel of truth to what the false memory people were saying. It's very polarized very black and white. You're either with this group or you're with that group. My point was two fold. If we see multiple personality arise just naturally in the family, what are the conditions that give rise to it? Well, you're trapped in the family, you can't escape, you're just a little kid, and there's massive trauma. What are the conditions we see in the therapy gone really wrong? Where you have to be trapped in a situation? You're basically dependent on the hospital and the therapist literally for your food and a roof over your head. And there's not sexual abuse, physical abuse, but massive control of environment for a long period of time and input in the form of suggestions, suggestions, suggestions, suggestion. The conditions we see in CIA mind control or military mind controller MKSearch described in the documents. I'm not just making this up, it's very clear in the documents. And it's the same sort of thing, you don't just walk up to a soldier and say " hey we'd like you to imagine there's somebody else inside of you and want to go on a mission tomorrow?" There's a whole training period, and then in MKUltra, Bluebird, Artichoke, CIA mind control documents, it describes sort of what goes on by mistake in this psych hospital. Sensory deprivation, sensory isolation, hypnosis, drugs, closed interrogation, which in a therapy situation is called Therapy. In the mind control situation it's called brainwashing or mind control, now we call it enhanced interrogation. So, there are different names for it, but very similar processes. And so, my point was this is very useful for the field as it fits because it sort of sets the threshold for how much control you have to have over the patient or client, for how long and what you have to do to create iatrogenic multiple personality. Therefore if you haven't done that, you can use that as it fits. And then we're going to turn the scale more toward this is a case of factitious [disorder] where the person has faked multiple personality and they're blaming the therapist because they want a big payoff at court. But never the less my, my colleagues didn't like the idea.
Joe: Yeah, I can imagine.
Niall: I bet, because as it turns out, quite a lot of them have something to hide, including some of your supervisors.
Pierre: That's a good question because it commonly held belief in that those CIA mind control experiments were just conducted by few rogues psychiatrist that were acting in a secret basement. That is the first commonly held belief and another commonly held belief is that it didn't in any way lead to tangible results?
Jason: Have we ever heard that one before. A few bad apples.
Dr. Ross: Yeah, a few bad apples. It's sort of a modification of the lone gunman basically. That's a very common thing that you hear all the time. That is was a few rogue psychiatrists. It happened a long time ago, and anyway they didn't even have any success. John Giningher who was the lead psychologist on MKUltra, did exactly that at the U.S. Senate testimony in the mid 1970s. He was the lead psychologist on MKUltra who was directly involved in mind control brainwashing, and Bluebird was the first program in 1950 which rolled over to 'M Artichoke', which rolled into MKSearch, but MKUltra which rolled into MKSearch which ran till early seventies. And then everything is classified after that. This John Giningher was directly involved in the programs and the program documents in great detail describe successfully training Manchurian candidates and using them in simulation exercises where they worked perfectly. A manchurian candidate being an artificially created multiple personality. So, he knew perfectly well that these people were successfully created and operational. He was just basically lying.
Niall: Yeah, this is a pattern that repeats isn't it? They're lying. The ability to say one thing and do completely the opposite.
Dr. Ross: It's a general pattern, so I started hearing stories from patients when I moved to Texas and I wasn't really interested in this before 1991 and then patients started telling me. I was taken to a military base when I was a kid. I was taken to some kind of hospital laboratory and all these experiments were done by doctors with lab coats and they created multiple personality parts. And so I thought, hhmm... and that's how I got into this and started looking into it. I read quite a bit about history and the CIA and intelligence and so on. It's a general pattern I think. If we look at multiple personality, when you look at paranormal extra sensory perception, remote viewing/psychic spying or we look at UFO's. Those are the examples I use. I think that the intelligence strategy is to fuel both sides of the debate. So, in the UFO debate, it doesn't really matter if we assume that there are in fact aliens piloting those aircraft, or we assume its all experimental military craft. It's either way. I think the strategy is to fuel both the believer side and the disbeliever side, and have a whole great big debate, which is the whole thing... is the distraction and cover strategy. And it's the same with the paranormal. There are people from a disinformation perspective who debunk the paranormal and there's people who believe in and support the reality of the paranormal. And the whole debate distracts us from the fact that the CIA and military invested many millions of dollars in psychic spying, which was declassified and admitted to. The same with multiple personality, there's all these guys from the false memory syndrome foundation, who are saying it's all false memory, it's just cooked up in therapy, it's all iatrogenic multiple personality. {inaudible} Two of those guys are documented CIA mind control contractors in this Manchurian candidate programs.
Joe: Are you talking about Hillenkoetter, is that right?
Dr. Ross: Martin Horn and Charlie West.
Joe: Okay I was thinking of "Bluebird" from your book, I think, Bluebird was approved by the first CIA director Rosco H. Hillenkoetter. He was also on the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. He was for UFO disclosure at the time. {Inaudible}
Dr. Ross: That's what I'm saying there's people on both sides of the debate, but that itself is part of the strategy.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. It brings up the kind of questions to me which is they're talking about the psychiatrists who are more or less treating patients in these hospitals that was basically torture or similar to the kind of process that then evolved into creating Manchurian candidates or people with DID creating DID. Which came first? Was it the doctors who just stumbled on this and realized that this could be done because of their hard fisted brutal way of treating patients, or was it that the intelligence agencies came in and kind of directed them in this? Pushed them in this direction? I mean have you any...
Dr. Ross: Well I don't know for a fact, but I have thoughts on that subject because I thought about it a lot. So, in general, if you look at the history of 1950 to the present, in CIA military mind control experimentation and contracting. It wasn't just a few rogue psychiatrists somewhere because medical schools, where MKUltra contracts took place, include Harvard, Cornell, UCLA, Tulane, Columbia. It just goes on and on and on, Johns Hopkins, all these major big places. And the individual contractors, psychiatrists and psychologists who were cleared at top secret, include editors of major journals, top well known figures in the field. It's a whole network that's at the core of academic psychiatry's, not just a few lunatics in a basement at all. And these are people with top secret clearance. So, clearly institutionalized systematic and pervasive. And there's a lot of contracting into the academic community. If you look at MKUltra which ran from '54 to '63 about a third of the contracts were just chemical procurement at contracts. Biological, chemical weapons, hallucinogens, and so on. And, nothing, no research or academic part. A third of them were kind of bland general contracts which funneled through front organizations called 'cut outs' where the guy receiving the grant at the time, I think, legitimately did not know it was CIA money. And they were just trying to shed some light on this topic or that topic or they were beginning a relationship with the person and he would get clearance a few years down the road sort of thing. And then the third were top secret cleared, direct, mind control Manchurian candidate program type contracts. So there's various types of contracts, but many many many of them are in academia in the major institutions. And then a lot of the experiments are slightly sanitized where it's published in the mainstream medical and psychiatric literature. I can't prove, but I think after MKSearch was shut down in the early 70's, I think most of the contracting shifted to the private sector and out of academia. Just because for security purposes basically. And so then, the psychiatrists and psychologists who were involved in that now, are not, are less likely to be the academic psychiatrists. More likely to be private practice psychiatrists. And, we know at Guantanamo Bay there is a behavioral science consultation team that goes in there. Which was psychologists psychiatrists directly involved in the events and interrogations. So, there definitely are currently actively involved psychiatrists and psychologists, but we can't identify them because it's all classified. So, I think that the cases I was involved in where it was actual colleagues that I knew, like I met at meetings. I didn't see any evidence that any of them were directly contracted to the CIA. And it looked like most of them were kind of just fumbling and bumbling and doing it by accident.
Laura: Let me give you just a little example, Hi I'm Laura. It's something that I observed. My husband is a physicist and he's been an academic for thirty five years, forty years. When he came to Florida from Poland, he was working at the University of Florida in Gainesville and they apparently had some sort of little recruiting program. It got around that he was looking for a permanent job of some sort other than teaching. And, you know, one person to another, this kind of got around, he was asking. He was invited to meet with a couple of members of the department. They had a project for him to work on for a private contractor. To make a long story short, this was a nuclear detection with some kind of programming. He ended up after a year or two, working for a sub contractor then being invited to go ahead and go through his naturalization process so that he could get a security clearance. So it was like, it was like little step by step you know? What can you do? What can you perform? What can you produce? Of course, at that point, we just kind of opted out, said "no way" because we know where this is going. So, I think that this may happen for psychiatrists or psychologists. They want something other than teaching or they want something other than just private practice necessarily, where they're grinding out the same thing everyday all day long. And they start asking around and somebody is there to fulfill their need. That's what I think.
Dr. Ross: Right, I agree totally. I'm sure if you go to, well basically go to Boston, when you're standing on the river there looking at Harvard and there's MIT and then around the corner is this university and that university, it's just this amazing concentration of intellectual power. Where you're going to, especially at MIT, you'll find lots and lots of military CIA contracting going on all the time. No question. And there's got to be contracting into the mental health field, it's just a question to who and where are currently.
Laura: Yeah so, but at the same time I think that the people who would go into it full bore, they would be actively seeking it, they know it's out there, I mean you know we didn't know exactly where it was going, until it got there. I think there are those who actively know it and they're actively seeking it and I think they're actively seeking some ways or means of... you know gratifying impulses to power or control over others or they're looking to make lots and lots of money which is another avenue of gratifying their impulses to power and control over others.
Joe: There's also obviously the... this is been going on since, well for ever for most of last century but definitely since the second world war and during the cold war and now it's the so-called war on terror. Theres the hook of national security and doing this for your country and people buy the patriotism kind of thing, you know you can help your country in this way and that cloak and dagger stuff, yeah almost looks like cloak and dagger James Bond type of thing. I mean it's, it's all pretty puerile in a way and that people get hooked into it in that way and then end up committing really evil deeds based on that kind of that really...
Laura: Let me ask a question. What kind of programs were going on, let's say Navy contractors, mind control programs and say the early 1950s like 1954 and 1955.
Dr. Ross: Well the U.S. Office of Naval Research was one of the primary mind control contractors and they contracted to... pardon me?
Laura: I said, "oh Jeez".
Dr. Ross: Yeah, it's the Office of Naval Research. And one of the people that they contracted to was a neurosurgeon at Yale named Jose Delgado. I have a copy of his book.
Laura: I do too.
Dr. Ross: And a really catchy title; Toward a Psycho Physical Control of the Mind subtitled Toward a Psycho Civilized Society. And I also have series of his papers in different journals, and also copies of his contracts. So, who refer US Office of Naval Research. And what he was doing was, and there's a guy at Tulane doing this, there's a project at UCLA, there's a team at Harvard. He would put brain electrodes into the brains of children as young as five years old, for no therapeutic purpose. There'd be wires attached to electrodes which then go to a control box, and depending on which button he pushed on the box, that would activate an electrode which would activated a certain part of the person's brain. In the books and papers you see a sixteen year old girl with a bandage on her head. He's got the electrodes in place but, he made the technical advance of; you didn't have to have the wires going directly from the port of the skull to the box. He could use a regular transmitter to transmit the signal. Depending on which button he's pushing on the transmitter box, she's either staring off into space with a empty grin on her face, she's pounding furiously on the wall or she's looking normal. A six year old boy when he would stimulate, it's just a regular boy, when he would stimulate a certain electrode, the boy would say that he feels like he's a girl and say that he wants to marry Dr. Delgado. And then you can just look on You Tube; so it's Dr. Jose Delgado, you just put "bull in a ring" or bull ring or controlling the bull. There's a video that comes up showing he's in a bull ring holding a transmitter box and the bull's got electrodes are planted in his brain and comes charging at him, and he just pushes button A, B, or C, and the bull just stops and turns away. And then, it's cats... mostly cats and monkeys in the various papers and journals. In those papers, he refers to the cats that have the brain electrodes and he can make them walk here, there, everywhere. He refers to them as mechanical toys. The human beings were also mechanical toys.
Joe: To him.
Laura: To him yeah, let me take advantage of you, please. May I?
Dr. Ross: Go ahead. {Chuckles}
Laura: I had a very strange instance that occurred when I was very young and I'd like to just go through it really quick.
Dr. Ross: Okay, sure
Laura: I think it's semi related. When I was three years old, my mother married for the second time and, she married a Navy guy, who she met in Orlando. I was born and raised in Florida. We moved to Jacksonville and I recall several very strange incidences at the time that I'm not going to go into. The thing that happened was that the guy she was married to started acting in very strange ways. Like he would a... she found him hiding in the closet in a fetal position, he set a fire under the gas tank behind the house, he slashed his wrists. Various things were going on that she was concealing from us. She was trying to cope with this, and then she found out she couldn't get a divorce from him because he was crazy... because he wasn't legally competent to sign a divorce paper. To make a long story short, they got separated and I was just playing on our porch one day and he came by the house. He appeared to very fond of me but I can swear, I have really good recall back to being in a high chair and eating grits and eggs. He asked me did I want a new car and I said yes, and he said what kind of car do you want? I said I wanted a yellow and black convertible. A few days later he arrived, I was playing on the porch, and he had a yellow and black convertible. And, so he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride in the car, and I said yes. I went for a ride, a long way, driving through a long straight road, trees, blah blah blah, turn off on a dirt road, get to another pine forest, come to a big clearing with a little white building in the middle of this clearing. We go. there were three people standing of the porch when we arrived and they were in khaki, a two men in a khaki uniform, and a woman in a white dress. A nurse type outfit. And they said, we've been looking forward to meeting you. I'm not imagining this, this really happened. So we went inside and sat at a dining room table or what seemed to be a dining room table, and they asked me lots of questions. I don't remember the questions, and they said you must be tired, you need to take a nap, they took me into this room and there was a like a stainless steel crib. I was thinking I was three years old, I was too big for a crib. But they said, well, "this is the bed we have here", so I got into the crib. They said "hey, have this bottle", and I was thinking I'm too big for a bottle, I don't drink a bottle anymore. They gave me the bottle and the next thing I know, I was asleep. I don't remember anything until I was back in the car with my erstwhile step-father and we were driving like crazy at high speeds through the city of Jacksonville, pursued by the police, flashing blue/red lights at the time. He ended up turning a corner too fast, skidded out of control, ended in somebody's front lawn against a palm tree. I hit the dash board and messed up my face. The policemen came and took me out of the car. I was checked out by a doctor and they took me home to my mother. So that's what I remember. The back story was that I was gone at least three or four days. The reason we know that it took that long was my grandfather was working in the Bahamas at the time and my mother called my grandmother in Tampa, who called my grandfather. They sent a messenger out to him on the island. He got on a plane, flew through to Nassau then to Tampa and then flew up to Jacksonville, etc. He started making a big stink and that's when, somewhere along there, the guy had me in the car and was driving, and he was wanted, and so on and so forth. Because, of course, when my mother complained by herself, they said you can't file anything because he is your husband. He's legally entitled to take the child.
Dr. Ross: Right.
Laura: So, that was the only period of my entire life that I had a blank spot.
Dr. Ross: Add have you ever filled in any of that?
Laura: Oh, yes. I'm gonna.. Many years went by and this bothered me, bothered me, bothered me. I worried about sexual abuse and all these kind of things, but I didn't have any problems that would tend to indicate something like sexual abuse. I had lots of girlfriends who had sexual abuse, and they would tell me their stories and I would try to see if there was some kind of stir in my heart or my mind or my psyche that said "oh that's frightening to me!", or "I identify with that", there was never anything. So, finally, after I'd married my current husband, we decided that we were gonna try to work on this, try to find out, cause it was really worrying me. So we went to a hypnotherapist, who was supposed to be very good, and she did her best, but she couldn't get anywhere, cause I was sitting there the whole time thinking "Jeeze, why don't you ask this question, why don't you ask that question?" "Cause that would help me get there, just tell me please. Ask the right question" and she wouldn't. It was like free formal, you know.. blah blah blah, what do you feel? And I wanted somebody to ask me the question, but she didn't.
Dr. Ross: What question did you want asked?
Laura: Ask me, for god's sake, what happened! You know, she wouldn't even do that! So a few days later, a week later, I went to sleep thinking about it and I dreamed what I think happened. And it was so intense and so horrifying, that I woke up just absolutely blubbering and screaming and crying, you know, the blubbery stuff. I told my husband what happened and I said, what I think happened. In the dream I was taken as this child into an empty room, it was just an empty room, no furnishings or anything, maybe a few objects or something on the floor, but I don't remember exactly. They gave me an injection and then the walls started to move, they started to melt. And I realized that my dream was telling me that what they had done to me, was they had given me LSD. Then the next thing was that I was in this scenario. It was like created and it was in a classroom. They brought me in as a new kid and introduced me to everybody and everything was all friendly, everybody was nice, the teacher was there, and so on and so forth. So I'm sitting there and there was a little girl across the way. We passed notes back and forth as little kids do. And the next thing that happened was a bunch of military commandoes, all of a sudden, just broke into the room and started shooting everybody. There were people being shot, blood and gore and bits and everything. At the end of it all, everybody was dead except me. Then the scenario melted away. The next scenario was that I was in a park. There was an old man, I sat down, he was telling me a story, there was a dog, I petted the dog, everything was nice. The military commandoes showed up again, shot everybody, and everybody was dead except me.
Dr. Ross: Hmm.
Laura: That melted a way. The third scenario was, that people were in line, they were in line to be assigned tasks of some sort. I was in this line and I saw the same little girl that I had seen in the classroom, in the next line, and she...
Dr. Ross: And what was the setting that time?
Laura: Well at this point it was like... it was almost like we were going into a building. We were lined up outside and everybody was supposed to be perfectly in line, keep their heads down, not look, not talk, not do anything. So, I was standing in this line, and this little girl was in this other line and she had a piece of paper and she was going to pass me a note, and I hissed at her "don't pass me a note, if you pass me a note they'll kill everybody" and she did it anyway. True enough, the soldiers showed up, machine guns, blood and guts, everybody's dead except me! And then, what was said to me at the each of these scenarios was "this is what will happen to anybody that you try to help".
Dr. Ross: Oh, scary.
Laura: And I just, you know I mean, it just.. It just struck me as such a crazy and insane thing. I told my husband about it, and I said, well, I don't know how accurate it is or how distorted it is, it came in a dream. I'm fairly certain that something along that line. LSD with created scenarios were executed. What the purpose was or if this was anything along the line of what was actually being done at that time? I've never talked to anybody that had any knowledge about it, who could tell me or give me an answer. What's the point of this kind of thing? I mean I was three years old for god sakes.
Dr. Ross: Right. Well, so, what do I think? Well, I think several different things. First of all, there's no way, assuming it happened, that you... unless you have reason to assume that it didn't happen.
Laura: I have proof that it did happen. I have letters from my grandfather written at the time where he was talking about the incident. My husband and I talked to my mother about it.
Dr. Ross: So, you've done some investigation.
Laura: Yeah we've done some investigation, yeah, and my brother also.
Dr. Ross: So let's just forget about the did/didn't happen question then. So, the first thing I would say is, which doesn't make any difference in the end really, it may not have been LSD. Just because of the number of days you were gone and how extreme it sounds. I would say it could've been another hallucinogen such as BZ, which is a for sure existing thing that was tested at Edgewood Arsenal and other locations. It would put you on a trip for three or four days. So, LSD was/is actually the mildest of a collection of mind control drugs that were tested extensively by the CIA and military. It may not actually be LSD, but that doesn't really matter. Second comment I would make is, it's not unlike stories I've heard from multiple other people.
Laura: Hmm.
Dr. Ross: So, I'm not going "oh my god I've never heard this before", I'm going "yeah, pretty similar to what I've heard before". Have you ever read a book called "The Control of Candy Jones"?
Laura: No. Oh, wait a minute; it was serialized in a magazine wasn't it?
Dr. Ross: Playboy, actually.
Everyone: Laughter
Niall: That's why she hasn't read it!
Dr. Ross: {Laughs} Your husband has read it.
Jason: It also made an appearance in the book series called Mysteries of Mind, Space, and Time.
Laura: Oh that's right, I have it in Mind, Space, and Time. I have 26 volumes.
Dr. Ross: You might enjoy re-reading that, just because it's in many ways similar to what you're describing.
Laura: The kicker is that my mother went down with my grandfather to press charges against my stepfather after I had been recovered. And when they got there, the sheriff or the police chief, or whoever told them that he'd been realized to the Navy, who came to claim him.
Dr. Ross: Yeah. Well, I have a few more comments and thoughts. I can't give you all the answers obviously, but one thing is, that's a lot of effort to go to, so I wonder why there wasn't any follow up. That's kind of weird.
Laura: Well, one thing is, my grandfather took... he was kind of paranoid after this, and he put us, basically, in hiding.
Dr. Ross: Oh, okay.
Niall: That was smart.
Laura: So that was, you know. We grew up, more or less... the big paranoid thing about it was not so much the stepfather guy. Of course, he was freaking crazy, they were concerned about that. But, they just worried that he would come stalking and kidnap me again, so we lived in hiding.
Dr. Ross: Yeah and him being crazy is good cover just by itself.
Laura: Yeah, I guess so.
Dr. Ross: And on top of that there's this crazy niece, see it runs in the family. So, that's a good cover strategy just by its self. The question is, okay, that's good that you were hiding from him, but it's kind of pathetic to think you can successfully hide from the military.
Laura: Yeah, I know, I think...
Dr. Ross: It just kind of leaves you with... what the heck? Why would they just do that for three days, and then that's the end of it?
Laura: The only thing I can think of is, I don't think they expected the reaction from my family that came about and the fact was that my grandfather was employed by a foreign firm and had access to considerable resources, and he was pretty hostile.
Dr. Ross: So you think they just backed off like "this is too much trouble"?
Laura: Probably, that's what I would guess, cause it was... you know.
Dr. Ross: Well, that makes sense. Somebody, let's say it wasn't you, it was another girl from another family who ended up being recruited and chronically involved in the program and trained up, and then was used in the operationally 20 years later. How would that little girl follow a different path from you? You just explained half of it, which is the people who're describing these types of experiences frequently... You can't just be missing from a normal family who don't even notice that you're gone, right? There's got to be some degree of collusion and involvement by at least the dad. So, it's usually, he was a military guy himself or an intelligence guy, he was buddies with a bunch of military people. He's kind of a shady guy; maybe he was involved in organized crime. But basically, they had something on him. Kind of a bribery deal. He may have been a pedophile himself, so therefore could get access to his daughter and he didn't blow the whistle on it. Or he was kind of, what you were sketching in earlier, just a guy who thinks it's a thrill to be involved in this stuff, and maybe he's a pedophile and is molesting his daughter, or he just wants to be in with this exciting crowd doing this spy stuff. Maybe he buys the patriot angle on it. One way or another, the dad is knowledgeable about colluding with and allowing access. And so, when the family isn't doing that, then they grab the person, but they don't have a secure access route, because you're step-dad or whatever he would be called, isn't reliable himself and he doesn't have reliable access and control over your situation. So therefore, they just said, well, looks like you're a good candidate, but looks like it's not going to work out, let's move onto the next one.
Laura: Yeah, I think I got lucky, but I did, in a sense, scar me because my brain, my memory, my cognitive powers have always been my strong suit. Having a three day period in my life that I couldn't recall was like a thorn in my brain for years. It just really bothered me and some of the weird paranormal stuff that happened around that time or seemingly paranormal. I don't know that it was. It's just kind of weird and I've wondered did they do something, did they put a ticking bomb in my brain? Is it going to go off some day, and if so what is it, what's it gonna do? But, at this point I figured that three days, four days at the max, what could they do?
Dr. Ross: Yeah, that would just be round one of a very long term program to have any kind of ticking time bomb inside your brain.
Laura: Well thank god for that. {Laughs}
Dr. Ross: {Laughs} You should turn over all your life's assets to Dr. Ross right away.
Everyone: Laughter
Laura: I don't have any! Sorry.
Dr. Ross: Aw, so much for that.
Laura: But, I do notice that I did have some problems with kind of feeling isolated as I grew up, because, well, I was afraid to form friendships. I would say that if something like that happened, it would kind of affect that. But you know, I think I'm fairly healthy now. I wanted to ask, if a person had DID and say you were a partner with that person and the person had been pretty good. Because I've read your...I was reading The Osiris Complex and I noticed that a lot of these people, that everything kind of blossoms out in their late 20's and 30's it seems. They're able to cope up until then and then things start blowing up in their lives.
Dr. Ross: Right.
Laura: So, I was wondering if a person was in a relationship with somebody and I'm thinking about somebody in particular, specific. What signs would they look for? To know...
Dr. Ross: Well there's no 'one size fits all' kind of pattern. Some people have full multiple personality, and seriously abusive childhoods, and they would be switching by this one part coming out and going back in, throughout childhood. But then they kind of got out of it. They either went off to school, or the perpetrator died, or the parents got divorced, and life was kind of okay from middle school or high school, or college on. And then, the system just kind of went into shutdown mode. So, there are all these parts inside, but they're kind of in sleep mode inside. There's no overt switching, there's no amnesia and you would never know. The person might never know. And then something happens, like they get raped or they get into an abusive marriage. Sometimes they have a daughter and the daughter turns four, the age that it started, and it all starts coming back. For one reason or another, stress, or just for no obvious reason, the lid kind of comes off. They start having some flashbacks, some nightmares, some missing time. Then you get into therapy and then the whole thing unfolds. Up until the lid comes off, you could be living with somebody, and not notice much of anything.
Laura: And not notice anything at all. Okay. Is there?
Dr. Ross: Well that's one scenario.
Laura: Okay.
Dr. Ross: The opposite end of the spectrum would be somebody who clearly has fully active DID with switching and amnesia. There's kind of a variety of accounts and degrees of knowledge by loved ones. Sometimes, not commonly, but occasionally, the husband will actually know parts by name. You know, knows one that he has sex with, knows the little girl that he reads stories with, knows their names and just kind of accepts that's the way it is with my weird wife sort of thing. And then they come into therapy and he goes, "oh yeah, I know so and so, and so and so and so and do". That's not that common. But more common is, the person comes into therapy, maybe they've been in the health system for a year, two, or three, but finally the diagnosis gets figured out. They bring the husband in to discuss it and go over it, and he goes "that totally makes sense, now I get it". Because he didn't realize that she had DID, but she would just, all of a sudden, start acting like another person. She'd either be acting like a scared little child, curled up in a ball, or she'd be very seductive, sexually active, or very angry, blowing up over the slightest thing. They would have a huge fight, and then the next day she would claim that she doesn't remember. And he'd always think, *"just not remembering", and they kind of believe that she didn't remember, and kind of thought she was using that as a cover story. The very distinct changes in behavior, and claiming not to remember what had happened, not remember parts of the conversation, that would be the most common scenario. So, what you look for is exactly what you would expect, actually. There's "other people" inside, they take turns being in control of the body, and so the behavior changes dramatically, and then they claim not to remember. The more disguised it is, the more it looks like "this person's just kind of moody". Or when they get drunk, all of a sudden it's like somebody else is there.
Laura: Oh boy.
Dr. Ross: Just feeling like there's somebody else there.
Laura: Yeah like a busload with nobody driving.{Laughs} Is there any cross over between DID and borderline personality disorder.
Dr. Ross: Actually I've published a couple of papers on that, and have a paper under review in a journal about that, that's also, I think, an interesting problem. So, first of all, what is borderline personality disorder? It's a somewhat controversial diagnosis, and it's had very bad press. People who have borderline personality disorder are called borderlines and I always thought that borderlines are gigantically manipulative, pain in the neck, kind of hysterical females. And you got to try and settle them down, manage them, not get too tangled up with them, don't let them stay in the hospital too long. And they're always trying to yank your chain, threatening suicide, but they're not really generally suicidal, just manipulative. It's a very ugly, demeaning picture. There is no discussion of any child abuse whatsoever. But, in the literature on borderline personality disorder they regularly have very traumatic, lousy childhoods. Not quite as severe as DID, but pushing up towards it. And the borderline personality is basically a checklist of symptoms that you have to have quite a lot of the time for many years, not just for a month or two, sort of thing. It's angry outbursts, angry episodes, chronic feelings of boredom and emptiness, really severe and chronic feelings of boredom and emptiness. Clinically self-damaging acts, like self-mutilation. Doing things to harm your body like cutting or burning, etc. What's called idealization and devaluation, which describes broad changes from totally white to totally black. So the mood could be perfectly fine, and then it's like a switch flicks and all of a sudden, say if you're the greatest psychiatrist in the world, suddenly you're the arch psychiatrist from hell, sort of thing. Simply because you wouldn't write a prescription, or didn't agree with something, or weren't being perfectly attentive. So the whole perception, the thinking, how they interact with you, the mood state, the level of arousal, just switches like night and day. So there's abrupt, complete changes of state, which is already beginning to sound a little DIDish.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: Then there's instability of mood, huge, sudden shifts in mood, back and forth and up and down. Identity disturbance, which is fragmentation of identity. General impulsivity that is necessarily, directly, like cutting/burning on yourself. Intolerance of being alone, frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. So first of all, the symptoms overlap a little bit. But, in people with multiple personality disorder, it varies from series to series, but in a large series of cases it bounces around over a general range of about 50-60%, of people with DID, also meet criteria for borderline personality disorder.
Laura: Wow.
Dr. Ross: And it's the main diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, again, it varies from series to series, but a substantial number like 20-30% will meet criteria for DID, or a partial form of DID. So basically, I just think they are variations on the same theme. Not really distinct things.
Laura: Do they ever take their violence, you know, like outside. In other words, instead of cutting on themselves, do they ever become violent against other people?
Dr. Ross: Uhm, yeah, they do. You know the Jodi Arias trial?
Laura: Uh hmm, oh yeah.
Dr. Ross: Horrendously violent. Her boyfriend, who may or may not... No matter what he was doing to her, that was like as violent as it gets, how she murdered him. And there's no doubt that she did in fact murder him. The defense was trying to argue that she had post-traumatic stress, and had been abused by him, and then the prosecution's expert was going, oh no, she's just borderline. Meaning that she was a lying manipulator, basically, and didn't have legitimate abuse or trauma, so he couldn't feel sorry for her, and couldn't use the abuse excuse. So I don't know if she does or doesn't meet criteria for borderline disorder, but...
Jason: Did you watch interviews with her?
Dr. Ross: Uhm, a little bit. I didn't follow it really closely, I followed it a bit. The point being that people with borderline personality disorder more commonly turn the violence on themselves, but definitely can turn it outward. I have a couple other observations and comments about her if you want.
Laura: Yes, please.
Dr. Ross:: Okay, one is... and again, I didn't follow this closely or look into it in great detail, but..
Jason: If you want we can give you a rundown of the case. No?
Laura: Go ahead, talk about it.
Dr. Ross: It sounded like she was describing some... she was describing amnesia. But, she told so many different stories, trying to figure out which one's the true story, which one's the lie, which one's a mix up. She was claiming to, first of all, she said she never did it, then it was self defense, then it was this, then it was that. But she claimed that she remembered, I think, shooting him, not stabbing, is that right?
Laura: I think so, yeah.
Dr. Ross: She claims she can't remember some part of it, anyway.
Jason: Let me give you a rundown of the case, of what basically happened. The story that the guy saw basically went like this. She had this on and off relationship with this Alexander guy, who was a Mormon. The day of the murder, they had taken pictures of themselves having sex. She had taken some pictures of him in the shower, posing playfully, so it was totally playfully. And then, the next pictures on the camera from the same day were of his body on the ground, and her dragging it away because she had knocked the camera over and it had taken a picture. So like a picture of her dragging his bloody body the same day that all this was happening. When you watch interviews with her, each one of her interviews she starts off with "No, totally didn't happen, totally didn't happen". And she then has this kind of "I'm totally innocent, no...", demure kind of behavior. Then in the next interview she's like "no, no jury will ever convict me". She's very confident, her body language changes, her voice changes, I mean she really kind of gave the impression of not being someone who was mentally stable, you know.
Dr. Ross: Right, well, we know she's not mentally stable!
Jason: She stabbed him 26 times? And shot him once, I think in the head. I mean, it was extremely violent. And this was the same day they were basically having sex and taking pictures of it. And neither of them seemed to be particularly unhappy about the situation, it was obvious that she was taking the pictures of him in the shower while he's posing playfully. So you can't imagine the situation as like; what was really going on there. So that's basically the backstory.
Dr. Ross: Right, so. First, let me just give you my view of the insanity defense and so on. This is my personal take on it. I personally disagree with the whole concept of the insanity defense. I don't think it makes conceptual sense. I think that you're guilty if you did the crime, you're not guilty if you didn't do the crime, and your mental state doesn't have anything to do with whether you did or didn't do it. So, I don't think the concept of not guilty by reason of insanity makes any sense. I think that it should be abolished because it just brings psychiatry and the law into disrepute. But what could happen is, there's basically two phases. They have a guilt phase, so if you're not guilty of the crime, that's end of story. If you're found guilty, at that point mental health testimony could be introduced, solely for the purpose of...
Laura: Punishment.
Dr. Ross: Or sentencing. Not length of sentence, though. Maybe, maybe length of sentence, but mostly what kind of mental health services are you gonna need, and where should you serve your time?
Laura: I think that's extremely rational.
Dr. Ross: Therefore I don't think multiple personality should be grounds for the insanity defense, cause I don't believe in it. But even if there is an insanity defense, I don't think multiple personality disorder should qualify. There's a very good movie with Kevin Costner is the Mr. Brooks. He's a serial killer with multiple personalities. What's his name? William Hurt is his alter personality. It demonstrates, very nicely, what I think is commonly the case in criminals who have DID. Which is, the innocent guy up front who isn't the criminal, actually knows what's going on. Either to a little degree or a big degree. So, it's not that I'm innocent, because the horrible other person inside did it. The guy who's Mr. Innocent up front commonly either has a pretty big inkling, or knows exactly what what's been going on. So he's really, legally, he's likely the getaway driver in the car outside the bank. Totally implicated*. He's an accomplice. And he could have walked into the police station at any time, and turned the bad guy in, but chose not to and colluded in the cover up.
Laura: Uh huh.
Dr. Ross: So even if you have an insanity defense, most of the time DID doesn't really qualify. You're not insane in the sense that you don't know right from wrong, and have no idea that it's wrong to rob a bank or shoot your boyfriend. So, I'm only interested from the perspective of, is there anything that we can learn about this, that could be useful with other people elsewhere and in life down the road. Just understanding the origins of crime. Because if she does have DID, which I'd say is a distinct possibility, how does she get it? What was her childhood like? And we have to... instead of just slamming her in the media, saying she's not gonna get away with anything cause she's horrible, what about, how all these criminals are being created, what are the conditions of society, and what, if anything, can we do to prevent more Jodi Arias' coming down the pipe.
Laura: Well, what about criminals who are not necessarily created, but are born that way, you know psychopaths for example.
Dr. Ross: I'm a pretty big skeptic on people just being born that way.
Laura: Yeah?
Dr. Ross: I know that's, again, touted in the profession and there are a lot of professionals who look at it that way, but the evidence doesn't really support it.
Laura: Well, what about all the work that Robert Hare has done, what about Bob Altmeyer and Martha Stout?
Dr. Ross: There's people who fit the profile of the psychopath, no question about that. But how many of them came from healthy, normal, happy families? It's not that it's impossible, in general, there's a...
Laura: {Laughing} I think I know a few! I swear to god!
Dr. Ross: I'm sure there's a few, but not the majority, I wouldn't think.
Laura: Well...
Dr. Ross: In general, in the mental health field, there's kind of examples of everything. There's people who have the disorder who have trauma, people who have the disorder who don't have trauma. So it's really all a question of, you know, what percentage of the group is trauma really a factor, and what percentage of the group are the genetics a big factor? There's gonna be some people where it's almost all trauma and some people where it's almost all genetics. It's not like everybody fits one pattern.
Dr. Ross: True
Pierre: Maybe a way to make those two topics converge: Psychopathy and mind control. I wanted to quote part of your book about Dr. Delgado. It gives a glimpse of the psyche of some of those people. One central question during reading your book, was what was the deep motivation of some of the key players? How did they manage to go to so much cruelty, torture? I was thinking that fame, money, and helping the country, couldn't explain totally such behavior. Dr. Delgado wrote the book entitled Physical Control on the Mind: Toward a Psycho-civilized Society and you're right. In it he described his vision of evolution. Delgado believed that control of the human brain, through remote stimulation of implanted electrodes, offered man another step up the evolutionary ladder. With this technology, man could directly control his own mind, mood, and behavior. I was wondering if one of the two main motivations of the central players, doctors, was not control over human beings, and this kind of delight in the suffering of others that is documented amongst psychopaths.
Dr. Ross: Well, gosh. Well, I mean... Yale University. {laughter} Yeah. So, Delgado wasn't kidding. I mean in his book, there, explicitly, as you were just pointing out, his idea is that we're gonna plant electrodes in everybody. Though of course not Delgado.
Pierre: Not him!
Dr. Ross: And all of his friends, including up to the rank of General in the military. And we're gonna control everybody's thinking, behavior, attitudes. I mean it's a totalitarian, total control. And so, that's just fascism, in the hands of the scientists. I mean it's the ultimate in fascist control of the state. Oh, this guy's saying it's for the benefit of humanity, evolution, and blah, blah, blah. But it's... you know for sure that Delgado's not gonna have an electrode in his head.
Joe: People that come up with ideas like that need to be pushed off a cliff.
Laura: Well but that kind of highlights what I'm talking about. Somebody like Delgado, somebody like some of these psychiatrists, psychologists, physicians, politicians, so forth. You know, people who are not raving Hannibal Lecter types, certainly, but they have no conscience and they do incredible damage to the planet because of their lack of conscience. But they're still not blubbering, spittle spewing mad men.
Dr. Ross: Well neither was Hannibal Lecter.
Laura: Well, I don't know.
Dr. Ross: Most of the time.
Laura: Yeah, most of the time.
Jason: Well what about, like, Joseph Mengele, you know, people like that? That's like a kind of extreme example of a scientist doing very evil things.
Dr. Ross: What's your question about that?
Jason: I mean he's kind of like Delgado, but he's got the funding, you know. I was just giving him as an example of somebody who's really doing quite bad things.
Dr. Ross: They are beyond quite back. I mean that's at the maximum of the human race.
Jason: Right, you know, I mean, at a certain point you have to wonder, maybe if there is something fundamentally different about them, beyond just, "oh well he diddled too much as a child", type of thing. I'm just saying that backing up the idea that, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with a person like that, that is beyond just simple that they had a difficult childhood. That was just, putting it in to back it up.
Dr. Ross: Right. I agree totally. You can find a million people with equally difficult childhoods, who never became like that.
Jason: I wanted to ask the particular question, because you said that you don't think that insanity is a defense.
Dr. Ross: Conceptually, it doesn't make sense as a concept.
Jason: Conceptually, it doesn't make sense as a concept and I do understand that. And I do actually, to a certain degree, agree with it. But, I do kind of begin to ask the question of, If trauma creates a person of unstable mentality, right?
Dr. Ross: Uh hmm.
Jason: And then, they then in turn traumatize other people through murder, through whatever. How do we, you know, ethically, and also morally and with conscience, draw a line between a victim and the abuser, when it's like a repeating pattern, a chain in a certain sense? So I mean, how can you, if you have a conscience, look at a person and say "Yeah, that person may have shot up an entire room of people", and you're like "oh that's really horrible, obviously we have to do something, and no insanity should not be a way for you to get out of the crime". Because obviously, if you're killing people, the reason that we have laws, and that we go to a court and put people in jail, is for the safety of society. So, it's a defense. But from a perspective of conscience, you look at a person, and even though they hurt people, did they do it because of something intrinsically evil about them? Or because they were a victim themselves, and a that fracture in their psyche caused the problem? And that's kind of my question.
Joe: I think what Colin said before is that, basically, if a person committed a crime, and they have DID or whatever, they're guilty. But, you don't just necessarily say they're guilty and then treat them like a person who is a normal rational person and put them in jail for the rest of their life or execute them. You at least make some effort to try and find out why they did it, and develop the whole process of trying to treat it, you know? Maybe specifically with that person and with other people in society. Is that what you said, Colin?
Laura: Yeah, what they call a pre-sentence investigation.
Dr. Ross: Well let me step on the other side of the debate for a second. So this is very complicated, and all kinds of people have legitimate different points of view, and so on. But, when would the insanity defense actually kind of make sense? So here's just a made up scenario, not based on anything at all. So a guy comes into the small convenience store, he's got an AK47, points it at the store owner and demands two chocolate bars. So the store owner gives him the two chocolate bars. He eats one, and then points the AK47 at the store owner, and demands that he call the police, because so and so has been persecuting/following him, and the police need to know about it. So, the store owner calls the police, the police arrive. In the meantime, the guy's put his AK47 down. He's very happy to see the police arrive, because he wants to tell them about the conspiracy against him. Well that guy's obviously insane. And why would we want to legally treat that guy exactly the same as your average criminal bank robber? That's the rationale behind the insanity defense and that makes sense. But the problem is, mental health professionals can't really... well, part of the problem is, you come in as a mental health professional, and it's like 6 months, 9 months, a year and a half later, and you've got to try to figure out what was the person's mental state in this little window of time, in this day, way back when. And we just don't have a consistent, reliable, valid scientific way of doing that very well. So, that's a problem. And then, the next problem is, as we see in trial, after trial, after trial, there's these experts with totally opposite opinions, on opposite sides of the case, all the time. So, which expert is right, and which one is wrong? I think it all becomes so fuzzy that it just becomes a mess.
Laura: I think part of the..
Dr. Ross: It's not really like the theory of it, it's more just the practical reality of it is such a big mess.
Laura: The problem, I think, is partly the diagnostic criteria, and how to categorize, because nothing is necessarily exactly categorical. It can also be on a continuum.
Dr. Ross: Which is true in mental disorders.
Laura: Yeah, it has all those problems. But this is why I think...what you just said a few minutes ago was kind of brilliant. Just leave it at this, that "you did it, you're guilty, that's that". But then, the sentencing phase should be strongly influenced by the actual factors, as to where, when, how, and why you got the way you did. Either you're a rational, criminal, evil person or you had mitigating factors. I think that's really, kind of... you have two absolute, distinct phases in the process. Guilt or innocence. If you're innocent, forget about it. But if you're guilty, consider all of the factors there. I think that's kind of brilliant because then you kind of get away from this whole "innocent by reason of insanity". I mean, how can anybody say that somebody's innocent, when they DID the crime? You know what I'm saying?
Dr. Ross: Right and that's just it. Highly heated arguments on both sides of whatever talk-show or media-show and it just goes on and on forever, it's never resolved. And every single case, you have to bring up the whole concept again and rehash it.
Laura: Well if your guy with the AK47 who ate the chocolate bar. What if he then, instead of putting the AK47 down, he shot the store owner, and then waited for the police to arrive? Then he would obviously have to... I mean he hasn't really done much except steal a candy bar, which is like a petty offense, but if he murdered the guy, then clearly he's guilty of a capital crime, even if he's crazy as a loon, and needs to be locked up in a hospital.
Dr. Ross: And the other issue there is; with Jodi Arias, the same would apply. She's obviously way too dangerous to let out.
Laura: Ever. Ever.
Dr. Ross: And the idea that, I mean in theory, say she did have multiple personality and say she had skilled multiple personality therapy in prison, which is never gonna happen. And she got treated to stable integration. She totally remembered everything, she took complete responsibility for everything. In theory, maybe she could become non-dangerous. But that's a huge in theory, because that'll never happen, because she'll never get that kind of therapy in prison anyway. But most, more insane style people who are like the guy at the convenience store with the AK47, the medications are not all that effective a lot of the time.
Laura: No.
Dr. Ross: And the idea that this guy's gonna agree to pleasantly agree to take his medications post-discharge and be safe.
Laura: Not very likely.
Dr. Ross: No, the odds of reoffending are too high to let the person out. It's really not about letting the person out, anyway.
Laura: Yeah, what about Karla Faye Tucker?
Dr. Ross: Karla Tucker; she's the one who was in the movie Monster, right?
Laura: Oh, I don't know if there was a movie.
Dr. Ross: Who are you talking about? Which person is that?
Laura: Karla Faye Tucker is the one who was involved in the axe murder. She was on drugs when she did it, she had been with this rough crowd. She was convicted, and was sentenced to death, and she converted to Christianity, became a good person, realized the error of her ways, you know, blah, blah, blah. I think she was sincere. I watched an interview with her, and think that she was sincerely horrified with what she had been led into doing by the associations that she'd been keeping. And the kind of thoughts she'd been thinking because of those associations and because of her background. And, she said, as far as she was concerned, staying in prison the rest of her life wasn't unfair, because she did the crime and she felt that serving the time for it was fair. But, she didn't think that being executed was the answer, because at that time she had been doing a lot of work in the prison system, helping other people. There was a global outcry against her execution, even the pope appealed on her behalf. George Bush is the one who had her executed, and mimicked her on a TV show afterwards, when he was interviewed about it, where he said "Oh, she was begging, please, please, don't kill me", and he laughed about it.
Dr. Ross: Great. Well, I personally don't believe in the death penalty either, and one reason I don't believe is because of the mistakes that get made.
Laura: Right. And they get made.
Dr. Ross: There's a number of people on death row who've been exonerated based on DNA evidence. I just don't believe in it, period, so, If we got rid of the death penalty, or if we're in a non-death penalty state, then that just takes that whole part of the ranting and raving off the table. So there's mitigating circumstances, but that has to be balanced against, "okay, so you had a horrible childhood, but you're an adult, and you're responsible for your choices as an adult. And having this kind of childhood doesn't give you a license to do all of the following". We follow that in therapy all the time. We say that out loud to people and we have behavioral consequences for people doing outrageous things while they're in therapy.
Pierre: And then we have several cases, so sorry Colin, I wanted to mention the cases that you listed in your book The CIA Doctors where you have the actual murderer was not sentenced and found guilty. The programmer was sentenced, like the case of Patty Hearst. There are two or three cases like that where it was established by the court that the murderer was definitely programmed and had no responsibility whatever for what he or she did.
Colin: Yeah there's... I'm not sure exactly the correct pronunciation of his name, but I think it's Palle Hardrup. It's a very interesting case in early 50's in Denmark, where he was in prison, and his cellmate conditioned and programmed him. He had this character X that he created, that was under the hypnotic control of the guy who was still in jail at the time that Palle Hardrup robbed a bank. It was very extensively reviewed. It was a very, very thorough kind of case; jury case. Palle Hardrup, who actually robbed the bank was found innocent and his cellmate, who was still in jail, was found guilty.
Pierre: {inaudible}
Dr. Ross: First of all, these are very, very unusual cases and aren't the foundation of general principles of law, I don't think. But, in a case like that, that would be a serious mitigating circumstance issue. But still, was Palle Hardrup really totally helpless? Did he not have an inkling at all? Could he have not gone to the police?
Joe: Well, isn't that the question in terms of the whole CIA mind programming and the extent to which they're able to do this? I mean, Patty Hearst kind of springs to mind as well. She did two years I think and then she was released.
Dr. Ross: Yeah, Jimmy Carter pardoned her. The Patty Hearst story is interesting, though, and it's in my book as well. There's a whole bunch of different wrinkles and aspects to that case. She's a member of the Hearst family, so probably wealthy. She's an undergrad at Berkley. Why on earth would she need or want to rob a bank?
Joe: And she had no priors, right?
Dr. Ross: No priors. She's at her apartment with her boyfriend Stephen Weed. The SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) breaks in at gunpoint, knocks her boyfriend out with the butt of a rifle, throws her in the trunk of a car, and rides away with her. So then, she's held in captivity for more than 40 days and most of the time she's in a closet. She's raped by SLA members. There's mock FBI raids that they conduct, where she thinks that she's gonna get killed any second. So it's Guantanamo Bay enhanced interrogation program and then she has a new identity named Tanya, who participates in several bank robberies. The amusing twist on the whole story is that her expert witnesses included Jolly West, Martin Orne, who were both MKUltra mind control contractors, cleared at top secret on the Manchurian candidate programs.
Laura: Oh boy!
Dr. Ross: Who testified that she was basically mind control victim. But, she was found guilty, then she was pardoned later. So who was the Symbiont Liberation Army?
Laura: Yeah!
Dr. Ross: Donald DeFreeze was the main guy. And so there's about eight or nine of them, and there's all kinds of wrinkles on the background story. Basically, Donald DeFreeze, whose codename was Cinque, was a low level, not very educated, petty, street criminal guy, before Patty Hearst was captured. He died in the shootout. In her biography, Patty Hearst describes that Donald DeFreeze (Cinque) constantly was talking about Colston Westbrook being a government agent, and who is Colston Westbrook? Well, I have his master's thesis from Berkley. He was a psychological warfare expert for the Army during the Korean War. He came into Vacaville state prison under cover of the Black Cultural Association, and while there worked with Donald DeFreeze, designed the seven headed cobra logo of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and gave Donald DeFreeze his codename of Cinque. Donald DeFreeze was at Vacaville state prison at the same time the drug research was being done there by the CIA under MKSearch.
Joe: Uh hmm.
Dr. Ross: Which is admitted to in a letter from a high ranking CIA official to Leo Ryan, the congressman who was killed at Jonestown.
Joe: Exactly, that's interesting.
Dr. Ross: Highly convoluted story. One of the survivors of the massacre at Jonestown says that she saw Steven Weed on the premises, at the People's Temple in Ukiah, California, walking around with Jim Jones, three months before the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
Laura: So, in other words...
Dr. Ross: Jim Jones was a... unfairly condemned.
Laura: A CIA asset.
Dr. Ross: Yeah, a CIA asset. And Jonestown was actually a mind control program in and of itself.
Laura: Yeah, so the CIA created the Symbionese Liberation Army, mind programmed this guy who then kidnapped Patty Hearst, mind programmed her with the techniques that he learned, or whatever, and then she committed a bank robbery for which she was convicted, and basically it was just like one or two steps away at most, from being a CIA program, is that what we're saying here?
Dr. Ross: Yeah, exactly. So we can talk about, well should Patty Hearst have been found guilty and * {sneeze} her sentence again, but how about all the other players getting off scot free?
Laura: Yeah, exactly, I mean it's just... Did you ever see a video series called Evidence of Revision?
Dr. Ross: I don't think so, no.
Laura: Evidence of Revision is the actual archival video footage that covers a whole lot of different things that have happened in the U.S. history, including the assassination of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, the Jonestown Massacre, etc. And basically shows how what was being reported at the time, it's the actual footage from television reports and interviews with different witnesses and so forth. And one part of it has.. it's only an audio because it was taken from a tape, so there's no video part to this. It's the interrogation of a girl named Sandy Serrano who was present at the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and listening to this interrogation by this CIA guy, who was working with the Los Angeles police, is probably one of the most disturbing things I have ever heard in my entire life. I'll send you a copy of these videos so you can listen to this interrogation, because it's just...
Joe: Sandy Serrano was the eyewitness who said that she saw a girl in a Polka dot dress coming down.
Dr. Ross: She's the Polka dot dress observer, yeah.
Joe: Yeah, this is the witness and she was mind programmed on the spot over a series of hours by this guy, in the police station.
Laura: You can hear it happening!
Niall: The guy claimed...
Joe: He just turned her around. She started out saying "No, I saw her", and that's what she said. She said "we got 'em", the girl in the Polka dot dress said "we got 'em". Someone asked who and she said "we got Bobby Kennedy". And this was her statement. And after about three hours of this guy...
Laura: Six hours I think.
Joe: Six hours in the police station, she basically said that she had made it up and that she didn't see that.
Niall: And these guys were presenting themselves as FBI.
Laura: It's the most amazing thing you'll ever... well not you, but the average person. If they listen to this, it's the most amazing thing. But I mean I will, I'll send you a copy of this.
Dr. Ross: Yeah, Sirhan Sirhan, to the present day, says that he has amnesia from the shooting.
Joe: Absolutely
Laura: Yeah.
Pierre: Colin I have a question about the shooting. In your book, in The CIA Doctors book, you mention that, for the sake of the book, let's assume that Sirhan Sirhan was a set programmed Manchurian candidate. Is it because you didn't want to dwell on the conspiracy theories surrounding the RFK assassination, or is it your take on it, do you think?
Dr. Ross: Kind of both, good question. So, for that book, I was kind of toying with putting this or putting that in, and then I just decided when I was writing the book, no, I am going to stay 100% with documented facts. Because I don't want there to be any kind of opening for attack.
Joe: Yeah, that really comes through.
Dr. Ross: So that's point number one. And point number two is, on Sirhan Sirhan, there just isn't lock-down, total proof, evidence of who he was handled by.
Laura: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: And so, no. {inaudible} incompetent if there is not much evidence all over the place. I guess I thought, for the purposes of this book, I'll just use him, and the same with Mark David Chapman, the guy who shot John Lennon, to demonstrate how a self-created Manchurian candidate would look. For the purpose of the book and the purpose of illustration, it works out either way. But my mind is wide open to both of them being candidates.
Joe: So you're saying that, in terms of self-created, you mean that he's basically had some mental disorder like DID or...?
Dr. Ross: Well, Mark David Chapman did a lot of self-meditation, a lot of kind of preparation type stuff and Sirhan Sirhan got a bunch of Rosicrucian study manuals and was involved in some self-hypnosis type stuff and some training. I personally think he was handled, but I can't prove it.
Joe: There's pretty strong evidence that he was.
Niall: That he was extremely suggestible.
Laura: Yeah, I think you'll be really interested in some of the interviews and footage, archival footage that we've got on this DVD set, and I will send you... I want you to give us the names of your books that are kind of designed for the popular culture, so that our readers can be aware of their titles. Because we've got a stack of them here. We've got this one here. We've got The The CIA Doctors, which one you got there? You've got the Great Psychiatry Scam, The Rape of Eve, and The Osiris Syndrome. I don't think we bought the textbook, it was pretty pricey but we got everything else.
Dr. Ross: Well the textbook is a textbook, it's for professionals. I wish the publisher would bring out a soft cover version, but they insist on just a hardcover. So, in terms of all this mind control stuff, it's The The CIA Doctors, which is quite readable for anybody. You don't need any kind of special education or anything. In terms of criticizing the way psychiatry operates, the pseudo-science in psychiatry, it's The Great Psychiatry Scam, which is satirical and I think kind of funny.
Laura: I really enjoyed your little autobiographical sketch in The CIA Doctors, it was terrific. I hope everybody will read at least that book, because it's a terrific book. I enjoyed that very much. There's another thing that...
Dr. Ross: The Rape of Eve is also a very readable book. It's about amazing, very well documented, exploitation of Chris Sizemore, who's the Three Faces of Eve real person, by her psychiatrists.
Laura: Yeah, I was pretty disappointed because I really loved Hervey Cleckley.
Pierre: I have a question about that, because while reading the book, I was wondering what was the real role of Cleckley because The Mask of Sanity is a reference...
Dr. Ross: I like The Mask of Sanity, I think it's a very well written book.
Joe: Yeah, we do too.
Dr. Ross: I think Cleckley was more the background guy and the main controller running the show was Dr. Thigpen. But also, I'm sure Cleckley knew what was going on. In terms of the level of exploitation, for the book which came out in 1957, The Three Faces of Eve, which sold over two million copies, Chris Sizemore got three dollars. One dollar for each of her alter personalities. All the rest of the money went to those two psychiatrists.
Laura: You don't have a peacock, do you?
Dr. Ross: {Laughs} A peacock?
Laura: I just heard a strange sound.
Dr. Ross: I think that's my phone, I think I got a text or an email or something.
Laura: Oh, it sounded like our peacock.
{Laughter}
Pierre: Well, the thought that occurred to me while reading The Rape of Eve, is that obviously Cleckley had to know that this was going on, and had to know about the Thigpen manipulation. I started to think that if Cleckley managed to make such an accurate description of psychopathy, as early as the 30's, and at the same time he was at least partially involved in the Chris Sizemore case, maybe he managed to describe psychopathy accurately because it was part of his inner landscape, so is it a paranoid thought?
Laura: No, I don't think it was part of his inner landscape.
Dr. Ross: Well, I think that could be partly true, but you have to remember, the image of the psychopath that we have today is kind of the clever criminal who gets away with stuff and commits crimes. So then, we got the white collar criminal, who's like the really good psychopath. But, when you look at the stories in that book, it's actually a whole different spin on psychopathy from what we normally think.
Laura: Yeah, they're people who are hospitalized.
Dr. Ross: Yeah, it's basically stumbling, bumbling losers that are manipulating and defeating themselves as much as the outside world. So, it's not the clever con-artist picture at all.
Laura: He describes them as nine year old boys, you know.
Dr. Ross: Exactly. So then, he wouldn't fit that profile. But, if you wanted to be a psychiatrist writing a psychological dissection Thigpen, you could say of Cleckley, you could say that he presented that portrait to prove that he isn't one of them.
Joe: Colin, we have a caller. I was going to take it and see if the caller has an interesting question. Hi, what's your name and where're you calling from?
Dr. Ross: Go ahead.
Bahar: Hi, I'm Bahar from the Netherlands.
Joe: Hi, Bahar:
Bahar: I am sorry for interrupting you guys, but I would like to ask something about something else.
Joe: No problem.
Bahar: I would like to ask about the music industry. There are quite some people on the internet speculating that so called Monarch programming is being practiced on artists in the music industry, specifically on some of those who are most popular. I was just wondering whether you, or anybody else, have read anything on Monarch programming being used in the music industry and do you think it could be a possibility?
Dr. Ross: I'm aware of all that. So, Monarch is a not yet declassified mind control program which is supposedly operational up to the recent present, if not currently. I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with CIA, defense intelligence agency, three branches of the military, on Monarch. And just got back, "we don't have anything on it". I'm sure there are ongoing mind control programs. Whether one of them is actually called Monarch, or that's kind of disinformation, misinformation, I don't know. But, it doesn't really matter, because even if it's not called Monarch, I'm sure there's some such program operational. As to whether there's handled, controlled people in basically all walks of life, but in the music industry?
Bahar: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: I would say possible, but I don't know. But I'll tell you two interesting Youtube videos.
Bahar: Okay.
Dr. Ross: If you just go to 'Britney Spears Alter Ego'.
Bahar: Yes, I've watched that.
Dr. Ross: So, there's an interview with Diane Sawyer. It looks to me... well some other skeptics will say "oh, he's just over interpreting everything". But, it looks to me like there's a clear switch of personality states and she tries to cover it. Kevin Federline apparently and friends of hers, have been quoted saying that they think she has multiple personalities.
Bahar: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: And, when she was at UCLA, where of course she got a diagnosis of Bipolar, I saw news footage of... So, this was probably three to four years ago, when she was in really bad shape, and there was this custody speech about her kids and everything. The paparazzi would say, "Whenever she came out wearing the pink wig, then we knew we were in for a show". They are quoted as saying that. You see a clip of her, sticking her head out of the car window, with a pink wig on, talking in a British accent, denying that she's ever heard of her current boyfriend. Then you see another clip of her, she doesn't have the pink wig on, doesn't have the British accent, and she's like "yeah, I've been dating him for so many months", and on she goes.
Bahar: Yeah. I am wondering...
Dr. Ross: And I'll give you another example. So this is a little different, this is Lady Gaga. So you search Lady Gaga alter ego, and it's theres this guy, Joe Fortuna or some such name. So, it's either very good acting and just another stage performance, or it's absolutely this alter personality, with this Italian name and brooklyn accent. So, with her I can't tell if it's just a pure performance, or if she actually has DID too.
Bahar: Yeah, there are many others who talk about hearing voices or hearing random numbers, so it's just... And I wonder how that impacts the younger population, you know?
Joe: Yeah. The question there would be, if those artists are basically mentally ill in that way, or have a mental disorder as a result of modern society and the whole industry that they grew up in, or whether they are mind controlled puppets, type of thing, to spread...
Laura: To purvey or vector certain attitudes, or ideas...
Joe: Crass.
Laura: Degradation of society etc.
Dr. Ross: It's a good question, but we don't have an answer.
Joe: Is that alright, Bahar?
Dr. Ross: Thanks for calling.
Bahar: Yes, thank you very much. Bye.
Joe: Thank you for your question, bye.
Pierre: There is a series of articles by Dave McGowan, titled Laurel Canyon, that documents quite extensively the connection between music movements, in the US in particular, in the 60's and 70's, and the connection with CIA and government agencies, and obviously music movement is not such a free endeavor.
Laura: Yeah.
Niall: I want to ask you, Colin. Have you heard of the Greenbaum Speech?
Dr. Ross: I was at the Greenbaum Speech. {Laughs}
Laura: It's true?
Dr. Ross: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I forget the exact year now. It was late 80s.
Niall: I think it was 1992.
Dr. Ross: 1992, yeah. it was the year after I moved to Texas. So, there's a conference called the Eastern Regional Conference on Multiple Personality and Dissociation. It ran every year from the 80's into the 90s'. Really good conferences, lots of good talks and so on. So, there's one talk which is gonna be just a general hypnosis training talk. How to use hypnosis in the treatment of dissociative disorders. This seemed like it would probably be approved by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, and would just be like a regular, mainstream training talk. And Cory Hammond, who's a PhD, top expert in hypnosis, was the speaker. So I just thought, there's always different talks to choose from, well I'll probably go and listen to this one. So we're all sitting in there, and lo and behold, the talk has nothing to do with the title or description of the program. And he, Cory Hammond, is describing the patients he's working with who are victims of CIA mind control programming, and they have several different levels of programming, you know alpha, beta, theta,, delta, gamma. He describes the characteristics of these different types of programming, different cases and so on. And he says that the lead programmer is Dr. Green, which is obviously codename. In that era, we heard from patients about Dr. Green, Dr. White, Dr. Black, sometimes Dr. Red, so these different mind control doctors. The idea is that Dr. Green was actually Dr. Greenbaum, who was a psychologist or psychiatrist in the death camps who was doing experiments on the prisoners in the death camps. Then he was recruited and brought over to the United States after World War II, and was known as Dr. Green, and was the lead guy in the MKUltra, Bluebird, Artichoke, Manchurian candidate programs. So, that sounded extremely fantastic until we find out that actually, in fact, there were mind control programs, and they did, in fact, create Manchurian candidates. And it's well described in the documents, and so on. Also we find out that there really was a Project Paperclip, and some related projects, where Nazi war criminals such as Werhner Von Braun and the rocket program people were brought over to the United States secretly because they couldn't get State Department visas, because they were classified as war criminals. We know that M.D.s, rocket experts, propulsion experts, ball bearing experts, film experts, experts of all kinds, who were Nazi war criminals, were brought over to the US and inserted into military and private sector. That includes a physician named Hubertus Strughold, who the people he reported to and the people who reported to him were tried and convicted at Nuremberg. He was briefly questioned, and never even questioned at length by the U.S. interrogators, was brought over through Project Paperclip and is regarded as the father of aviation medicine. He has a library named after him at one of the San Antonio Air Force bases, and his experiments included things like putting people in chambers and dropping the air pressure to the equivalent of 60,000 feet, which caused them to die an extremely agonizing death in a few minutes. And then cutting their heads open underwater to see if there was air bubbles in their cerebral arteries. So, all these guys are documented. The only people missing from the documentation on who was brought over under project Paperclip is the psychiatrists. So, I would say it's almost certain that somebody was brought over who was a Greenbaum type figure, whether he was actually named Greenbaum or not.
Jason: The thing that I find interesting is there were all these rumors of Nazi obsession with the occult, you know.
Dr. Ross: They're not just rumors, there's lots of documentation on that.
Jason: Right. They were obsessed with the occult. And then you have all of these Nazi doctors that come over, and then you have all of these reports of satanic, ritual abuse on people, and it's always kind of connected with these Manchurian candidate kind of programs, mind programming. I always thought it was kind of a little bit convenient that there were Nazi doctors brought over, and then there's this satanic ritual kind of thing. And it's really kind of interesting, these rumors - I say rumors because there's never any, what I feel, concrete evidence, for the most part - of like a rampant, almost satanic or occult kind of 'occult cult' inside of the military and military intelligence. People who are like devout members of like the church of satanism in California, stuff like that, you know. So there's all these interesting rumors, and I think that it's kind of convenient, all these Nazi doctors come over and then you see all these reports of satanic ritual abuse, which look suspiciously like mind programming experiments and all these child pedophilia rings, and all this different stuff.
Joe: Well something that ties into that, Colin...
Dr. Ross: It's huge. Actually the John Travolta movie, The General's Daughter, just peeks into the edge of that a little bit. So, it's either just a huge crazy fantasy cooked up by some mentally ill people, or it's this very deeply embedded network or cross relationships and cross connections that's very well protected and controlled.
Joe: What's the reference in your book, The CIA Doctors, who... The Scottish Rite and psychiatrists being associated with the Scottish Rite conferences, and Scottish Rite Association?
Dr. Ross: Well the Scottish Rite equals the Masons.
Joe: Exactly, what are they doing in the middle of it?
Dr. Ross: Well that's a good question. I don't have the answer to why they're there, but there are many... this is all documents. So, you can find many of the LSD experiments where there's funding by MKUltra either directly to the same doctor, funneled through the public health service, by different routes, and then there's cross funding of the same network of LSD experiments by the Scottish Rite Foundation in sponsoring the major LSD conferences, that's a fact.
Joe: Yeah.
Dr. Ross: A lot of these guys are 33rd degree Masons.
Niall: Crazy...
Pierre: And you have a tentative explanation in your book, where you write: "Although the Masons are not implicated as an organization, the CIA and military mind control connections in the network of doctors were maintained up to high rank in the Masons".
Colin: Right, exactly. Which is sort of like pedophiles in the Catholic Church except that the Catholic Church is implicated in the cover up.
Joe: Yeah, so. We didn't get a chance to really go through all of the MKUltra history, Manchurian candidate history and that kind of stuff, but...
Laura: They need to read the book!
Joe: Yeah, but suffice to say that the CIA, etc., U.S. Intel agencies, have spent a long time and a lot of energy, effort, and money, into finding out how best to basically create a mind controlled human being. My question is, assuming that they've got it down to a fine art after 60 years or more, what's the point? What do they want these people for?
Dr. Ross: Well, I'm glad you're asking questions I don't know all the answers to here, but as far as I can figure out, the whole idea that you're gonna get somebody, turn them into a Manchurian candidate, so they would do something that they wouldn't ordinarily do, to me that just seems like a big red herring. If you want somebody to go and become a serial killer, all you do is put them through basic training and send them off to a combat zone. But they're not serial killers because they're killing the bad guys.
Joe: Uh hmm.
Dr. Ross: So, taking an ordinary guy off the street, and turning him into someone who kills multiple people, there's nothing mysterious about that, and you don't need "mind control" beyond the certain basic training level mind control. If you want somebody to be a spy, you just recruit them and train them. Or deliver documents or whatever. So to me, the rationale has got to be the amnesia. The only thing that makes sense to me is, it's all about resisting interrogation. That when the interrogators capture somebody, they're grilling the guy up front and there's so many areas of hypnotic codes and access codes put in there, that the interrogators can't get through to the real information. In the CIA documents it describes efforts to detect Manchurian candidates being run in the U.S. by Foreign Intelligence Agencies. So they're working on both sides of it. To me, otherwise, I don't see any purpose, other than just the thrill of monkeying around with people's minds.
Joe: So, is it kind of saying military, government, CIA, intel applications?
Dr. Ross: Yeah.
Joe: That was the original idea.
Pierre: Colin, I have a question along Joe's question. In one of the YouTube videos, where you participate, you mention a personalized mind control, that is described in MKUltra projects, where basically you have one psychiatrist behind one patient, for months, doing an individualized brain washing, let's call it this way. But, you also mentioned generalized mind control and you list some tools that are being used. Disinformation, misinformation, TV. Today in 2013, could you evaluate the extent of the generalized mind control, now thinking about all the factors beyond the three ones you listed, like what is put in food, in water, the air we breathe? I was even thinking about HAARP, that is because you list in The CIA Doctors some mind control tools using waves, sound waves, electromagnetic waves. I wanted to hear your take on it.
Dr. Ross: Well that's an area of interest of mine, because I actually have a patent, it's in kind of that general area. Not to use it as a military weapon, so I'm interested in electromagnetic energy, and I've got a whole model for... I think a lot of the control signals inside out bodies are actually at the electromagnetic level, not the biological level. I think of human beings and mammals in general, as being kind of like biological cell phones. We're emitting signals into the environment all the time, and receiving signals from the environment all the time, and it's not just background noise, it's really built into evolution. Way back 10,000 years ago it would have been used for tracking game by paranormal means, but it's really like a magnetic signal. I've got a whole model about that. In the MKUltra documents it describes sound energy and electromagnetic energy being beamed at people's brains to... and experimental monkey brains, to knock them out, confuse them, change their mental state and behavior. In U.S. News and World Report, early in the 21st century, I forget the exact year, there's an article called "Wonder Weapons", and it describes... the contractor is Sandia Labs, in New Mexico if I remember right. It says what Air Force aircraft it was. It says what the specs of the machine are, the type of electromagnetic beam that it emits, the altitude of the plane, how far into the skin it penetrates. So, this weapon exists for a fact, and you can see pictures of Marine Corps vehicles, with the weapons mounted on them on Wikipedia. So there's no doubt that this technology exists. And HAARP is High Altitude Auroral Research Program, thats based in Alaska. Jesse Ventura did a conspiracy theory program episode on it. And, from what we're told, it's kind of weather control, maybe weaponized earthquakes, communications signals with submarines...
Joe: Or mind control?
Dr. Ross: Yeah, and so you've got the crazy tin foil hat crowd who says that the CIA is beaming electric energy at them. Well, some of those people are very delusional, but not necessarily all because these weapons definitely exist, and if we know for a fact that radiation, chemical, biological weapons, LSD, were tested on unwitting civilians. I would say the odds are low that these kind of electromagnetic weapons have never been tested on unwitting civilians. You can go to the U.S. Patent Office website and see patents in this area. For beaming electromagnetic energy at people's minds, at their heads, to modify their mental state. Even insert sounds, voice, and language. So, this stuff is right there in the public domain and the U.S. government has already reviewed it and is aware of it.
Joe: Colin we got another call here, just gonna go to it for a second.
Dr. Ross: Okay.
Joe: Hi caller, what's your name, where you calling from?
Lisa: Hi this is Lisa, I'm in North Carolina.
Joe: Hi Lisa.
Lisa: Hi, I just wanted to ask Dr. Ross a question about psychic driving and how... well, I think that the mainstream media uses some kind of variation of that. Psychic driving where they used to put the tape recorder with a looping message under the pillow of comatose patients. And the objective, I guess, was to erase the old belief system and instill a new one, using repetitive messages. I see that in the mainstream media, they also seem to do that with their programming. Could you maybe comment on that?
Dr. Ross: Sure. So what you're describing is an MKUltra subproject with Dr. Ewen Cameron at McGill University in Montreal. And he was, again, not a mad scientist in a basement. He was one of the founding directors of the World Psychiatric Association, President of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, the Society for Biological Psychiatry, a very politically connected guy. And also part of the team that went over, interviewed the defendant doctors of the Nuremberg Trials. And in his MKUltra project, there's two parts to it. There is de-patterning, and psychic driving. De-patterning is massive amounts of electric shock to the brain, like a hundred-plus treatments. One of the chapters in my book is based on the medical records of a woman I interviewed, who was compensated by the Canadian government for this, so at the end of several months, with over a hundred shock treatments, with each shock treatment she got six times the normal amount of electricity to her brain. At the end of that, she's incontinent with urine and feces, doesn't know her own name, doesn't recognize her husband or children, doesn't know where she is and doesn't know what year it is. So that's de-patterning. Then what they would do from there, they would do psychic driving, which is, with ECT and drug induced sleep, they would play these tape loops over as you described, thousands and thousands of times. The rationale was we're gonna wipe out the old identity with it's mental illness, and we're going to build up a new identity which won't be mentally ill anymore. Which, of course, didn't work. But, obviously the CIA was not interested in treating mental illness. What they're interested in is completely wiping out memories. So, this woman who I interviewed has complete amnesia for about age 25 after birth, from the time she entered the ward and was de-patterned and programmed. Under MKUltra and related projects, the CIA contracted the doctors, and learned how to reliably, totally erase somebody's memories with electroshock. Those are all facts. When you go, okay, what sort of watered down, or more general version of that is going on currently? I basically don't know. But, I would say we are just swimming in a sea of propaganda and information control all the time.
Joe: Yeah.
Lisa: Just what I was trying to get to, also, is how when people watch TV, their brains are kind of put into this alpha state, with this repetitive messaging, and then people start parroting that, what they heard on the TV. I did read your book Bluebird and I have to say it's an excellent book.
Dr. Ross: Thank you. Yeah The CIA Doctors is the same book, I just changed the title cause I thought people wouldn't know what Bluebird means.
Laura: Well that's another thing that..
Dr. Ross: I agree with you that it's a kind of general population variation on psychic driving in a way.
Laura: If you think about what happened, say for example with 9/11, you put everybody into a state of shock with an Attack on America, right. And then, the media repeats over and over again, the story, the 19 Arab terrorists, attack on our freedoms, they hate us for our freedoms...
Lisa: Uh huh.
Laura: We have to go to war, we have to blah, blah, blah, etc. And it's like, who was it? Naomi Klein who wrote the book The Shock Doctrine. When a society is in a state of shock, that they are easily programmable... It kind of goes back to Ivan Pavlov and his transmarginal Inhibition.
Dr. Ross: It does. Transmarginal Inhibition is the term that was invented by Pavlov, the brainwashing dogs term, which was then talked about a lot in William Sargant's book, Battle for the Mind and he's the lead psychiatrist expert on brainwashing in England who co-founded the World Psychiatric Association with Ewen Cameron, the MKUltra contractor.
Laura: Oh, swell.
Joe: On 9/11, a little interesting anecdote is the teacher in the U.S., on that morning, who got into class a little bit late, about 10 a.m. Two hours after the attacks. She didn't know what had happened, and only found out from her students. One of her students came up to her, at 10 a.m. on the morning of 9/11, and said "who is Osama Bin Laden, and what is Al-Qaeda?" And that's how he introduced the topic of what had just happened, two hours after the plane had flown into the building. And the message was already in the mass consciousness. Al-Qaeda and 9/11, two hours after this crime was committed, they knew who did it.
Dr. Ross: Well in fact, there no evidence has ever been published in the public domain sufficient to convict them.
Joe: No.
Dr. Ross: I mean we've never actually seen the evidence, we just all know it was him.
Joe: Osama Bin Laden.
Niall: Bin Laden was actually removed from... he was no longer a suspect after two months. They just dropped the case against him officially, real quietly.
Dr. Ross: Yeah, you don't have any trouble convincing me that there's many, many, many things about the 9/11 story that don't add up. Including the building 7, the collapse of building 7, the flight path of the aircraft going into the Pentagon doesn't make sense. The fact that guys with a couple hours in a single engine airplane could pull off a maneuver like that, at that speed doesn't make sense. A whole lot of stuff that doesn't add up.
Lisa: If I may, another reason why I brought up the CIA with the media is because, isn't there a clip also, I think the SOTT team probably has seen it, where they are saying that they embedded CIA into the media many, many years ago. So, it is highly plausible that they have adopted some of their techniques, and things that they do, and used variations of those techniques to reach a wider, broader audience and get the same result.
Dr. Ross: I think the antidote to that is to be an informed consumer of everything and not buy the message, just because it's the message. That's the basic antidote. So this is often a function of the alternative media, and people like you guys.
Lisa: Thank you very much.
Joe: Alright, thanks for the call Lisa. Well, Colin, we don't want to take advantage of you or tire you out too much, and we don't have too much time left anyway.
Dr. Ross: Okay.
Joe: And I think we've covered most of the ground, although there's still a lot to say, maybe we can do that on another show at a later date.
Dr. Ross: That would be fine. I'd be very happy to come back, yeah.
Joe: Okay,
Niall: Cool, we really enjoyed talking to you, so...
Pierre: Thanks very much.
Joe: Okay and we'll contact you off air to get a copy of that DVD sent out, Evidence of Revision. I think you'll enjoy it.
Dr. Ross: Wonderful.
Laura: I very, very much enjoyed this talk, interview, conversation, it's been probably one of our better shows and I just think you're freaking brilliant.
{Laughter}
Dr. Ross:: Thank you! I would never be so rude as to question your judgement.
{Laughter}
Jason: I mean, of course, you're coming on the tail of Judy Wood, which was a fantastic experience.
Joe: Alright, thanks Colin, and we'll talk to you again soon, hopefully.
{All saying goodbye and thank you}
Dr. Ross: Bye
Joe: Alright folks, that's the end of the show. A bit longer than usual shows, but I think it was worth it. We won't be here next week, as we have a prior engagement, so our next show will be in two weeks. We hope you enjoyed it, so thanks for listening, thanks to our callers, and see you next week.
Laura: Two weeks.
Joe: Two weeks.
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