Project Monarch

Project Monarch

Much of Project Monarch remains classified. From the information that has leaked out, it is easy to see why these mind-control experiments were considered top secret.

Project Monarch was officially begun by the U.S. Army in the early 1960s, and it is still classified as top secret for reasons of national security. Some researchers are quite certain that Monarch evolved from such MK-ULTRA subprojects as Spellbinder, established to create “Manchurian Candidate” assassins, and Operation Often, which explored black magic and the occult.

Researcher Ron Patton theorizes that the name Monarch had nothing to do with royalty, but referred to the Monarch butterfly and “the feeling of light-headedness,” as if one were “floating or fluttering like a butterfly,” after undergoing the trauma induced by electroshock. One may also think of the common occult symbolism of the butterfly for the soul or the mind and an ancient belief that human souls become butterflies while they are between lives awaiting reincarnation.

Patton states that Monarch was essentially about programming the mind, modifying human behavior, and placing its subjects into a “marionette syndrome.” A marionette is a puppet whose actions are determined by a puppeteer pulling its strings, hence the analogy concerning the psychologist and the programmed subject. Conventional psychologists might use the term “conditioned stimulus response sequences,” but the Monarch experimenters called the process “Imperial conditioning.” Monarch also diverged greatly from traditional psychological conditioning exercises by including satanic rituals in order to enhance the trauma experienced by the subject. The programmer might choose to intensify the rituals by having the hypnotized or drugged subject “image” ancient archetypal symbols of mysticism and the occult, such as spiders, bats, snakes, masks, castles, mazes, demons, and monsters.

Monarch programming had six levels:

Alpha: General conditioning designed to improve memory retention, visual acuity, and physical strength. Exercises deliberately subdivided the subject’s personality and emphasized the left-brain/right-brain division.

Beta: Sexual programming that would eliminate all moral values and remove all inhibitions.

Delta: Deadly force programming for special agents and elite forces of the military. Subjects were conditioned to have no fear, and subliminal instructions were implanted for the agent to commit suicide if captured.

Theta: Psychic programming through various electronic mind-control systems, brain implants, and telemetry devices. The implants were used with highly advanced computers and satellite tracking systems.

Omega: Also known as “Code Green,” this level involved self-destruct programming that caused the subject/agent to commit suicide if too much memory was retrieved by interrogation.

Gamma: This level activated itself within a subject/agent when an opportunity arose wherein misinformation and deception could be disseminated to great advantage.

Many researchers believe that the MK in MK-ULTRA stood for “Mind Kontrolle,” a German spelling of the English word “control.” There were many Nazi psychologists who were masters of mind control and who were smuggled out of Germany at the end of World War II by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Hitler’s chief of intelligence against the Russians, General Reinhard Gehlen, arrived in Washington in 1945 and worked with William “Wild Bill” Donovan, director of the OSS and Allen Dulles to restructure the American intelligence program into the Central Intelligence Agency under Dulles’s leadership. General Gehlen shared the behavior-modification research of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz and the brainwashing experiments conducted at Dachau with hypnosis and mescaline.

There is an increasing amount of evidence that Mengele himself, under the assumed name of “Dr. Green,” participated in the formulation of many Monarch and MK-ULTRA programs in the United States after World War II. Mengele came to be called the “Angel of Death” when he conducted his infamous experiments on countless victims at Auschwitz concentration camp. While Mengele’s presence could not be acknowledged by Monarch, his unprecedented research on thousands of unwilling victims provided valuable data on mental programming, mind control, and many other areas of great interest to MK-ULTRA. Mengele had likely been brought to America together with a large number of Nazi scientists and medical personnel during Operation Paperclip.

Conspiracy researchers assert that the process of choosing the type of subjects to be used in the early Monarch experiments was reminiscent of the rationale of Dr. Mengele, who often selected his victims by his determining that they possessed “satanic bloodlines.” Many hapless individuals for the Monarch experiments were selected because they came from orphanages, foster care homes, or incestuous families and were pronounced as “expendable,” meaning that if any of them should die during the experiments, they would not likely be missed. “They are fulfilling their destiny as the chosen ones.” This coldhearted dismissal of “accidents” that resulted from harsh experiments is said to have been coined by Mengele at Auschwitz, and it was repeated often by the Monarch personnel.

“Dr. Green” was known to work often with “Dr. White,” the pseudonym of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, the former head of the Canadian, American, and World Psychiatric Associations. A personal friend of Allen Dulles, White/Cameron was given millions of dollars by MK-ULTRA to conduct a series of mind-control experiments and to serve as a resource for Monarch and many of the other 150 subprojects of the secret program. Cameron’s favorite experiment seems to have been what he called “psychic driving,” in which subjects were kept in drug-induced comas for weeks, then administered electroshocks through electronic helmets strapped to their heads. Many of the subjects were abused children who had been passed on to him through the Roman Catholic orphanage system.

In 1972 Richard Helms, director of the CIA, ordered records of all 150 individual projects of MK-ULTRA destroyed. On December 11, 1980, a lawsuit was filed against the CIA by a former “patient” who had experienced one of the experiments of Dr. Cameron. Once someone stepped forward to demand reparations for such cruel and harsh treatment, another former “volunteer” became a co-plaintiff. William Casey, the CIA director at this time, anticipated that more victims of the covert mind-control research projects would soon join in the court case, so he ordered the Agency’s legal staff to delay court proceedings as long as possible. Casey’s strategy was to wait out the plaintiffs, who were quite elderly, and to hope that if they died before the case came to trial, their stories would die with them. However, the case did eventually come to trial, and the plaintiffs settled for $100,000 each, released to them with the stipulation that they would never discuss the case or their complaints in public.