Remote brain wave research — primary documents
In September 1959, a researcher at an American university began work on a survey of scientific literature related to bioelectric signals in the human organism. The CIA was funding it. The researcher never knew.
Subproject 119 was approved in August 1960. Total CIA funding: $6,370. Sidney Gottlieb is listed as a monitoring officer. The stated objective covered five research areas. The fifth was techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means.
The internal CIA assessment of potential controversy: probably none, because the researcher and the university were unwitting.
Full 48-page transcription available.
Read full transcription: Subproject 119 →In June 1983, Wayne M. McDonnell of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade delivered a classified 29-page analysis of the Gateway Experience to the Commander of the U.S. Army Operational Group. The Gateway Experience was a commercial program developed by the Monroe Institute in Virginia, using audio technology to induce altered states of consciousness through hemispheric brain synchronization.
McDonnell's report constructs a physics-based model treating the brain as an electromagnetic organ operating at specific resonant frequencies. It argues that the Gateway techniques work because external audio signals entrain the brain's own electromagnetic field. A brain operating at a stable resonant frequency, the report argues, can interact with the larger holographic structure of reality that quantum physics and relativity theory imply. The report recommends an operational sequence for USAINSCOM personnel.
The document is filed in the CIA STARGATE collection. It was declassified in 2003. Page 25, the page most widely reported as missing, is present in the source PDF and is fully transcribed on this site.
Full 29-page transcription available, including the page widely reported as missing.
Read full transcription: Gateway Process →This AP wire story was filed in November 1983 and collected into the CIA STARGATE archive. It covers the publication of "Psychic Warfare: Threat or Illusion?" by Martin Ebon, a book reporting on a 1981 U.S. Army study titled "Fire Support Mission Area Analysis." The Army study concluded that the Soviet Union had made significant progress toward developing psychotronic weapons and called for U.S. research into both defensive and offensive psychotronic capabilities.
The most specific claim in the story is the brain wave hypothesis for the Soviet microwave bombardment of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, believed to have begun as early as 1953. Prior explanations centered on eavesdropping or jamming of U.S. electronic intelligence equipment. Ebon adds a third possibility: that the beams may have been used to read minds by tuning microwaves to the level of brain waves.
The fact that this story is in the STARGATE archive is itself part of the record. The CIA was monitoring public reporting on this question in 1983 — the same year the Gateway Process report was filed in the same collection.
Full 3-page transcription available.
Read full transcription: Soviet microwave hypothesis →Document 1: MKUltra Subproject 119. CIA FOIA Reading Room document 00017376. Declassified November 16, 1998.
Document 2: Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process. Wayne M. McDonnell, LTC, MI. June 9, 1983. CIA FOIA document CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5. Approved for release 2003/09/10.
Document 3: "U.S. Military Research: From War Games to Mind Games?" Associated Press, Barton Reppert. November 7, 1983. CIA FOIA document CIA-RDP96-00791R000200230031-8. Approved for release 2000/08/10.
The Interference is structured around a timeline that runs from 1960 to the present. Subproject 119 funded the research question. The Malech patent answered it fourteen years later. The Gateway Process report confirmed the underlying physics was valid. The Soviet microwave document confirmed the capability was already being deployed against American personnel. The Colonial Authority in the novel is what that timeline produces if you follow it forward rather than stop at the declassified record. The fiction begins at the point where the documents end.
The Interference begins with a patent. US3951134, filed in 1974, describes a device for remotely monitoring and altering human brain waves without physical contact. The patent is real. The USPTO granted it.
What precedes that patent is a documented institutional record. In 1960, the CIA funded MKUltra Subproject 119 at Texas Christian University. The stated objective included techniques of activation of the human organism by remote electronic means. The contractor was unwitting. The budget was $6,370. Sidney Gottlieb signed off. In 1952, an ARTICHOKE field team produced total amnesia in two overseas subjects held in a guarded safehouse with eyes taped shut in transit. Their dispositions after the operation were outside the team's responsibility. In 1963, the CIA Inspector General recommended termination of unwitting testing on American citizens. The program ran for another decade. In 1983, a U.S. Army Intelligence report filed in the CIA's STARGATE collection treated the brain as an electromagnetic organ that could be entrained to external frequencies. Not as theory. As established fact.
The Colonial Authority in The Interference is what that timeline produces if you follow it forward rather than stop at the declassified record. The mesh program James Harlan carries inside his skull is built on the physics in these documents. The fiction begins exactly where the public record stops answering questions.