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Producer/Interviewer Wayne Morris:
Good morning. You have tuned into another International Connection for another Sunday, and we are in the midst of a radio series on mind control in Canada and the USA. Last week, we heard an interview with Dr. Stephen Kent talking about ritual abuse allegations against Freemasons. Also as part of CBC's coverage for the Making up for Lost Time conference/workshop series, put on from November 1994 to June 1995 in Thunder Bay by a group called The Stone Angels. We heard Peter Tooey, a Mason in Thunder Bay respond to allegations of Masonic ritual abuse. Also we heard an interview with Judy Steed about the subject. Today we are going to hear an interview with Lynne Moss-Sharman. Lynne is the Canada contact for ACHES-MC (Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors - Mind Control) and she was the coordinator for the Making Up For Lost Time conference. We will go to that interview now.
I am on the line now with Lynne Moss-Sharman a survivor of mind control experimentation, and an advocate for other survivors. Welcome to the International Connection Lynne.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Thanks Wayne, I am really glad to be speaking here this morning.
Wayne Morris:
I wonder if you could briefly describe for our listeners what had happened to you. I will get into more detail, but just kind of summarize what happened to you.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I am a survivor of child mind control experimentation which was funded by the CIA, primarily in the 1950's in Southern Ontario and in Upper State New York. I grew up in Toronto until age 3 on Elm Street and Maria Street near the railway tracks, and then spent the rest of my childhood and adolescence in Hamilton.
Wayne Morris:
Just before we go into more detail about what you went through, I would like to talk about what you are doing now. You are the founder of The Stone Angels support group. I wonder if you could talk about that.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
The Stone Angels was formed in Thunder Bay in 1993. I had been in therapy myself for quite a long time, and began to come in contact with other survivors of cult ritual abuse at that point, and was able to speak with over sixty adult survivors of ritual cult abuse. Many of them are from Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario, but a great number of them had moved here from other cities in the country. There was a great need to begin asking for services to be provided for survivors, and we began producing The Stone Angels Journal in 1993 with Volume 1 of survivors' writings and drawings, and I have just been working on completing Volume 6b on Mind Control In The Modern Age. We essentially began bringing cult ritual abuse to light and that progressed, as we began to hear more from survivors, into the dialogue about the mind control experimentation that had in fact been going on all over the country.
Wayne Morris:
You focused on specific issues with your release of The Stone Angels information package. Maybe we could talk about the different issues that you have released, and what they have focused on.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Again, initially it was an overview and personal descriptions of having gone through cult ritual abuse, and then we began to realize that a great percentage of the survivors had also been involved in Masonic cult ritual abuse. Their fathers or their grandfathers were Masons or Shriners, again in different parts of the country, and we started looking much more closely at that because it seemed to be a common thread. Once the Presidential Hearing had been conducted in Washington in 1995 and the survivors of childhood mind control experimentation came forward with their testimony and that became part of the public record -- we were then able to publicly come forward with the information about the mind control experimentation that had been described by certain survivors, and the military connection began to come in there, and again the Masonic was also a common thread. Volume 6a was the first issue that we devoted entirely to mind control in Canada and it gives a bit of an historical perspective from World War II onwards, and Volume 6b brings in more experiences, drawings and documentation by American survivors. It's really curious to see the similarities between the experiences of women and men who were raised in Canada, as Canadian citizens, and those experiences described by USA citizens. It seems that wherever there was an American military base in Canada ... we started looking at NORAD and the DEW Line ... wherever there was an American military base we would then see a clustering of survivors who had grown up there, if not on the base itself, then as part of the community that was adjacent to a military base.
Wayne Morris:
Can you tell us typically how children are introduced to this sort of thing?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
There is a certain element of intergenerational cult abuse, but the common denominator again is that usually the father was in one of the armed forces - either Canadian or American - and whether there was a predilection for pedophilia and cult involvement prior to that particular father joining the military is a question that really needs to be answered. Almost all of the survivors - certainly over 90% - describe having been either consciously or wittingly offered up to the cult abuse and then to the mind control experimentation that followed. This wasn't a situation where children were secretly taken away from their parents during the day or on overnight visits or weekend visits elsewhere. There was conscious knowledge by either one or both parents and they were actively involved in making sure the children arrived where they were supposed to arrive. This is especially devastating. There is a really big statement that needs to be made at this point in history as well. When we think of the Third Reich and when we think of Hitler and the Nazis targeting for extermination 'the Other' - what happened following World War II is that the survivors who are coming forward are the generation of children who were offered up by their own families.
Wayne Morris:
This is something that is just so hard to believe - how a parent could offer up their own children to this kind of thing - but I think we have to put things into context here and what, primarily the fathers, have been involved in. You mentioned that very often the father is in one of the various armed forces, and also involved somehow in cults. What kind of cults are participating in this, and you mentioned the Masonic as well? Is the cult part of that structure or does it operate as a separate thing?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
If we start looking at the people, the men, who are put in positions of power in the military, in the government, in any given municipality - and again say across Canada, and again certainly across the United States - the white male secret society, the Masons, seems to be a prerequisite for having any sort of authority and they have traditionally certainly been involved in the military itself. I believe all but two Presidents of the United States were Masons - Ronald Reagan was inducted into the Scottish Rite in the Oval Office of the White House - and certainly the cults are very secret and they practice behind the scenes, so to speak, in Anglican Churches, Episcopalian Churches, the Mormon Church ... a number of churches have come forward. Research has been conducted by Dr. Stephen Kent, a sociologist at University of Alberta who researches cult practices, deviant religions and it is a focus of his work that the Masons seem to be the secret society who come up over and over again whenever cult practices are disclosed by survivors or investigated by researchers.
Wayne Morris:
I understand you had organized the Making Up For Lost Time conference in Thunder Bay back in 1994, which was really the first conference of its kind - a very important one because of that. What were your experiences organizing that conference, and what did you hope to accomplish?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
At the time of applying for grant applications to hold Making Up For Lost Time - it was actually a series of three conferences that began in November 1994 and ended in June 1995 - at that point I had come in contact with over sixty survivors of ritual abuse in childhood, just here in Thunder Bay alone. Many of the agencies here in the city had become fairly open about the number of clients they were seeing, and everyone was looking for information. The goal of Making Up For Lost Time was to bring the information and the experiences of survivors and of therapists as well into a community context so that people would be able to receive some education and instruction on how to deal with clients, including children, who were coming in with these problems. Also to put it into the abuse continuum in a sense as well, that this was severe childhood sexual, ritual trauma and that it had to be included in the abuse continuum. In a sense it was a way of making the information available, and to make it safe for people to begin talking about it. It was also really, really essential to bring the survivors together and this was a survivor-driven conference - it wasn't organized by an agency- it wasn't organized by professionals.
Wayne Morris:
What level of community involvement did take place at the conference?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
We designed the conference so it was appropriate for both Native and non-Native agency workers. We had representation and participation from Beendigen, the Native women's shelter and now women's and men's counselling unit, and they work with children too; the Canadian Mental Health Association; the Children's Aid Society; Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons; the battered women's shelters here in Thunder Bay - and we actually received our direct sponsorship from Faye Peterson Transition House; representation from Confederation College; the Refugee and Immigrant Women's Office; Family Services Thunder Bay; Ojibway Family Services; Geraldton Mental Health Services; Hoshizaki House - a northwestern Ontario based shelter for battered women; the Indian Friendship Centre; Kenora Sexual Assault Centre; Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital; Lakehead Regional Family Centre; Lakehead University; the London Sexual Assault Centre; the Ojibway Tribal Family Services; Meno Bimahdzewin Child and Family Services; the Ottawa Sexual Assault Support Centre; Oakland Place - Women in Crisis, Algoma; People Allied for Change Through Empowerment, the psychiatric survivors advocacy group in Thunder Bay; the Plummer Hospital Sexual Assault Care Centre in Sault Ste. Marie; Thunder Bay Police; representation from Toronto Rape Crisis Centre; representation from the Wunnemin Health Council which is a band council service group from a reserve that is primarily Ojibway speaking. We had students who volunteered and participated from the Department of Social Work and Psychology, including post graduate, from Lakehead University. Students who volunteered from the Departments of Aboriginal Studies and Social Services at Confederation College. There was also registration from post-graduate studies in psychology from Carleton University and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.
Wayne Morris:
So a lot of these groups were looking for information and to sensitize themselves to these issues. Did you get feedback from them afterwards as to what they got out of the conference?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I think the people who attended obviously were people who had come across it in practice, and were unable to locate any information or to concretely receive any validation that what they were experiencing wasn't an anomaly, peculiar to their own lack of experience. I think a lot of people who have worked in direct service with children and adolescents and adults, whether it is in addictions or in corrections or in direct crisis counselling - a lot of people have been really quite frightened when clients start to describe what has actually happened to them. And the information is so horrifying, I can't imagine how overwhelming it would be to a worker in a small agency, or a worker in an isolated area to hear their client describe what had been done to them and not really be able to put their hands on any information or have any peer consultation about this. It is certainly a taboo in our society to begin with ... There was a great relief and empowerment and strengthening that came about in the service providers themselves, and a lot of networking began.
Wayne Morris:
And the survivors themselves who attended the conference - how did they feel empowered by the conference?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
For many of the survivors - and they came from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, all over Ontario and one survivor from New Brunswick - for some it was the first time they had ever attended any sort of gathering where they were able to meet other survivors. I think one of the most empowering aspects was that a lot of the material was being presented in an academic, objective way -- survivors came to realize that they weren't alone with their perceptions or their experiences -- but that this issue was being taken seriously by a broader research and service delivery community. Just to be there as a survivor, and to see 40 other women and some of the men who were coming forward at that time was tremendously empowering for survivors. I saw many of them begin to speak for the first time. You take away the element of being "crazy", being isolated ... I saw some of the survivors begin to give material to students who were seeking information. One survivor actually made a videotape of one of her flashbacks which was to be used by three mental health workers out in the region. People began information sharing and they became less fearful for their own safety as well when they realized how many other survivors were out there. There was a great deal of laughter. I have to say that as well. Many survivors are really creative, and very bright people who are excluded in many ways from participating in society at large because they have such a hard time functioning. On that level alone, being able to laugh, and to share, and to speak the same language with other survivors - it's hard to put into words what being able to be understood by other people, other women who have gone through the same thing - how much that means.
Wayne Morris:
I can imagine that survivors who are trying to articulate what happened to them in the general public would be met with incredulousness and would find it very hard to come out and speak about it. Approximately how many survivors did attend the conferences?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
There were approximately 40 survivors who attended each of the three sessions. I was actually quite amazed at the number of survivors who did attend, but I had seen so much fear, and a lot of it was validated fear. Survivors have ended up in hospital from being stabbed or beaten up, they are threatened and harassed by cult members - it was a very dangerous thing to do - a very courageous act for a survivor to come to a gathering.
Wayne Morris:
Who else did you invite to the conference to speak from the academic world or from the therapist community?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
The first workshop that was held in November 1994 - the primary presenter at that one was Shirley Turcotte who is a registered clinical consultant and therapist based in Vancouver, B.C. A lot of people know Shirley from the NFB film that she made called "To A Safer Place". Shirley is a survivor herself and a therapist. She was born to a Native father and a non-Native mother in Winnipeg where she was raised, and it was a cult setting. She was used for child pornography as well. Shirley was an extraordinarily dynamic speaker. We also invited at that time, an Elder, Louise Shebagegit from Sabiskong Reserve near Nestor Falls, and Louise was there 24 hours a day throughout the duration of the conference there in the hotel. She was able to act as an Elder, and provide protection and healing for anyone who was having a difficult time or who wanted to seek the guidance of an Elder about it.
When I first called through to Nestor Falls to try and find Louise and ask her if she would come and do this for us, one of her relatives answered the telephone. The message was delivered to Louise, secondhand in a sense, and we asked if she would come and help The Stone Angels at this conference. When I went to pick Louise up at the bus terminal, there she was, having arrived on the Greygoose Bus with her medicine bag and her gym bag with her clothes - and she was really surprised when she met me, because she thought Hell's Angels had invited her to come to Thunder Bay to do a healing! And she gathered up all her courage, and there she was at the bus terminal, ready to act as an Elder and as a spiritual advisor to Hell's Angels, and we had a really good laugh about that one.
I just thought any Elder who was prepared at the drop of a hat to come and work with Hell's Angels had a lot going for her spiritually ...
Then that was followed by the January 1995 portion of Making Up For Lost Time. That was a more involved list of presenters. Judy Steed spoke - she had at that point just released "Our Little Secret: Confronting Child Sexual Abuse in Canada".
Pam Gummer and Ruth Chamberlain-Belagus were the two social workers involved in the Prescott Community Advisory Committee on multi-victim, multi-perpetrator crimes against children, spoke as well. Pam and Ruth had been involved in the case in Prescott where 50 adults were formally charged, and I think about 234 children were rescued from situations where ritual abuse was involved. All of the adults who were charged were found to be guilty. Pam and Ruth, because of their direct family-child agency service orientation, were very, very important to have speak to our community itself. They spoke about the procedures that they had to go through in order to ensure that the children's interests were served - the documentation that they obtained, the testing they had to go through. One thing that really stayed in my mind was that they had to set up a quonset hut for art therapy - they needed a really large facility because there were over 230 children who had been impacted in a multi-generational setting in a very small community.
Another presenter at that conference was Dr. Louise Million. She is a psychologist, and co-author of "Breaking the Silence" - the report on the abuse and torture experiences of First Nations people in residential schools - that report had been commissioned by the Assembly of First Nations.
Another speaker was Dr. Connie Kristiansen, who is a psychology professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Connie is a very well known researcher on the source and impact of the supposed false memory syndrome , and the recovered memory movement. Another speaker was Dr. Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta. His presentation was "Deviant Scripturalism and Allegations of Masonic Ritual Abuse". Dr. Kent specializes in primarily research and published writings about ritual practices within the Masonic men's society, and also within the Mormon church because there are many links between those two institutions.
There was a community panel on the Saturday afternoon, "The Ethics of Confidentiality - Who Is The Silence Protecting?" The moderator for the panel was Brenda Small, who is a Cree lawyer from James Bay who teaches in the Aboriginal Law division at Confederation College. Her specialty is the concept of Native or Aboriginal Law as opposed to the laws, the judicial process that is part of our dominant culture. The panel participants were Kerry Bourret, who is a counsellor/ therapist at Family Services Thunder Bay and who has almost ten years experience in working very successfuly with cult survivors, trauma survivors, mind control survivors. Also Constable Ken Davies, who is one of the two-person Criminal Investigation Dept. at Thunder Bay Police. He and another officer specialize in the area of cult activity, cult abuse as well.
So that January session was very comprehensive, and what I wanted to do there was to cover every possible aspect - the child aspect ... how agencies could deal with it. The parallels within the First Nations communities - the parallels in the kinds of organized torture and abuse that had taken place in residential schools. The impact and the acceleration of False Memory Syndrome Foundation. The evidence and research documentation about Masonic ritual abuse which is a big problem in this community as in many others in North America, Britain, Australia. And then to have the community panel - we are really fortunate to have some extraordinarily committed and very perceptive and bright professionals working here in the community in Thunder Bay. There are people working here who - I guess people are surprised when they realize the level of research and service that is actually occurring in this very isolated region.
The third and final section of Making Up For Lost Time was a workshop by Alexandra Rogers, who is also a survivor and therapist, based in the United States. Alexandra was raised in a masonic, military cult in the state of Maine and she was a programmer, trained to be a programmer throughout her childhood. I think that particular conference workshop setting - to have a survivor who has managed to break the programming and escape from the cult, and who is now able to work professionally with survivors and therapists - to break the code for them on how to deal with certain programs that have been indoctrinated in clients - also for survivors to be able to listen to this extraordinary woman who had been through all of the same practices, tortures and abuses, and had actually been a torturer herself - for her to stand up there and talk about the kinds of interventions that had brought her over on the side of being a survivor and not a practitioner or participant any more - it was one of the most powerful things that happened throughout the duration of the three part conference series. Alexandra is 33 years old. Her husband was also there. He is an artist and also a cult survivor who was raised in Toronto, and had formerly been involved in animation production.
This was a really interesting time in Ontario's history. Unbeknownst to us, there were five other communities in the province who were also hosting conferences, workshops or gatherings specifically about ritual abuse. One took place in Kitchener in February, 1995. One in Ottawa in February. One in Belleville in February. Another in Ottawa in March, and another in Kingston in June. So from our first gathering in November, our second in January and the third in June -- in that six to eight month period -- there were 8 or 9 gatherings happening around the province. So what we were doing wasn't happening in isolation - we are not a curiousity of a community. What we were doing was part of a much larger breaking the silence throughout the province of Ontario.
Wayne Morris:
Do you know if any of the other conferences made the links between ritual abuse and mind control experimentation?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
No, nor did they talk about masonic ritual abuse. I sensed at the time that if we were going to present this information, and if people were going to go to all the trouble of getting to Thunder Bay from other parts of the province, or from other provinces, that it was essential that we encapsulize the information and that we put the whole notion of ritual abuse into a much broader historical context. I know some of the other groups were very fearful of bringing that kind of information forward. We certainly brought the masonic information forward and we paid for that in lots of ways. The mind control experimentation wasn't addressed directly at that time. There were private conversations about it that went on at the gatherings, and actually I think the extent of the mind control experimentation -- coming to know about it -- was a byproduct of advertising - particularly about the masonic connection. I put a few small advertisements in the Globe & Mail, notifications about the upcoming conferences - and just the three or four words describing the masonic connection generated phone calls and letters from survivors across Canada who described themselves as being masonic survivors, living in terror. They were invariably the daughters of Masons, or Scottish Rite or Shriners. They began describing, again from all across Canada, memories of what could only be described as mind control experimentation. Those fragments began to come forward back then in November 1994.
Wayne Morris:
There were some public statements about masonic involvement in ritual abuse in the media, at the time of the conference and shortly afterwards in which they had a chance to respond, and they denied all the allegations that were brought forth. Has there been further responses from the masonic lodge since the conference, or any further communication?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
There was a really well organized - I can only call it an attack - by the masons when the January portion of the conference was coming to the media's attention and I am going to speak about Thunder Bay, because there was a great deal of media coverage here in the city about it. There was a fax campaign where then Premier Bob Rae received faxes from masons all over the province denouncing what The Stone Angels were doing in Thunder Bay. I had messages left on my answering machine at that point, day after day, from masons and wives of masons in Northwestern Ontario, including a call from the wife of a mason up in Moose Factory and also the publisher of a newspaper in Dryden who refused to print the notice about the conference itself because her husband was a mason. So she chose as publisher and editor of a regional newspaper to not let people know there was such a gathering. There was a public outcry by the masons that they were not allowed to come and attend our conference, and we were very explicit and very clear about masons not being allowed to attend. Registration was closed to survivors, therapists and service providers only -- that's who it was designed for. I received a series of calls from two particular masons over a period of time here in Thunder Bay. One of them was a retired policeman, Peter Tooey, who also went on television denouncing what we were doing. At that point I was fairly naive. I didn't have access at that time to all of the information that was available - primarily USA publications who had also been asking questions about the Masons. So I was operating in a bit of an information vacuum at the time.
I had come across some information (in a library encyclopedia of organizations) stating that the Scottish Rite in the USA funded, out of their charitable donations, research on schizophrenia. I can remember reading that and thinking how curious, how chilling, that the upper echelon within the Masonic secret society would choose to use their charitable monies to fund research on schizophrenia which is very similar in some ways, to the diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder or Dissociative Identity Disorder which is displayed by 99% of the survivors of ritual abuse, and certainly by survivors of mind control experimentation. And I very naively asked Mr. Tooey if he was aware that monies were being used for these purposes, and he very proudly told me that " ... well yes ... and here in Thunder Bay all the money that the Scottish Rite raised went to fund a research project on the study of schizophrenia at the University of British Columbia." I found that very frightening, and again, very chilling -- that the money from this community in Northwestern Ontario, raised by this male secret society, would be directly funnelled to a university on the West Coast of Canada. And then I came across another piece of information on a bulletin board out at the University shortly after that - there are research grants available at York University - something called the Rohr Institute which is funded by the Masonic Foundation of Canada which is headquartered in Hamilton, Ontario. It offers $8,000 and $35,000 research grants -- the $35,000 research grant is directly funded by the Scottish Rite Charitable Foundation of Canada through the Rohr Institute for the purpose of offering research grants for studies in the area of "intellectual disability". I don't think this is something that is broadly known either - and I am wondering what kinds of studies are actually being carried out at York University with these monies.
I think I have mentioned to you before, in terms of intellectual disability, all of the survivors with whom I have come in contact, are extremely bright, very very creative women and men. Some of them have two degrees. Some of them have post graduate accreditation as well, and yet the survivors who are able to function on any professional or academic level, or indeed, are even able to support themselves, are in the minority. What was done to us has been disabling to use intellectually, in the extreme.
Wayne Morris:
I would like to talk about ACHES-MC which you are the Canada contact for. How did this organization come about and what are your goals and demands and activities?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
ACHES-MC is the Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors of Mind Control. In March 1995 the testimony was accepted at the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in Washington -- the testimony of approximately fifty survivors of child mind control experimentation funded by the CIA was presented to that Committee by Valerie Wolf, a therapist in New Orleans. Valerie incidentally grew up on the military base in North Bay, Ontario and she and her husband both completed undergraduate degrees at McMaster University in Hamilton. Valerie has been a therapist for a number of years in New Orleans where her husband is a psychiatrist on faculty at Tulane University Medical School. Valerie collected the written testimony of survivors of childhood mind control experimentation to bring to the Committee's attention, and two of her clients, Claudia Mullen and Chris Denicola came in person to give oral testimony about their experiences as children who had been subjected to torture, mind control experimentation procedures, and also the organized pedophilia, again with the CIA context.
I was able to attend a conference in Texas in 1996. Valerie, Claudia and Chris were presenters at the conference, and when they described the next thing that had to happen for survivors was the formation of a survivor based advocacy committee who would collect information from as many survivors as possible and bring it to the attention of this Advisory Committee -- so that another Presidential Advisory Committee and a formal commission could be formed to accept the testimony of the mind control survivors in the United States and in Canada. I met other survivors there, and we began sharing experiences and began informally talking about forming such a group. On the last day of that conference I by chance started to talking to Blanche Chavoustie who is also a survivor, she is an adult survivor of mind control experimentation who is originally from upper state New York. She and I just happened to sit down and started talking to each other, and decided that we were going to do whatever was necessary to form a survivors advocacy committee. When each of us returned home, Blanche to Long Island and me to Thunder Bay, we began contacting all the survivors we had been in contact with over the internet or by mail or telephone. We were able to start ACHES-MC. One of the first actions that we did was when five survivors attended a conference at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. in May 1996 and they handed out the first information about ACHES-MC at that time. We started a data base. We formally started that a year ago in October of 1996, and we have a website and questionnaires have been sent out to well over a hundred survivors of child mind control experimentation. We have begun collecting this information, creating this data base and we hope to be able to produce a report. That data shows the geographical clusters where experimentation has taken place in the US and in Canada, and it also shows the clusters of alleged perpetrators, torturers - the doctors who carried out these experiments.
Wayne Morris:
I understand you have also been very active in working with the Native American Indian communities in the Thunder Bay area. What has your involvement been and how have traditional Native healing practices played a part in your recovery, and other survivors' recoveries?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
When I spoke earlier about coming in contact with over sixty adult survivors of ritual abuse in Thunder Bay, some of those adult survivors are Ojibway people who were raised in Thunder Bay or on the reserves in Northwestern Ontario. We began to see similarities in what survivors of residential schools were describing in terms of the practices that were carried out on them. For instance the electric chair that was constructed at the residential school in Fort Albany, near Moose Factory. There were also statements about the skeletons of children found in an abandoned barn there at Fort Albany. Some of the ex-residential school students described being raped in the middle of the night by men in white robes, and then forced abortions taking place. These are the same ritual cult practices described by survivors of cult abuse, cult experience.
Wayne Morris:
You are listening to The International Connection on CKLN 88.1 and that was an interview with Lynne Moss-Sharman, a US mind control experiment survivor and Canada contact for ACHES-MC. We are going to hear a music piece right now, called "Play Me Backwards" by Joan Baez, and if you listen closely to the lyrics, this song is about child ritual abuse.
You don't have to play me backwards to get the meaning of my verse
You don't have to try and go to hell to feel the devil's curse
Well I thought my life was a photograph on the family christmas card
Kids all dressed in buttons and bows and lined up in the yard
Were the golden days of childhood so lyrical and warm?
Or did the picture start to fade on the day that I was born?
I've seen them light the candles, I've heard them bang the drum
And I've cried Mama I'm as cold as ice and I got no place to run.
Let the night begin, there's a pop of skin and a sudden rush of scarlet
There's a little boy riding on a goat's head, and a little girl playing the harlot
There's a sacrifice in an empty church of sweel little Baby Rose
And a man in a mask from Mexico is peeling off my clothes.
So I'm paying for protection, smoking out the truth
Chasing recollections, nailing down the proof
You don't have to play me backwards to get the meaning of my verse
You don't have to try and go to hell to feel the devil's curse
I'll stand before your alter and tell everything I know
I've come to claim my childhood at the Chapel of Baby Rose.Joan Baez, 1992 (CD: Ring Them Bells)
That was Part 1 of an interview with Lynne Moss-Sharman the Canada contact for ACHES-MC and also of The Stone Angels group in Thunder Bay. Next week we will continue this interview and talk more about ACHES-MC's current campaign to call for government investigation into mind control experiments on children. You can learn more about ACHES-MC through their website which is www.aches-mc.org
I would like to make a couple of announcements regarding these issues we are dealing with on this show. From October 1 to 3 in Atlanta, Georgia there were will be a conference called "Ritual Trauma, Child Abuse and Mind Control: a growing threat to national security." This is organized by ECLIPSE. ECLIPSE is Emancipating Children from Legal Injustice, Pornography and Sexual Exploitation and it is going to feature quite an impressive list of speakers including Walter Bowart, author of "Operation Mind Control", Dr. Charles Whitfield, author of "Trauma and Abuse", Ted Gunderson, a former FBI agent who investigated the McMartin case, Nick Begich, author of "Angels don't play this HAARP", Brice Taylor, a former presidential mind control slave and author of "Starshine, One woman's valiant escape from mind control", among many other speakers in Atlanta, Georgia. Also another gathering, more survivor oriented healing gathering in Elliot Lake, Ontario from October 3-5. This is organized by SOS&SA, survivors of sexual and spiritual abuse and there will be survivor panels covering topics on institutionalized child abuse, incest, ritual abuse and cults, sexual abuse by the clergy. There will be an opportunity to participate in holistic healing and ceremonies by Anishnabe Elders. For more information, you can contact SOS&SA at PO Box 147 Serpent River First Nation in Cutler, Ontario POP 1PO. You can get transcripts of previous shows on this mind control radio series here on The International Connection at the Mind Control Forum website www.mk.net/~mcf and look under the CKLN Radio Series title.
Wayne Morris:
Good morning and welcome to another edition of The International Connection here on CKLN 88.1. Today we are broadcasting show #26 in a series on mind control. We are going hear part 2 of an interview with Lynne Moss-Sharman, the Canadian contact for ACHES-MC, the Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors - Mind Control and of The Stone Angels in Thunder Bay. Through her work with these organi- zations, she devotes her energies to act as an advocate for other survivors of ritual abuse and mind control. The Stone Angels publishes journals with information for survivors, and ACHES-MC is currently engaged in a campaign to call for an investigation into government mind control experimentation in the United States and Canada. Lynne alleges that she had been used in government mind control experiments involving tortures, electricity, sensory deprivation and sexual abuse. She has remembered names of doctors who are known to have been involved in the CIA's MKULTRA mind control project, such as Jose Delgado and Ewen Cameron. And now, the second part of that interview.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
More people contacted The Stone Angels as more Native agencies and Native service providers started to get in touch with us. A lot of this happened on an individual basis as well. We began to see that there were certain reserves, certain areas where there were intergenerational satanic cults operating - and these are comprised of Ojibway or Ojibway-Cree people. I can only assume that the creation and the maintenance of these cults over the decades, or over generations. was a direct result of the missionary activities, the religion that was imported by the British and the French through the fur trade centuries ago, and certainly is a direct product of the residential school experience. There is known cult activity on Manitoulin Island and some survivors described wealthy, white people who were flown in from New York and California to take part in highly organized, highly sophisticated cult activity right on the Island. This is something that has been addressed within the Native community and across Canada there is research being carried out by Native people themselves. They know where the activity is taking place, and they are dealing with it in their way.
A group has formed in the Sault Ste. Marie/Cutler/Thessalon area, Survivors of Spiritual and Sexual Abuse. They are affiliated with Elders, and have recently received funding to sponsor intensive healing gatherings directed and run by Elders. They are quite prepared to provide any help or assistance at all to ritual abuse survivors, or survivors of mind control experimentation, Native or non-Native. There is a high level of awareness within the Native community itself about the extent of ritual, cult abuse practices and certainly people who work in the Native Child and Family agencies have come to find a lot of evidence of this kind of practice, a lot of children who have been damaged by it.
Wayne Morris:
What kinds of healing practices have been going on in the Native community? Has that been helpful in the recovery of Native survivors?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I have been at healing gatherings, at sweat lodges, where Elders have gathered together and they usually know that there has to be a group of them who are going to work with ritual abuse survivors. They have had the most profound healing impact on survivors that I have seen. I often think that, personally, I wouldn't be alive if it hadn't been for the assistance of some Native Elders here in the Thunder Bay area. I am very grateful to them for what they have been able to do. They don't shy away from it, or deny it, or run away from it which is not something I can say about the non-Native healing community itself. There is a great deal of fear in the non-Native community. The fear isn't there in the majority of Elders. They see the direct equation to what has happened to so many of their people in the residential schools and within the prison system as well, and again because so many of the residential schools were also found in areas that were near military bases, either U.S. or Canada military bases (NORAD and the DEW Line certainly had an impact). We are starting to see a lot more evidence of mind control experimentation. I am assuming it is going to be the same CIA funded practices that were carried out on non-Native children, again in that non-military context.
Wayne Morris:
Lynne, I would like to talk to you about your own experiences with government mind control experimentation. How do you remember that you first got introduced to this?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
My father had been in the Canadian military, the Cape Breton Highlanders, from 1939-45. My mother was a war bride from Glasgow. They moved from Halifax to Toronto following my birth in 1947, and like many other men after the war, my father had the usual difficulty in finding work. My memories first began with memories of sexual abuse by my father, my uncle and a group of his army buddies who were also involved in the sexual exploitation of children. The memories always began with these men who were somehow associated with the military, and I am not sure how it escalated with my father. I am absolutely uncertain about how he came to play a role in this, and he will never talk to me. I do know he worked for General Electric in Toronto and that he belonged to something called The Pyramid Club. I met an adopted survivor, who is half Native, and she had been used in pedophilia in southern Ontario by her adoptive father who belonged to a group who went by this name as well.
Wayne Morris:
Do you know if your father was involved with any potential cults or ....
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I have very distinct memories of cult rituals starting at a very early age. One of them was when living on Maria Street in Toronto. I have memories of a ritual ('forgiven by the blood') taking place near the slaughterhouse; churches outside of Hamilton and Toronto - different locations there; also being flown to different places as well, including an underground cult site called Stone Mountain, that was affiliated with the military. I remember being taken to Uplands Air Base in Ottawa as a child.
Wayne Morris:
Do you have any idea of how old you would have been when this took place?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I have really distinct memories from age three onwards, and I have begun to piece together the memories about the experiments themselves bit by bit over the years.
Wayne Morris:
You have done a series of drawings that express your memories of government mind control experimentation which you have included in one of The Stone Angels journals and which I found to be very disturbing. Can you tell us how these drawings came about, and what they mean to you?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
The drawings were very puzzling to me for a long time. I found myself doing drawings of children who seemed to be wearing helmets, and there was always an electrical outlet nearby. There was always some kind of indication of electricity being used. Over time, I began to realize what I was trying to say with these drawings, because I was unable to say any of these things in words. It has only been in the past six or eight months that I am somewhat able to articulate what is contained in the drawings. There is one drawing that describes a series of memories I had about having my limbs dislocated at the shoulders and at the hips, and then being wrapped up with rolls of bandage to create a portable sensory deprivation unit, if you like. What was said about what was being done to me there was "First we break you, then we make you ..." I can remember looking at the drawing when I finally did it, and realizing that this was a very, very simple technique for anyone in the military ... not even necessarily in the military ... if someone wanted to begin the process of torture on an individual, they would be able to carry rolls of bandage as part of a first aid kit, or it could be as simple as carrying rolls of bandage in a brown paper bag ... and no one would know that you were about to begin breaking a person.
Wayne Morris:
And this is really exactly what the intention was of Dr. Cameron's projects at McGill were designed to do. He publicly stated that was what he wanted to do ... remove a person's personality. Totally break them down, rebuild them, put in a new personality according to their design.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Actually, not a new person per se, but a series of interlocked and interconnected personalities or components that could only be brought forward by key words or key phrases. Telephone programming - you were made to respond and made to be cued internally by the application of electricity and by different torture procedures, again as a child so that the telephone could be used very effectively. Again, it could be as simple as someone 1000 miles away wanting to make contact with that part of you, and all they have to do once the training had been completed, was to pick up the phone, give you a cue word, and then that component within yourself would be activated to follow through on any instructions or suppression of material they might want to implement at that time.
I have very distinct memories about different sensory deprivation techniques as well. There was a series of constructed rooms, some of which became smaller while you were in them. Other containers such as barrel shaped containers in which you were placed - your arms, legs, everything would be bound and you would be wrapped up that way and put inside a container. These are just the systematic techniques to begin isolating you. Then things accelerated to the use of Ewen Cameron's procedures. The song Home Home on the Range seems to be something that was used in my programming, and there was another experiment, again with the use of a helmet and tubes were placed over my arms so that I was unable to move my arms or my hands to defend myself, or have any tactile sense at all.
And there are also drawings of ... I remember being put in ... I had no idea what I was describing at the time, but I certainly knew what the effect and the impact was. There were chambers, and all I can remember is what I would call a huge coil at the end of the chamber and ... they ... I was put in there ... and then something happened, and it had to do with that coil, and I can remember wanting to rip the top of my skull off when I started to remember about being put in those chambers ... there were two of them, one was larger than the other ... I wanted to kill myself and rip the top of my skull off. I can't even put into words what the effect of those coils were.
I was part of some of the projects that were funded by the University of Rochester in the last part of the forties and early fifties. The three key research points in the funding triangle were Los Alamos, University of Rochester and Stanford University in California. Dr. Cameron certainly had an affiliation with those research groups which were conducted in secrecy in upper State New York. Another Canadian is Dr. George Estabrooks. There is a very worth-noting silence about Dr. Estabrooks. He was located at Colgate College in Hamilton, New York and he had a teaching affiliation with Oswego State Teacher's College. It is worth noting here that Oswego, N.Y., on Lake Ontario, was a major receiving site for Holocaust survivors and refugees. Those people deemed not well, psychologically or physically, were held at Fort Drum, about 35 miles from Oswego. George Estabrooks was born in Newfoundland, and Canadians can know that he was instrumental in creating the U.S. versions of the Manchurian Candidates. He had been in direct contact since 1937 with J. Edgar Hoover, and was affiliated with Jose Delgado, Martin Orne, Ewen Cameron and others -- with the practitioners of mind control and brainwashing experiments. There is a long-neglected history here that needs to be brought forward.
Wayne Morris:
Right, and he has published many writings of his own, detailing or giving some details of his work in trying to create Manchurian Candidates. Just for the benefit of listeners who may not be familiar with that term, it is using a person under the influence of mind control to commit assassination and many other military and espionage acts as we will get into later. Also to familiarize listeners with the work of Jose Delgado ... he was involved also in the same kind of work using radio control brain implants ...
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
... I don't even want to use the word "doctor" ... I will say torturer, Delgado, was one of the men who performed experimental procedures on me as well as Dr. Ewen Cameron. He had experimental sites constructed within a building -- one was called The Funhouse, the other was The Playhouse. I had been wired up to perform like a robot, like a puppet, and electricity was used to control my movements and actions. I was taken to a place that I can only recall as the "Land Vehicle Division" and the work that Jose Delgado was doing was somehow related to this military installation. Because I would have been taken there in a drugged state as a child, I am not sure of the location of that particular place, but I know it is Jose Delgado who has come up over and over again.
Wayne Morris:
Do you know what kinds of things the government has used you in, using mind control? What kind of operations were you involved in?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
In many cases it literally is to carry information and to be used for blackmail purposes and to be used in pedophilia among high-ranking people who either have to be brought into the fold or reminded of their place in the hierarchy. There are certainly the assassin programs, that is a very hard one to come to grips with inside yourself when you start to remember exactly what your hands have been taught to do. For example, I know how to scalp someone three different ways. Not a Betty Crocker Little Homemakers Oven trick is it?
There are many instances ... and Jonestown always comes up ... and the experimentation at Walla Walla Prison ... there seem to have been some assassin programs produced at Oakridge Penetentiary here in Ontario in the late 1960's and early 1970's under a programming and LSD experiment conducted by Dr. Elliott Barker in that institution. He is still practicing in the Midland area today.
I was used to blackmail a British scientist. It started in a faculty building dining room setting and then I found myself, as a child, in bed with this older man who was crying, and there was a camera trained on the bed, and he been drugged, I had been drugged as well ... and here I was a child, with of course no clothes on ... he had no clothes on ... and he was crying and crying about what was he going to tell his wife, what was he going to tell his wife ... (that was actually the least of his worries really) ... there were three people standing at the end of the bed, men dressed in women's clothes, and it had to do with one of the projects they were working on at that time, and this particular British researcher - it was essential that he become complicit in what they were going to carry out.
Wayne Morris:
Have you heard other accounts of children being used operationally for these sexual blackmail episodes?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
There are hundreds of stories like that. I think what I find - not just the sadism of these military researchers, these scientists - not just the sadism and their absolute total disregard for anything we would put under the definition of "human or humanity" - there seems to be a predilection among almost all of them for pedophilia with either male or female children, and that seems to be a common bond with them. There was also a lot of "gender blending", cross dressing at times in rituals or situations like the one above.
Wayne Morris:
What are some of the similiarities between the survivors accounts that you have come across with ACHES-MC and The Stone Angels?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Some of the things that children who have been involved in ritual abuse describe is the use of cages, electricity, the use of drugs ... these are also things that come up in the production of pornography, in any investigation of the production of pornography itself. In the mind control experiments, again, the electricity is essential ... it has been refined over time. The use of drugging to obtain compliance or to literally experiment with children to see what the effect of certain drugs will be. The use of torture. The use of sensory deprivation. Psychic driving. The use of the children who were used in the mind control experimentation to carry secrets, to be used for pedophilia to blackmail certain individuals in the research and military community so that their compliance is gained. Proximity to military bases or nuclear reactors ... in the U.S. and in Canada. When I look at a map of Ontario for example, I can pinpoint clusters of survivors who grew up in communities where there were military bases or nuclear power plants ...
Wayne Morris:
You were aware of other people, other survivors, being around other people who were being experimented upon. Were these for the most part children, or a mixture of men and women.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
There were babies, female and male children, female and male adults. The survivors that I am personally am most in contact with because they are the ones I share the most with are the child survivors of experimentation, and there are certainly many survivors who were introduced to these experimental technologies and this torture as adults at different colleges or universities, or in prisons, or the military itself. I guess I am thinking it is easier to believe that a prisoner or an adult was subjected to mind control experimentation because we have seen a published and a broadcast history of what was done to adults. It is really essential that the child survivors' stories are brought forward, and that as a society we understand the depth and the length that the research institutions in Canada and the USA ... the length and the depth they will sink, and go to, to devise more and more refined techniques so they can brainwash the populace.
Wayne Morris:
Through your memories of the time when you had undergone these experiments, what is your sense of how many other people were involved in being experimented on at that time?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I was taken to laboratory settings where people had been held for a long time. I saw evidence of children having been born in these laboratory settings ...
Wayne Morris:
And they were being used as well?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Yes, and the genetic experimentation that was going on ... I remember being in one place in the fifties and there were what I call "Torso Babies" ... they had little babies, they had beards, and they didn't have any arms and legs ... and when I did the drawings, all I could call them was the "Torso Babies". A friend, who is a nurse, looked at them and said "omigod, that must have been something like thalidomide being used that way" in these hidden laboratories. I know that some of the survivors who have come forward talked about having been given different drug regimes when they were eight or nine years old to bring puberty on ... so that they were able to become reproductive much earlier than they normally would have. They have been very damaged by what was done to them at age eight or nine in terms of their genetic makeup and some are unable or unwilling to have children themselves.
Wayne Morris:
What is the role of the various kinds of druggings they had used within the experimentation?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
That is a huge question. To make someone unconscious and therefore malleable is one. I think they were also experimenting to see which of the drugs would make someone more susceptible to brainwashing. Probably efficiency is a word I could use. Time management, cost efficient. Which drug is going to make it easier and quicker to begin the brainwashing process, to begin the patterning that needs to take place. And genetic alteration was a big factor ... along with radiation experiments. I believe cross breeding was taking place, animal and human matings. And if you look at the list of research projects documented at University of Rochester during that time period ... when you see an experiment described as being done with rats, or cats, or monkeys ... try inserting the word infant, child, adult human in some cases ... the CIA scientists would never have listed human beings as research subjects for the procedures they were carrying out on primates etc.
There is some parallel research going on in Canada in the Native community itself as well ... when I look at the electric chair that was constructed at the Fort Albany residential school up by Moosonee, where the children were put in that electric chair and made to jump and squirm with electricity for the "entertainment of the visiting dignarities" ... that was back in the 1950's. I am really wondering what role the military mind control experimentation has played in what has happened to the Native community across Canada. I have memories of being in one place where, there was an Inuit woman who had a very small infant with her and her head had been shaved. I am wondering what happened to some of the patients who were sent down to Southern Ontario or across the border into the States for tuberculosis treatment in the fifties and sixties ...
Wayne Morris:
How has the process of healing been for you?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
It's been a really long one, and I guess ... at some point there is a fragmentation that occurs is irreversible and absolutely devastating. As you enter into each of the levels of programming, your body remembers everything that was ever done to you. So physicall, you are almost in whiplash sometimes when your body begins to remember the insertion of certain things whether it was the doctor's penis, or whether it was a fine metal wire ... you begin to remember what it felt like when they began to turn the coil on when you were in the chamber. You begin to remember what you felt like when they put you in the chair and strapped down your hands and your ankles and put the electrodes on you. You begin to remember what it is like to be made to walk and function like a robot in a room where there were scientists looking down over the top of the small constructed room that they called The Playhouse, and they told you to go into The Playhouse and as a child you thought it was going to be a play-house ... and instead it was just an experimental laboratory ... sort of like a doll's house with no roof on the house ... and they watched you and used their remote control devices and their electricity to make you do what they wanted.
Wayne Morris:
How did you begin remembering the memories of experimentation and torture? What was going on in your life at the time?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I think things really began to break through at a time of personal crisis in my life. I know that many survivors have had the process of memory recovery begin ... sometimes a car accident, or a physical trauma like a rape, or another kind of traumatic event started their process. Mine was being in an extremely abusive personal relation- ship with someone and it ended up being the last of a series of degrading, for myself, interpersonal relationships. And I really just bottomed out and could not function, and some friends took me to get some help.
Wayne Morris:
And was that when you were first introduced to the therapist you have been working with.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Yes. And neither she nor I were cognizant at the time of what was to come in the therapeutic process over the ensuing years. Things started off fairly simply -- generically in a sense. I began dealing with different incidents with my father and uncle, some of my father's military friends. Over time I began having fragments of other more puzzling memories of being in hospital settings, memories of being in cages, electricity. I guess it is important to emphasize that my process, which is similar to many other survivors, was a very fragmentary one. I would get initially a glimpse of a setting, a glimpse of someone's face, but as I got the visual memory, or the fragment of the memory, I would have intense body pain and I would be unable to speak. I couldn't tell my therapist what I was remembering, or what was happening. So there was a very very long and intense series of acting things out for her ... I was absolutely non-verbal, incapable of telling her what I was remembering. There was a lot of abreacting, and sometimes writing or drawing, sometimes hiding myself under her coffee table, wrapping myself up in her throw rug on the floor of her office, sometimes pinning myself against the wall, or hiding in the corner. Using the electrical outlet on the wall, pretending to put my fingers into it, to somehow transmit to her that there were electrical currents coming into my body.
Wayne Morris:
And when you say abreacting, that means to be re-living that experience once again ...
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Yes. In that process, your body literally takes on the position that you found yourself in, or you will intensely feel the pain in certain parts of your body, as if it were taking place right at that minute again.
Wayne Morris:
This seems to be the nature of remembering traumatic experience ... in that it does come back more like a body memory and a lot of survivors have said that they have felt the actual pain or the physical effects of what had been done to them ... the actual marks on the body will reappear during remembering.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I didn't have any of that happening (marks), but I did find myself in physical positions that I would be absolutely incapable of putting myself into in my everday existence. It's really hard to describe. The contortions that my body went into, and the spasms -- I literally would have spasms as my body remembered the electricity. I can remember another time sitting there and pounding and pounding my legs, as if I was going to break the bones in my legs, with strength I would never experience, again, in my day-to-day existence. So the therapeutic process is a long one for those very reasons. It is extremely wearing physically to be able to allow yourself in the safety of your therapist's office to try and somehow convey to her what was done to you.
Wayne Morris:
How did your therapist go about conducting the sessions with you?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
She was very, very good right from the start. I honestly didn't know what was going on. I was finding myself collapsing out in the street, finding myself phoning hospitals because I was reliving memories of being in hospitals, and I had programming that was telling me to go back to the hospital. At certain points I used to beg her to send me to a hypnotist in Toronto or in Ottawa, or wherever a competent hypnotist would be. She really gently sort of didn't dissuade me from it, because all the decisions that were made were my own, and continue to be my own, but she was also very firm and said that she didn't think hypnosis would be a good idea based on the intensity of the physical reactions that I was having as I brought the memories forward -- that hypnosis might be literally more than my body could handle. If I was going to be overwhelmed and flooded by hypnosis with a huge quantity of memories -- it would literally be very hard on my body. What she recommended was that we just go really slowly so that I was able to deal with things just a bit at a time, one step at a time, so that my body, my spirit, my psyche, my "self" was able to process and begin to understand how the different memories were actually linked together.
She has also been very kind and very careful to never give me any information in writing, or any spoken information. The relationship I have had with her has been one of her acting as my witness ... and as a person in whom I have been able to ... for the first time in my life ... establish a relationship of trust. It has never been my experience where she was giving me articles or books. She has never once said "this sounds like" or "this may be" -- it has been, and it still is, the relationship outlined by Judith Lewis Herman, the trauma specialist at Harvard University -- where the most important thing that a survivor of any childhood trauma needs is someone to be a confidential and respectful witness to the story that needs to be told by that person.
Wayne Morris:
So she never used hypnosis or drugs on you ...
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
Nothing. Nothing. And because she was able to go slowly, and carefully, and respectfully with me, I was able to avoid any psychiatric intervention. There were many, many times when I did want to, literally, erase myself from life and go into a psychaitric ward, go into a psychiatric hospital. I did want drugs to make what I was remembering and feeling easier to bear. But I never did do that. There were lots of times when I wanted to drink or do drugs as well as a means of escaping the pain of remembering what had happened, and I never did do that either. I give a lot of credit to her competency and her skills as a therapist that I was able to continue in therapy, and I am still in therapy today, without having to escape into any articial intervention, or any destructive intervention. Because I could have ended up being one of those recipients of electroshock, I could have ended up being one of those persons who were chemically lobotomized. There has certainly been an escalation in both of those things in the past few years in Ontario.
Wayne Morris:
Absolutely. Now when you started remembering the names of the doctors and the places of the experimentation, were you familiar with the history of CIA mind control experiments through what had been published.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
No. I had absolutely no knowledge of any of these experiments or any of the information involved. And I think it's really important to say something about how I remembered the names, or how I remembered places. It's not like a cartoon flash coming up in your mind, "Oh, that's Dr. so-and-so" or "Oh, that's the place I was taken to..." I have binders and binders and binders of my journals. When I started remembering things, and I am going back to remembering my father, my uncle, my father's military friends ... when I started remembering the incest when I lived in Toronto on Maria Street as a small child and then in Hamilton, up on the mountain ... I wrote and I wrote and I wrote ... night after night. I had something I called my "secret code writing" as well that came at a certain time. After a certain point, I found myself writing things that were not familiar to me at all, and there were names in there ... a Dr. Hamilton, a Dr. Green, a Dr. Hendricks as well, I don't know who that is ... I found myself writing down names and words and phrases that had absolutely no meaning to me at all. And it was quite a few years before some of the things I had written began to have some meaning. The fragmentary fashion in which I wrote these things down too ... they were not really intelligible. My handwriting would change as different parts of myself came forward to write things down and that's how my drawings came as well. I ended up doing a series of drawings for ten months ... although I had never been able to draw more than a stick figure in my life ... and once the drawings "came through" for that ten month period I was unable to draw again after that series of drawings came out.
I don't know how to put into words ... I am not sure how to put into words ... about how fragmented the therapeutic or the memory process is. It's as fragmented as the fragmentation that was deliberately induced by these scientists, by these doctors, by these CIA funded "workers" when they put electricity on me, or when they put the electrodes on, or when they put the helmet on me, or when they put me in the different sensory deprivation containers. They were ensuring that what was being done to me at that time was being fragmented into a certain neuropathway, and so as the memories came, they came in a fragmented fashion as well. This isn't like a lightbulb going off in your head ... "Oh yes, now I remember!" You go through years of getting little bits of information about the same event and finally, you do get to the point where you can "re-enter" the hospital setting. You can "re-enter" the military setting. You can "re-enter" the pedophile setting, after having spent years and years of an indescribable amount of physical and emotional pain as the fragments leaked through.
Wayne Morris:
And did you visit these places in an attempt to verify your memories in terms of validating the existence of the places themselves and the people that ...
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
No. And I live in Thunder Bay and I have been on welfare on and off for 17 years. I am on disability now. I do my laundry in a bucket. I go to food banks sometimes. I don't travel anywhere. My biggest wish would be that I could go to upper state New York, that I could go to Oswego, Rochester, Hamilton, N.Y. to Colgate College. I want to go to Annapolis, Maryland. I want to go with someone that I trust and I want to take a videocamera and I want to go back to these places, because I know that I have a voice, or voices, inside me that are going to be able to describe very accurately what was done, when I visit the places. I have been able now, in the past year, to find some photographs of sites. I was given the yearbook from the Oswego State Teachers College from the 1950's, and I was able to identify, without the names, the two psychologists in the Psychology Department there, who were involved. There is one location in one of the buildings ... I know that was one of the places where I was taken.
I have gathered lots of information in the past year, and I can certainly verify some things, but I would give anything to be able to go back physically to these places and take this process to the next level.
Wayne Morris:
When did you start finding out that what happened to you may have been part of the CIA and US government's military experimental programs? How did that realization take place?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
It was actually on New Year's Day 1996. A friend had given me a computer the summer before, and another friend gave me a modem so I could get on internet, and another friend gave me a year's hookup on internet so that I could begin contacting other people and finding information. On 11pm at night, on New Year's Day, I, by accident found a speech that Walter Bowart had given in 1994 or 1995 in Texas. His speech mentioned something about funding at University of Rochester, Navy funding, something called Project Chatter in 1952. I literally went into shock at the computer. My daughter and her boyfriend were both there, and apparently I went into spasms and my daughter's boyfriend was going to call an ambulance. My reaction to reading those words apparently really, really strong. What had happened was, I had a drawing. It was a child with a helmet on, and I had written "Chatter" underneath it. There were actually a series of drawings about these helmets, and the sound programming that we were made to endure. I felt very alone with all this. I thought I was crazy, to be honest, for a long time. And here I am sitting there reading, "Project Chatter, Navy funding, 1952". Following that someone gave me some information that Valerie Wolf and Claudia Mullen and Chris Denicola had testified in Washington, and when I read that, that was a huge turning point, especially Claudia Mullen's, because I had remembered Ewen Cameron. The cages, the electricity. Chris talked about the same table I had already remembered, and gone through that. There were so many similarities, particularly in Claudia's testimony. That was a huge turning point. I did phone Valerie Wolf, and I got her address, and when I realized that she was Canadian and had gone to McMaster University in Hamilton where I grew up, that was another sort of curious synchronicity.
I did send my drawings to Valerie in New Orleans, and I asked her if she would just take a look at them, and see if anything I had drawn was similar to anything she had been told by her clients. She phoned back to say that Claudia Mullen had looked at my drawings, and Claudia was able to identify the doctors' portraits that I had drawn. I can't put names to these "portraits". Claudia and Valerie won't tell me the names because they don't want to contaminate my memory process.
I actually didn't even show them to my therapist for about ten months after I had finished most of them. I felt I had no conscious connection to these drawings at all, and I finally just went into her office one day and really dismissively just sort of tossed this stack of drawings to her ... and said, "you might find some of these interesting." It was the only time I had ever seen, a sort of "emotional" reaction on her face (laughs) -- I think she was really really shocked at what she saw -- but again, she was really respectful. That part of me was ready to sort of hand over the drawings to her. There was a lot of pain, and a lot of work ahead of me in terms of having to go through more abreactive processing about these drawings that I consciously "had nothing to do with". It's a very complicated process, this memory retrieval.
I don't think I will ever live to see the kind of verification or validation of everything that is in my journals, or everything that is in my drawings. And I would imagine that most of the files that my drawings are referring to around 1952 to 1955-56 -- I would imagine most of those CIA files are among those that were destroyed because those drawings are very damning, very damning indeed.
Wayne Morris:
They are extremely moving to look at, and depict such horrific experimentation. Can you tell us what some of the recent activities ACHES-MC have been?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
A group of survivors, and advocates, and professionals were able to meet at the Believe the Children Conference in Chicago in April of 1997. At that time, we began documenting statements from survivors and the professionals involved on videotape and we have now sent a videoletter to President Clinton with a copy to Prime Minister Chretien, asking for a Presidential Hearing and the declassification of government records relating to mind control experiments conducted on unwitting children and adults funded by the United States government through the CIA from the 1940's onward.
That videodocument is now in their hands, and we haven't heard anything back at this point in time. Basically we are now lobbying and pressuring for a formal hearing to begin on the mind control experimentation.
Wayne Morris:
What sort of form of hearings do you envision or you would like to see? Or what are the possibilities of different types of hearings?
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
I am not entirely familiar with how the process for the Human Radiation Experiments was conducted in the United States. I understand there were travelling hearings though that would be similar to other commissions that have been conducted in Canada and the United States. I am assuming that the travelling hearing process would be the most successful, and the most productive. If a Committee can be constructed, and if they can go to different centres in the United States, and again, in Canada, that it would then become possible for survivors and for their therapists and other persons involved, to be able to attend the hearings and present their information.
And I would certainly assume that there would be some travel monies made available to survivors so that they would be able to attend and present. But I am certainly hoping that there is going to be a North American hearing ultimately ... and that the Canadian survivors who have been affected by the CIA experiments are going to have an opportunity to present their histories as fully as possible.
Wayne Morris:
I want to thank you very much, Lynne, for speaking here with us at CKLN. I know it takes incredible courage in speaking out, more than any of our listeners can imagine.
Lynne Moss-Shaman:
It's a struggle. I want to thank you too on behalf of survivors and people working in the field, for what you have taken on with this radio series. No one else has done it, and I want to thank you.
We have been listening to an interview with Lynne Moss-Sharman, the Canadian contact for ACHES-MC, the Advocacy Committee for Human Experimentation Survivors of Mind Control. To support the ACHES-MC current campaign for a government investigation into mind control experimentation on children and adults, you can send your letters of support to Prime Minister Chretien and President Clinton. I would quickly like to make an announcement about an upcoming conference regarding these issues. From October 1 to 3, 1997 in Atlanta, Georgia there will be a conference about ritual trauma, child abuse and mind control. Call ECLIPSE for more information.