A. DAVID KORESH HEARS THE VOICE OF GOD... OR WAS IT JUST CHARLTON HESTON?
David Koresh, leader
of the Branch Davidian religious compound in Waco, Texas, was (so
the official story goes) a man who claimed a special and unique
status as a leader within his community.119 According to some
newspaper and magazine articles he saw himself as a veritable
second Messiah, uniquely plugged into the mind and thoughts of God.
From such a privileged position within his community, he led his
followers to a ruinous conflagration and death... or so the story
goes.
But few people now
recall that during the numerous interviews of “official spokesmen”
on the major networks, those spokesmen made no secret that various
forms of psychological warfare were being deployed against the
Branch Davidians under siege inside their compound, from everything
from loud rock music being played 24 hours a day, to other
techniques of “inducement.”
One of those
techniques was exposed by researcher Jon Ronson in a book that has
recently been made into a movie, The Men Who
Stare at Goats, and it affords our entry into the topic of
the “oracular technologies of revelation,” or, to put it more
succinctly and baldly, mind manipulation. The question that
inspired his hunt, and that eventually led him to the Branch
Davidians, was innocent enough: “Was there,” he asked, “somewhere
out there, a paper trail of patents for subliminal sound
technologies, or frequency technologies, that simply vanished into
the classified world of the United States government?”120 The answer that he
found was not so innocent:
On October 27, 1992, Dr. Oliver Lowery, of Georgia, was the recipient of U.S. Patent #5,159,703. His invention was something he called a Silent Subliminal Presentation System:“A silent communications system in which non-aural carriers, in the very low or very high audio-frequency range of the adjacent ultrasonic frequency spectrum, are amplitude- or frequency-modulated with the desired intelligence and propagated acoustically or vibrationally, for inducement into the brain, typically through the use of loudspeakers, earphones, or piezoelectric transducers. The modulated carriers may be transmitted directly in real time or may be conveniently recorded and stored on mechanical, magnetic or optical media for delayed or repeated transmission to the listener.”121
Note the euphemistic
phrase “modulated with the desired intelligence” and the equally
euphemistic reference to the “listener” of these amplitude- and
frequency-modulated “subliminal presentations,” for amplitude and
frequency modulation are, of course, the two types of modulation in
use in AM and FM radios, and modulation itself is simply the fancy term for the
information being encoded into the radio
waves, that is to say, for the information you hear when you
turn on your radio. Thus, the phrase “modulated with the desired
intelligence” really simply means “modulated with the desired
information” that is being
“subliminally presented” to the “listener.”
Just what was the
“desired intelligence” or “information” to be subliminally
presented to the “listener”? According to Ronson,
The following emotional states could, according to Lowery, be induced by his invention:Positive emotions: contentment, duty, faith, friendship, hope, innocence, joy, love, pride, respect, self-love, and worship.122
This is an
interesting list in and of itself, given our hypothesis that such
technologies might possibly underlie certain special revelations in
ancient times. But what of the “negative” emotions? Lowery’s list
here is as equally disturbing as the so-called “positive”
ones:
Negative emotions: anger, anguish, anxiety, contempt, despair, dread, embarrassment, envy, fear, frustration, grief, guilt, hate, indifference, indignation, jealousy, pity, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, sadness, shame, spite, terror, and vanity.123
But it did not end
there, as Ronson soon discovered.
A mere four years
later, on December 13, 1996 to be precise, Ronson discovered that
Lowery’s company, called Silent Sounds Inc., had posted a message
on its website that made for some very disturbing reading:
“All schematics have [now] been classified by the U.S. Government and we are not allowed to reveal the exact details... we make tapes and CDs for the German Government, even the former Soviet Union countries! All with the permission of the U.S. State Department, of course.... The system was used throughout Operation Desert Storm (Iraq) quite successfully.”124
Apparently Dr.
Lowery’s invention had found some rather interesting “buyers” — the
United States, Germany, and “former Soviet countries” — as well as
some rather unique “listeners,” presumably Iraqi civilians and
soldiers during the First Gulf War.
But what did all of
this have to do with David Koresh and the “evil” Branch Davidians
under siege in Waco, Texas, ready to break out and storm the M1A1
Abrams tanks with their assault rifles?
Ronson dug further
with Dr. Lowery, and soon Lowery mentioned the name of a Russian
researcher who had invented a very similar technology, Dr. Igor
Smirnov.
I looked Dr. Smirnov up. I found him in Moscow. I corresponded with his office, and his assistant (Dr. Smirnov speaks little English) told me the following curious story.It is a story the FBI has never denied.Igor Smirnov was not prospering in the post-Cold War Moscow of 1993. His finances were so bleak that when the Russian mafia turned up at his laboratory one evening, pressed the bell marked, somewhat ominously, “Institute for Psycho-Correction,” and told Igor they’d pay him handsomely if he could subliminally influence certain unwilling businessmen to sign certain contracts, he almost accepted their offer. But in the end it seemed just too frightening and unethical and he turned the gangsters down. His regular clients — the schizophrenics and the drug addicts — may have been poor payers but at least they weren’t the mafia.Igor’s day-to-day work in the early 1990s was something like this: A heroin addict would turn up at his lab very upset because he was a father-to-be but try as he might he cared more about the heroin than his unborn child. So he’d lie on a bed, and Igor would blast him with subliminal messages. He’d flash them on a screen in front of the addict’s eyes and blast them through earphones, disguised by white noise, and the messages would say “Be a good father. Fatherhood is more important than heroin.” And so on.This was a man once fêted by the Soviet government, which — ten years earlier — had instructed him to blast his silent messages at Red Army troops on their way to Afghanistan. Those messages said, “Do not get drunk before battle.”125
Then, however, the
story began to get very interesting, and with it, the implications
of such technologies for claims of revelation multiply like
rabbits:
But the glory days were long gone by March 1993 — the month Igor Smirnov received a telephone call, out of the blue, from the FBI. Could he fly to Arlington, Virginia, right away? Igor Smirnov was intrigued, and quite amazed, and he got on a plane.The U.S. intelligence community had been spying on Igor Smirnov for years. It seemed he’d succeeded in creating a system of influencing people from afar — putting voices into their heads, remotely altering their outlook on life — perhaps without the subjects even knowing it was being done to them.... The question was: Could Igor do it to David Koresh? Could he put the voice of God into David Koresh’s head?126
At this juncture, it
is worth pausing to take some stock of the situation, and at some
crucial techniques used by Dr. Smirnov.
First, it is to be
noted that Dr. Smirnov’s technology was taken very seriously, not
only by the former Soviet government, but by the American FBI.
Secondly, it is also to be noted that the FBI was not hesitant to deploy such technology on American
citizens. Thirdly, and finally, it is also to be noted that the FBI
had a specific use in mind for that
technology in Koresh’s case: it wanted Smirnov to convince Koresh
that he was receiving another revelation, hearing the voice of God
Himself, while in reality, the voice being heard was only the
hidden agenda of the FBI. The pattern — that of an elite in
possession of a technology which it is using for a hidden agenda,
hiding it behind the “voice of God” — has its own obvious and
disturbing implications for the hypothesis of the possible
existence and use of such technologies in ancient
times.
But one should also
take note of two basic facts about the technology — and the
technique — used by Dr. Smirnov, for both optical and aural
techniques were used simultaneously and in conjunction with each
other. The BBC even ran a short report on two unnamed Russian
“psychologists” that were brought in by the FBI. During the report,
the Russians’ equipment was shown, which included flashing lights
on television, as the reporter stated that various key words were
beamed in white noise to the “listener.” We may refer to these two
significant data points and techniques as the “flashing lights” and
“strange sounds” techniques.127
In any case, what
came of the FBI’s attempt to recruit Dr. Smirnov and his technology
for use during the Waco massacre?
The FBI flew Dr. Smirnov from Moscow to Arlington, Virginia, where he found himself in a conference room with representatives of the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency.The idea, the agents explained, was to use the telephone lines. The FBI negotiators would bargain with Koresh as usual but, underneath, the silent voice of God would tell Koresh whatever the FBI wanted God to say.Dr. Smirnov said this was possible.But then bureaucracy crept into the negotiations. An FBI agent said he was concerned that the endeavor might somehow lead to the Branch Davidians committing mass suicide. Would Dr. Smirnov sign something to the effect that if they did kill themselves as a result of the voice of God being subliminally implanted in their heads, he would take responsibility?Dr. Smirnov said he wouldn’t sign something like that.And so the meeting broke up.An agent told Dr. Smirnov it was a shame it didn’t work out. He said they had already co-opted someone to play the voice of God.Had Dr. Smirnov’s technology been put into practice at Waco, the agent said, God would have been played by Charlton Heston.128
If true — and there
is no reason to disbelieve Ronson’s research — then this account
sheds much light not only into the disturbing possibilities of mind
manipulation technology, but also upon the agendas of the elites
who would use it, for note the subtle suggestion is that the FBI
was perhaps contemplating putting the “suggestion” into Koresh’s
mind to have everyone inside his compound commit mass suicide à la
Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple cult. Had that happened, it would
not have been the first time that the voice of “God” has urged
wholesale slaughter through a spokesman who has received a
“revelation.” But more of that later.