The first two items deal with proposals in California in the early 1970s to implant brain electrodes in prisoners to track them and EEG-telemeter their brainwaves to a central monitoring station after their release. Only public protests stopped the project from being funded and started up. Consider how much more advanced the technology and techniques are now, both open and secret, compared to 1971. Governor Reagan of course became president.

The third article deals with the "controversy" in 1999 over a University of Albany professor's research into people's claims that they had been implanted. Note the usual "space alien" discrediting comparison. Keep in mind also that there are many possible mind control technologies besides implanted devices that a person who assumes he or she has been implanted may not be aware of.
 

Excerpts from Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists, by Colin Ross, MD, p. 118-119, 217.

[...]

Other related brain work was to have been done at the UCLA Violence Project, which was to have been headed by Dr. Louis Jolyon West. Dr. West describes the demise of the Project prior to startup in a chapter entitled "Research on Violence: The Ethical Equation." The book was edited by CIA contractor, Dr. Neil Burch (see Chapter 14). Other contributors to the volume include Dr. Frank Ervin from the Harvard brain electrode team, and doctors from Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, San Diego and the Veterans Administration Hospital, Salt Lake City. Dr. West writes:

Actually Ervin was never involved with the CSRV [UCLA Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence] and had no part in its planning or development. Nevertheless, a radical students organization called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) pounced on the "UCLA psychosurgery project" in wildly accusatory articles in the _Daily Bruin_ and the underground press. Politically activist students suddenly began to picket with signs denouncing "A Clockwork Orange at UCLA," "Stop Psychosurgery at UCLA," "Fire Frank Ervin," "Drive West into the Sea" and the like.

At first the staff assumed that the sudden hostile attack on the yet unfunded center was essentially political. The theme seemed to be, "If Governor Reagan is for it, we are against it." However, a small group of much more sophisticated political radicals, including two or three psychiatrists, took over the fight against the establishment of the CSRV. They went to many community groups and organizations, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Black Panther Party, and persuaded them that the proposed center was in fact racist, sexist, and dangerous to human rights; in fact, nothing less than a government-sponsored program for mind control.

Another California project cancelled due to public protest was a proposal to implant brain electrodes in prisoners at Vacaville State Prison, site of CIA mind control experiments on the drug pemoline under MKSEARCH. The prisoners were to be monitored by remote tracking technology post-discharge. If they entered a restricted area or exhibited sexual arousal patterns on remote EEG telemetry, a signal would be sent to their brain electrodes immobilizing them, and law enforcement personnel would be dispatched to apprehend them.

Dr. Louis Jolyon West was cleared at TOP SECRET for his work on MKULTRA. His numerous connections to the mind control network illustrate how the network was maintained; not through any central conspiracy, but by an interlocking network of academic relationships, grants, conferences, and military appointments. Some doctors in the network were not funded directly by the CIA or military, but their work was of direct relevance to mind control, non-lethal weapons development, creation of controlled dissociation and the building of Manchurian Candidates.

[...]

Chorover describes another mind control program at Vacaville State Prison which was aborted because of public protest. A Maximum Psychiatric Diagnostic Unit was set up at Vacaville in February, 1972 to deal with selected inmates out of the 700 held in solitary confinement in California prisons. A program was approved for this Unit in which prisoners would have electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor them and control their behavior after discharge, using radio transmitters. Due to public protest, the California Department of Corrections called a press conference on December 30, 1971 to announce that the project had been "temporarily abandoned for administrative reasons," repeating the pattern of the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and the Lafayette Clinic aggression project, both of which were run by physicians and shut down due to negative public reaction.

[...]

Excerpts from Journey Into Madness, by Gordon Thomas, p. 283-285.

[...]

In California, between his visits to Washington -- he [Casey] would attend only ten of the commission's twenty-six hearings -- Governor Reagan was using his considerable charm to try and maneuver the Legislature to secretly finance a scheme that, when he first heard it, impressed him.

The governor, like most Americans, was obsessed with the violence that permeated the nation. Serious crime had reached unprecedented levels.

The answer, at least for California, its governor believed, was the one proposal by one of the state's most eminent psychiatrists, Dr. Louis Jolyon West, chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of its Neuropsychiatric Institute. In the early 1960s, when he had been at the University of Oklahoma, Dr. West had run an LSD research program financed by the CIA.

He had proposed to the governor the creation of a financially well-endowed multidisciplinary Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence. Within its confines, doctors would explore all types of violent behavior, what caused it, and how it could be detected, prevented, and treated.

It was planned to site the Center on a converted missile site in the Santa Monica Mountains. The psychiatrist proposed that the Center deal with persons who displayed antisocial and impulsive aggression. Its laboratories would be devoted to genetic, biochemical, and neurophysiological studies of "violent individuals, including prisoners and hyperkinetic children."

Other research would concentrate upon the "pharmacology of violence" and the best way to use "anti-violence inhibiting drugs."

One of the tried, though far from proven, techniques of the CIA that Ronald Reagan was helping to investigate in Washington was, in California, being given a warm welcome by him. He eagerly shared Dr. West's conviction that one day the behavior of all persons with violent tendencies -- no one had yet decided the criteria for measuring the degree of violence -- would be monitored by the staff at central control stations presiding over screens producing signals from the implants. The first indication of an abnormal impulse could indicate the onset of violence. Attendants would rush with suitable psychotropic drugs to overpower the person. The system would be expensive to operate, but Governor Reagan visualized the day when thousands of his fellow Californians would be permanently monitored in this way.

Among those who was considered to work at the Center was Leonard Rubenstein. Two South American doctors who had worked at the institute under Dr. Cameron had also been targeted, one to run the center's shock room -- which would operate on a twenty-four-hour basis, seven days a week -- and the other to assist in the center's psychosurgical operating suite, where the very latest techniques in lobotomy would be used. The doctors were currently employed in detention centers in Paraguay and Chile.

Despite his considerable persuasive techniques, Governor Reagan failed to convince the California legislature to go ahead with Dr. West's proposal.

[...]

Human Brain Implant Research Suspended At Major University

Albany -- Professor whose work is at issue has focused on surgically inserted mind-control devices

The University at Albany has shut down the research of a psychology professor probing the "X-Files" world of government surveillance and mind control.

At conferences, in papers and research over two semesters, Professor Kathryn Kelley explored the claims of those who say they were surgically implanted with communications devices to read their thoughts.

According to colleagues, Kelley has privately claimed the university is violating her academic freedom. She declined to discuss the matter with a reporter.

Kelley's research and the controversy surrounding it echoes the experience of John Mack, a renowned Harvard psychiatrist who wrote the 1994 best seller "Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens." By lending credence to the stories of those who claimed they were abducted and molested by space aliens, the book led to an unprecedented inquiry by the Harvard Medical School. A school committee eventually chastised Mack for engaging in unorthodox research and "affirming the delusions" of his patients.

But unlike Kelley, Mack has an international reputation. He earns hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. And while Harvard challenged Mack's conclusions, the investigation at UAlbany is focused on methods.

Last week, university spokeswoman Mary Fiess released this statement on the matter: "The university imposed the suspension because of serious concerns that the experiment did not meet the standards governing such projects on campus. While we're working to gather all the facts in this case, we cannot comment further."

A memo sent to all psychology professors and graduate students last week instructed them to refer calls "looking for information on any psychological research conducted in our department" to the university's public relations office.

According to three sources -- two faculty members and a graduate student -- the school's Institutional Review Board, which monitors human research, closed the project when a student complained late last spring. The student, sources said, was not allowed to leave a lecture that was part of Kelley's experiment. Refusal to allow a subject to leave an experiment violates National Science Foundation guidelines.

Despite the inquiry, Kelley, a fully tenured professor who earned $67,000 last year, is slated to teach two graduate courses in the fall.

The department became aware of Kelley's theories as early as the spring of 1998, when a note on her office door announced a lecture called "The Psychology of Invading the Self."

The note described implant research funded by the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense with an annual budget of $2 billion. The "uninformed, unconsenting subjects" of these devices were typically "federal prisoners and political dissidents," the note said.

At the same time, Kelley won approval from the review board to conduct research on "advances in technology that affect interpersonal communication." In a 16-page outline to the board, Kelley said she wanted to look at the uses of technology for "monitoring and control." She proposed presenting a lecture to research subjects and then having them respond to 60 questions about how the case study she would describe affected their views.

The interest in technology marked an extreme departure for Kelley, a professor at UAlbany since 1979. Kelley, who earned her Ph.D. from Purdue University, was a professor at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin before joining the psychology faculty at UAlbany. Her previous research dealt with issues like health, date rape and risk-taking. With her ex-husband, distinguished psychology professor Donn Byrne, she co-authored a textbook on gender differences.

The shift in the focus of her research puzzled many. Gregory George, a graduate student who has since left the university, said he was part of a team assigned to lay the factual foundation for the implants research.

To his astonishment, he found several firms had developed "trans-tympanic transducers," instruments that function as mini-telephones, sending voice messages to the inner ear. Companies declined to market the product for fear of bad transmissions causing deafness, he said.

George believed the point of the research was to look at how people would perceive those with the implants, and whether there might be a social stigma attached.

"Kathryn has never been one to go traditional," said George. "But some of us wondered why we were looking at the social stigma of something that hadn't been developed yet. Why not look at the stigma of using something more common, like a wheelchair?"

Papers Kelley delivered at two recent conferences suggest that she was becoming fascinated with the subject of mind control.

At the annual conference of the Eastern Psychological Association in Providence, R.I. -- attended by several UAlbany graduate students -- she delivered a paper that looked at implant claims as "one of the indicators of schizophrenia."

Yet many colleagues began wondering to what extent Kelley believed that such implants were actually occurring.

"A lot of people wonder where she draws the line," said one graduate student, who asked not to be named. "Is it hypothetical? Or is it fact?"

In a more detailed treatment she gave at a conference earlier this month in Orlando, Fla., Kelley lent more credence to the phenomenon. She described how a subject might be implanted with the device during anesthesia, perhaps leaving tiny stitches visible in the ear. She called the devices RAATs, short for radio wave, auditory, assaultive, transmitting implants.

"When (short-wave) operators transmit to or scan RAAT implants in victims, they can talk to the victims remotely and anonymously, and hear the victim's speech and thoughts," Kelley wrote.

The paper noted that the National Institutes of Health denied any governmental role in such research.

The EPA is a respected psychological organization. But few professors had heard of the groups behind the Orlando meeting: the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the International Conference on Information Systems Analysis and Synthesis. The Web site for the organization, based in Venezuela, said it is devoted to cybernetics, which it describes as integrating various disciplines into "a whole that is permeating human thinking and practice."

The current investigation into Kelley's work is considered highly sensitive at the university, coming four years after a gunman who claimed the government planted microchips in his body held a class of 37 students hostage and shot one student during a struggle. Ralph Tortorici, the gunman, recently hanged himself in his state prison cell.

Without commenting on specifics, sociology Professor David Wagner, outgoing chair of the review board, said that shutting down a professor's research was "quite rare."

Some faculty members said the last time they remember the board making such a move was in the early 1970s.