The Boy in the Box

In recent years, I have had a number of childhood memories emerge that disturb me very much. These memories are like the memories of many other people. And I have also found, buried in some old news stories, startling corroboration for one of them.

I have also found, in our society, an institution that was created by two accused child abusers, and has on its board advocates of pedophilia and CIA officers, which exists to discredit anybody who has such memories. This institution is called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. I will be addressing it later.

I believe that, beginning after World War II, children began to be recruited for various experimental efforts to create ‘perfect’ spies, and to study the effects of the development of dual and multiple personalities in them.

The idea was that a child would be placed under intense pressure, abused both physically and emotionally, until, as a defense mechanism, the child developed a second personality that the first was not aware of. This second personality would then be used by the child’s handlers in all sorts of ways. Some of these children were hypnotically triggered to recruit for CIA on their own when they came of age, and their hidden personalities were then activated and used by informed handlers.

I believe that this program started in 1947 or 1948, and continued on, perhaps into the seventies and even into current times. It involved the abuse and destruction of many thousands of children, and the ruin of many lives. I do not think that it resulted in much long-term success. If that had been the case, the United States would not have seen its covert intelligence operation fail during the seventies and eighties, and would never have had to turn to electronic eavesdropping as its primary means of gathering intelligence.

But a price was paid in ruined lives, and it is high time for the United States to expose the records of this that remain, and offer the victims the restitution and support that they need.

The government has admitted that it methodically abused innocents in the MK-ULTRA mind control program and in the various AEC programs that exposed unwitting victims to radiation. The book the Plutonium Files, for which its author won the Pulitzer Prize, exposed the radiation abuses. The CIA itself admitted the existence of MK-ULTRA under pressure from congress, and released thousands of pages of documents that implicated hundreds of institutions, including many colleges and universities, and many hundreds of individual scientists and doctors, in the most outrageous abuse of their fellow citizens, including the secret dosing of psychiatric patients with LSD.

However, a number of boxes of documents were held back by the CIA, and its refusal to release them was upheld by a court order. I believe that at least these documents contained information about the methodical abuse of children, and I believe that the CIA takes an interest in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation because, like sexual abusers and members of child abuse cabals, it has a vested interest in keeping the lid on.

I do not believe that the current management of the CIA shares the concerns of the officials who are hiding this information. However, it is also true that its disclosure could have unforeseeable effects, which I will discuss when I refer to the way in which this abusive training not only developed alternate personalities, but also ?cracked the cosmic egg? and made some of these children into very unusual beings.

Nevertheless, the unforeseeable are not likely to be devastating, or even particularly dangerous, so it’s time for the intelligence community to face up to these abuses, and admit that children were ferociously victimized as well as adults, during and before MK-ULTRA.

I believe that pederasts became involved in these programs, and that they have woven a web of blackmail and intimidation through many areas of government and society in an effort to keep their secrets hidden. So far, I believe that they have been extremely effective, and I wonder if our society will ever have the institutional energy to face this problem and bring it to the surface. There have been a number of past attempts. So far, they have all failed.

Before I continue on, I would like to detail the memories that I have. They are very fragmentary. I would be the last person to say that they represent any sort of a smoking gun. However, one of the problems with dealing with traumatic childhood memories is not present in my recollections. I am aware of the problem of dramatization, and have carefully controlled for it.

Dramatization takes place when a relatively fragmentary memory is elaborated due to the fact that, as the person matures, its emotional content is much more intense than the available memories would seem to justify.

Here’s an example: a two year old gets burned on the hand. To a baby, understanding nothing about fire, the pain is inexplicable. And the tender young flesh, filled with new and extremely sensitive nerves, communicates pain vastly more intense than adult care-givers may realize.

A less than sympathetic caregiver, angry at the fact that the child has repeatedly ignored warnings, flies into a rage and beats the child. Initially, the child buries this trauma, largely because the child cannot afford to reject the caregiver upon whom life depends. A few hours later, all appears forgotten.

But, thirty years later, perhaps during a psychotherapy session, the memory emerges, and along with it the volcanic emotions that were evoked at age two. The memory is distorted by time and the baby’s limited understanding that originally captured it. But emotions on this scale couldn’t be connected with something so minor as a burned hand, could they? Of course not. So there must be more there. Soon, the nightmares march, as the mind attempts to find events that fit these towering emotions.

Over the course of a few more therapy sessions, mother’s moment of weakness becomes a whole childhood of abuse and sadomasochistic torture.

In order to avoid this kind of thing, I am going to confine my description of my memories only to the recollections that came to me spontaneously, suddenly and vividly. I will not include all of the filler that my mind has conjured up to explain the memories, because I simply do not trust it.

However, the memories themselves took place spontaneously and unexpectedly. They were strikingly similar to the memories of buried trauma described in books like Dr. Leonard Shengold?s Soul Murder and Dr. Jennifer Freyd’s Betrayal Trauma.

The first one took place on my first day at a new day camp. It was June of 1948. I was barely three. I had been removed from my very placid kindergarten because the nuns could not control me. This new daycamp had horses, a swimming pool, trampolines and everything a highly active little boy could enjoy. However, on the first day, I was tricked into going naked into a public area during the lunch break. All of the other children, ranging in age from four to twelve, laughed at me. I knew that I was younger than any of them, and now I was being made a fool as well. This agonizing memory has remained burned into my mind since the day it happened.

By itself, it wouldn?t mean much. Perhaps an older child tricked me. Perhaps a teacher misdirected me, or I got lost on my own.

The daycamp has long since been closed down, but a few years ago I went and walked in its ruins. The old concrete bath house where this had happened was still there, and I relived the event again?as well as many other events at the camp, all of them wonderful. I had a terrific time there.

And then, one night thereafter, another memory flashed into my mind. This memory was visual. In it, I am in the living room of a house with one of the teachers from the camp, a woman who I respected and trusted entirely. My relationship with her was very southern. I was raised in an archaic manner with a mammy, and was used to both obeying and controlling adult authority figures who were not my parents. I assumed that this same relationship existed with this woman, so I felt entirely safe and in control of the situation. I would obey her, but she would take me where I wanted to go and let me do as I wished, within limits that she would establish.

A man was there, who I believe was called Dr. Antonio Krause. I have been unable to find any trace of him. They gave me coffee out of a demi-tasse cup, richly sweet coffee. Then I noticed that my teacher was gone. I did not care for the man, who would not speak to me. I went to look for my teacher. I wanted to tell her that it was time for me to go home.

There followed an extraordinary shock. I went into a bedroom and found her tied hand and foot, with a gag in her mouth. Her eyes were terrible to see. A blast of absolute terror went through me. I saw that my control over this situation was false. I ran back into the living room. I demanded that the man take me home.

He stood between me and the front door, blocking my way. At this point, I can remember no more of this incident. I have been trying to do so for years, but there has never been another spontaneous blast like the one I have just described.

The next memory involves this same teacher, another teacher and, once again, Dr. Krause. We drive through the iron gates of a large estate in the school?s station wagon. We are taken onto a sun porch. There are about six of us children. Unfortunately, I remember nothing of the others, except that they were there. We are given stuffed bears and told that they are a gift from Stalin. We are then regaled with stories about how wonderful Stalin is, and how we should all love and respect Stalin. The other children are delighted with their bears. They?re happy to hear about Stalin. I am shocked. I try to explain that Stalin is evil. I won?t touch my bear. I want nothing to do with Stalin or my teachers or anybody else who likes Stalin.

For a long time, that was all of that memory. But then, one summer about four years ago, there occurred another memory that may be connected to it. I think it is what happened to me after I declared myself to be against Stalin. In this memory, I am looking down on myself from above. I am lying in the lap of a figure who appears a number of times in these memories. He is completely blacked out, as if covered by black paint. He is a portly man, and he is spanking me very harshly. I am suffering so much that I have gone out of my body and am watching this from above.

I believe that this was a clumsy, stupid and sadistic test to determine our level of loyalty. Because nothing would convince me to say that Stalin was good, not even a devastating beating, I ?passed? the test. Too bad for me.

In another memory of this dark figure, I am at the house of a childhood friend. I have been stripped of my clothes and I?m terrified. It?s all wrong. Somebody dreadful is there. I run out of the house into the street, holding my clothes in front of me. My friend, a demonic smile on his face, follows. Hiding in the doorway is the dark figure.

I do remember who this friend was. He seems to have no memory of this incident, but he has never really had much contact with me since we were adults. Once he confessed to me that there were things he had done in childhood that he found extremely painful to remember. Other than that, nothing.

Another memory involved going down to Monterrey, Mexico. I remember flying in a wonderful plane at one point, a great, noisy thing that must have been a Ford Trimotor of the Mexican airline. I recall going to a school that was located in a villa in the foothills above the city. This was described to me as a school for brilliant children, and I was quite proud to go there.

I have very little recollection of what happened there. There is one flash of memory of seeing another child holding a bloody saw. I was told that this child had killed somebody with it. The child appeared absolutely terrified. While this person, whom I still know well, seems to have no memory of this incident, she has lived a ruined, disturbed life. She has never been healthy, either physically or mentally. My wife tells me that I have mentioned seeing Jewish babies there, and that I once said that the school was located in a villa owned by somebody connected with the Pan American Sulphur Company. I have no recollection of saying either of these things. The Pan American Sulphur Company did indeed exist, and was once a powerful influence in Mexico.

In general, I have found very little corroboration for these memories, beyond the mysteriously destroyed lives of the people I recall being with. Of the two who were most involved, one is a physical and mental wreck, and there appears to be no reason for it, unless there was conventional child abuse in this person?s life. The other lived a wasted life, dying in his early fifties after he went to the VA hospital with a back injury, and was injected with a lethal dose of steroids.

However, there is one very telling piece of corroborative evidence. Chilling, actually. A few years ago, and some years after the memories described above, I came across information about the Finders controversy. My memories came to me in 1998 and 1999, after I wrote the Secret School, or I would have included them. I discovered the Finders material in 2000.

My memory of going to Monterrey, Mexico predates the discovery of the Finders material. As you will see, this is an important clue, at least in my research into my own personal past.

The story of the Finders is a strange one indeed. It may be the only place where this hidden process involving children was briefly brought to light. On Saturday, February 7, 1987, the Washington Post published an article about a strange case out of Tallahassee, Florida. It seems that six children were observed in a local park and reported to police because they seemed to be in a dirty and unkempt condition. The police found that they were under the care of two men who identified themselves as Douglas E. Ammerman and Michael Houlihan.

These men told police that they were conducting the children to ?a school for brilliant children in Mexico.? The men were charged with child abuse and the children were taken from them, and attempts were made to identify them. The children were traced to a warehouse in Washington, and to a group called the Finders.

There the story ended, for seven years. Then, on December 27, 1993, there appeared in US News and World Report a follow-up story. The story stated that no allegations of abuse were ever proved against the Finders, the charges against the two men were dropped, and the six children were eventually returned to their mothers.

That would have seemed to be the end of it, except in 1993, the Justice Department reopened the investigation into the Finders, saying that there were "unresolved matters" relating to the Finders. The Washington D.C. police had termed the case "secret," and it appeared to investigators that this had been done at the request of the CIA.

Representative Tom Lewis of Florida elaborated. ?Could our own government have something to do with this Finders organization and turned their backs on these children? That?s what all the evidence points to.? He went on. "And there is a lot of evidence. I can tell you this: we’ve got a lot of people scrambling, and that wouldn’t be happening if there was nothing here."

Marion David Pettie, the founder of the Finders, maintained that there was no connection between the group and the government, and that the group had never been involved in child abuse.

US News?s sources, however, said that some of the Finders were listed in the FBI?s classified counterintelligence files. Later, all investigations into the Finders were ordered stopped by the Justice Department, as the case was determined to be a national security matter. It was referred back to the CIA.

Since then, silence.

For the New York Times record of the initial effort to investigate the Finders, click here.

I believe that the school in Mexico existed in 1987, and in the early fifties or late forties when I was there. I think that it was in Monterrey. In 2001, I drove through that city, and spent some time attempting to find it. I was unable to make any progress.

What do I think this was all about? I do not believe that it involved pedophilia and sex slavery. I have no memory of such things, and I do not exhibit the behaviors of a person who has suffered childhood sexual abuse. However, I have a rich lode of fragmentary memories of the most horrendous kind, many of them involving Dr. Antonio Krause.

Dr. Krause used to pick me up and take me to classes at a place called South Gate. I believe that we entered the South Gate of Randolph Air Force Base for these classes. At Randolph in the early fifties, Dr. Hubertus Strughold and many other former Nazi scientists worked on aerospace medicine. Dr. Strughold has been called the father of American aerospace medicine. He also headed the Third Reich?s Institute of Aviation Medicine. At Dachau and other places, this institute carried out cold water experiments in which Jews were slowly frozen to death, and hyperbaric experiments in which they were subjected to lower and lower air pressure until they exploded. In these experiments, people routinely died in hideous agony.

Strughold was named Chief Scientist of the USAF Aerospace Medical Division in 1961. He received the Americanism Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1985, the Texas Senate declared June 15, 1985 to be Dr. Hubertus Strughold Day.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League protested when a library at Randolph AFB was named for Dr. Strughold. "Paying tribute to Dr. Strughold was an obscene mockery of the pain and death suffered by his victims," commented ADL National Chairman Richard Strassler. The Air Force changed the name of the library.

My memories of what happened to me at Randolph are so horrific that I can scarcely credit them. I will not repeat the details here, because I cannot tell the degree to which they have been dramatized via the process described above. However, there are a few of those spontaneous, sudden glimpses that seem undistorted.

In the first of these, I am being dressed by my mother, my hair being carefully combed. Suddenly, I see out the front window of her bedroom that Dr. Krause is coming up the front walk. He is wearing a uniform. I know that I am going to the school. Then I see my sister running down the driveway, trying to save herself by going to the neighbors across the street. I run into my own room and get out onto a single story porch roof that abuts the back of the two-story part of the house. I run across this roof and onto another roof. From this roof, I am able to clamber up onto the highest roof. I go up there. I stand there, expecting the visitors to save me, to take me up into the sky. But Dr. Krause comes up on the roof. There is another recollection, which could be from that or any other time, of sitting in the back of an old Dodge?his car?and wishing that the doors hand handles.

This event must have happened after I was nine. Before that age, I would not have been able to get onto the high roof because I didn?t have enough reach to make the climb between levels.

In another snatch of memory, we are leaving the school. I ask where my friend Mike is. Dr. Krause laughingly says ?he?s getting a fast spanking.? I am filled with fear, because I know what this really means. ?Fast? doesn’t mean quick, it means extremely brutal, "fast" in the sense that the implement of torture is being struck with great speed.

In October of 1952, my immune system shut down, apparently due to extreme stress. I was aged seven years and four months. Anne and I found my second grade report card. It indicates that I was out of school due to ill-health for six weeks. As I recounted in the Secret School, I again became ill in my ninth year, and it was during this illness that I began to have close encounters.

A psychologist I have worked with tells me that she thinks that the close encounters were real, and that they involved literally breaking through into another level of reality in order to escape the hell I was enduring in this one. Modern research suggests that parallel universes may be very real, and that they may exist all around us. (For a story on this, click here.)

I think that making this very type of breakthrough was the purpose of the school. Probably while interrogating and ?testing? Jewish children during the holocaust, people like Krause found that certain strange things would happen to them. I believe that these children would sometimes develop a second personality that could be used by their captors in various ways. I think that this same effect was induced in children here for the purpose, as I have stated above, of creating adults who would be available as unwitting assets to people who knew how to control them.

A woman I met in London when I lived there in 1968, who had survived two years in Nazi death camps, told me some vivid stories. Among them, that the gas chambers were not soundproof, and workers on the outside could hear the screams of those being gassed. ?It sounded like the wailing of a great wind,? she said. She also said this: ?Sometimes, children would disappear.? These were children who were known to have gone into the chamber. But when it was opened, they were not there. At first, the Nazis accused the Jewish kapos of stealing the corpses. Some of these people were broken to bits with clubs and tortured in other ways, but nobody knew where these children had gone.

Among my worst memories, one that has come back to me again and again and again over the course of my life, is of waking up and finding that I am in a coffin. A box. I wake up when I try to move, and my head bounces against the top of the thing. I cannot get out. I?m trapped. The silence is absolute. The air is heavy. Soon, my breathing is agonizing. I?m in torment. But it doesn?t end. It keeps on and on and on. I remain for what seems like hours at the edge of suffocation. I scream, I see demons staring at me, I see angels, I see my grandfather Strieber there, then I see a long horizon, the sun either rising or setting.

At first in fits and starts, I am walking. Then I am walking down a path. There is foliage around me.

The memory ends.

During the Korean war, it was reported that the Chinese used to torture American POWs by pretending to bury them alive. Just enough oxygen would be fed into the coffin to keep the man at the edge of suffocation, until he went mad with the suffering. When they let him out, sometimes, he would end up totally dependent on them.

In other words, they were using the same technique. Where did they get it? From the Russians, perhaps? And where did they get it? We had Project Paperclip to bring Nazis to work in the US, but the Russians imported them in droves.

I have returned to San Antonio, in part, to explore my lost past. Most of what I remember of my childhood is delightful. But there is this dark side that will not go away. Perhaps it?s all dramatization. I don?t know. My parents were good folks. They weren?t perfect, but they certainly would not have allowed what I am describing to happen to me, not if they had known. In fact, I think that they got me out of it when I was about nine or ten, perhaps after years of trying.

Or maybe it never happened at all. I cannot discount that fact. Looking back, it seems impossible that anything so outlandish could have happened to me. But then there is this: About two months ago, Anne and I were going to meet my brother out near Randolph. I had not been there in years, not since those days, in fact. We did not go onto the base.

Coming home down IH-35, something very odd happened. I was driving along the crowded, eight-lane interstate when I suddenly found myself on an empty two-lane road surrounded by farmer?s fields. For a moment, I was completely disoriented. How had we gotten here? What happened to the interstate? Anne had not even been aware of going off the highway. She was as surprised as me.

Then I realized where I had gone. At the end of this road lay South Gate, the south entrance to Randolph. I was going down a road I had last traveled as a little boy, deep in the mystery of my childhood, in the lost past. I realized that, back in those days, you could have gotten from my daycamp to that place inside of twenty minutes. Or from our house in under half an hour.

I could not continue on, not then. I turned around. But I felt my past calling me, the little boy in the box pleading that by some miracle he will get to enjoy the life God gave him. I looked at the woman beside me. I took her hand.

Added 8 October, 2006: This journal was intended originally to be continued. I never did so, because I just don’t know what to make of these memories. Can they be real? If they aren’t, then why do I remember being taken to a school in Monterrey, Mexico, for super bright children, a school at which horrific things happened, and then seeing this same claim made by the two men who were stopped in Tallahassee with a van load of tattered children in 1985?

I just don’t know, honestly. But I strongly suspect that the United States has for years been experimenting on children, among other things subjecting them to extreme trauma in order to split their personalities and create secondary personalities who can be accessed by controllers and used as agents, but without knowledge of the first personality.

There was a book written some years ago, the Plutonium Files, by Eileen Welsome, which won a Pulitzer Prize and led to the United States government apologizing to and compensating people who had been exposed to plutonium in outrageous and extraordinarily cruel experiments.

What has been done to children is even more cruel, and because the people involved have also engaged in pederasty–probably not sanctioned by their official employers–an extreme effort has been made to conceal this abuse behind the usual campaign of disinformation and lies that our government uses whenever it is in trouble.

We urgently need a competent investigative reporter to look into this matter. I am sure that much of the record has been destroyed. But there must be people with better documented stories than my own, who can be found and induced to come forward.

But, above all, our responsible media, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and all the other important papers, the news magazines and blogs, and the broadcast media, need to stop listening to the blather of cover organizations such as, in all probability, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and start looking under this rock in a determined and professional manner.

Our government has fallen off a moral precipice in this matter. It needs to be reminded that it belongs to the people, not the people to it, and that our children are sacred.