u/Gran-Stan

Swann and Price's early sessions read like firsthand narrative accounts. Then the program developed CRV to impose structure and make results easier to evaluate. Then ERV emerged as a separate method entirely.

Three distinct approaches across two decades. Each one developed in response to problems the previous version couldn't solve.

My question for this community: what do you think each shift was actually trying to fix? And do you think CRV's structure improved reliability or just made results easier to score for oversight purposes?

When the American Institutes for Research requested the operational session records, they were returned sealed and unopened. The reliability conclusions that ended the program were based almost entirely on SRI Outbounder experiments from the late 1970s — not the two decades of actual intelligence taskings.

McMoneagle, Lyn Buchanan, and others confirmed this afterward.

So the question I keep coming back to: what was in those operational sessions that made them too sensitive to hand to the evaluators? And do you think the conclusion would have been different if AIR had actually reviewed them?

Most of what people know about MKUltra comes from the Church Committee and the '77 Rockefeller hearings. But Gottlieb ordered the files destroyed in 1973, what we actually got was the batch that survived because it was misfiled in a financial records warehouse.

What's in those surviving documents is disturbing enough. But the gaps are what I keep coming back to. 150 research projects. 80 institutions. 44 colleges. And we have partial records on a fraction of that.

The question that doesn't get asked enough: what was in the files that didn't survive? The scope of what was documented suggests the destroyed records weren't the boring ones.

Anyone gone deep on the FOIA releases beyond the standard Gottlieb and Cameron references?

Was going through the FOIA releases on Project Stargate and noticed a pretty significant gap between how the program was presented to oversight committees and what the internal evaluation reports actually concluded. The external reporting emphasized the hits. The internal documents were a lot more conflicted about operational reliability.

Anyone else gone deep on these files? Curious what you make of the Ingo Swann sessions specifically, his early protocols look pretty different from what the program standardized later.

Was going through the FOIA releases on Project Stargate and noticed a pretty significant gap between how the program was presented to oversight committees and what the internal evaluation reports actually concluded. The external reporting emphasized the hits. The internal documents were a lot more conflicted about operational reliability.

Anyone else gone deep on these files? Curious what you make of the Ingo Swann sessions specifically, his early protocols look pretty different from what the program standardized later.