Kevin Barrett
The Unz Review
“With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking (CIA mind control guru Jolly) West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? ‘No,’ he said, ‘an MKULTRA experiment gone right.’” (CHAOS , p. 369) I moved out of Southern California in the summer of 1969. I was ten years old, and my parents were fleeing decadence and depravity in favor of the more wholesome Midwest.
Before our move, a story had circulated about some local (Newport Beach) high schoolers who had "gone on an LSD trip" and gotten caught by police. As I understood it, the teenagers had "taken LSD" and started leaping from rooftop to rooftop, "tripping" all over the neighborhood and waking people up to the sound of thundering hoofbeats overhead. At the time I wondered whether LSD conferred a miraculous leaping or flying ability, since the houses in Lido Sands, though rather tightly clustered, were mostly spaced perhaps eight or ten feet apart, which seemed like a long way to jump.
I vaguely recall this "LSD-fueled teenage midnight horsemen of the apocalypse" story having something to do with my parents' decision to move back to Wisconsin. Southern California circa 1969, a few years after the hippie movement had peaked and turned into a bad trip, didn't seem like a good place to send your kids to high school. (Little did my parents know that the 60s would hit Wisconsin high schools ten years late, putting me and my siblings directly in the path of the psychedelic hurricane.) John Kenn
Years later, as an "experienced" (in the Jimi Hendrix sense) subversive teenage wannabe intellectual, I would read about the Manson murders and notice how convenient they had been for the Establishment. From the moment Charlie Manson's grinning, demonic face started leering from every front page and TV screen in America, the whole hippie-antiwar thing had seemed a whole lot scarier. I read the official version of the Manson myth, Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, and thought: This is too crazy to be true. None of the Wisconsin hippies I know are even remotely like these characters. Maybe it's something they add to the fluoride in the Southern California water.
By 1975 I had seen Mark Lane's presentation of the Zapruder film and knew that America had experienced an unspeakably evil coup d'état in 1963. In 1979 I read John Marks' The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control and discussed it with William S. Burroughs, who told me he had been aware of such activities for many years before they were publicly revealed by the Church and Rockefeller Commissions: "The thing about these secrets is they're not all that secret."
Well, maybe not, Bill. But if you had proclaimed in 1960 that the CIA's most heavily funded program aimed at turning people into killer zombies, you would have gotten blank stares at best. Rumors whispered in bohemian demimondes, blown up into dystopian parody in books like Naked Lunch, are hardly threats to national security secrecy.
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