The Light Beyond The Mountains
Chapter 13: Manchuria
(Cover image © Tristan Maduro)
(Note: Chapter 13 follows Chapter 12 of The Light Beyond The Mountains posted on 22nd June, in which I discussed cognitive scientist Professor Donald Hoffman’s pioneering work on the way we perceive reality - a screen of perception he likens to the graphical user interface of a computer; and an analogy that helps us understand the role consciousness might play in mediating our experience of ‘everyday reality’)
Chapter 13: Manchuria
Most people familiar with The Manchurian Candidate know the legend: that the story - about a returning American prisoner-of-war brainwashed into carrying out an assassination of a US politician - is based on truth. But as movie-goers also know (the 2004 Denzel Washington/Liev Schreiber movie, IMO, isn’t bad, but is eclipsed by the 1962 Frank Sinatra/Laurence Harvey version) ‘based on’ captions at the beginning of movies come with a health warning: the truth, whatever it might be, should never stand in the way of a good story …
The Manchurian Candidate was born not so much out of hard intelligence that Soviet and Chinese communists had been brainwashing captured US military personnel during the Korean War as on the paranoia that underwrote the public mood in those febrile times (the 1962 original, based on a novel by Richard Condon, was released in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis).
What the film did achieve, however, was remarkable. Not only did it cement the idea that people could be ‘brainwashed’ – a word it helped to popularise via its depiction of the assassin (Laurence Harvey) spurred into action via a voice on the end of a phone inviting him to ‘play a little solitaire’ – it assisted in redoubling the CIA’s efforts to enhance its own mind-control programmes, by then a decade old.
Here again, however, caution should be applied: ‘mind-control’ being a highly loaded term takes us straight back into Manchurian Candidate territory. In fact, MKULTRA, as this catch-all intelligence-driven activity came to be known, was so diverse that it came to touch a number of people I’d already met, including, most notably, Ingo.
In 1998, Ingo self-published the strangest book I have ever read: ‘Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy’. He had written a few books up to this point, most of them about the nature of psi – the nature of our ‘psychicness’ – and none was a particularly easy read. But Penetration eclipsed them all.
Ingo gave me a copy on one of my trips with Robert Knight to 357 Bowery - pushing it at me across the table where the three of us were eating.
The cover featured a black and white lithograph (on closer inspection, it looked more like a collage, an artform of which Ingo, the artist, was a skilled adept) depicting a kind of turn-of-the-century (as in 19th/20th century) steam-punk flying machine with an oversized baby’s head looming over the top of it. The machine was overflying some gently rolling hills, on which horses and/or cattle were grazing. A beam emitted from a point between the baby’s eyes - its third eye, I later supposed - was illuminating, or possibly incinerating, one of the animals. All told, it was nightmarish – as in, literally; like something you’d only ever see in a bad dream.
I turned the book over and glanced at the blurb on the back, conscious Ingo was watching for my reaction.
Ingo Swann, it began, renowned psi researcher, reveals a long-held secret series of experiences with a ‘deep black’ agency whose apparent charter was simple: UFOs and extraterrestrials on the moon, and worries about ET telepathic/mind control powers …
“I’d be interested to know what you think of it,” he said, after I had thanked him. He then signed it and added: “Have you been told anything about the book by anybody?”