The MindBox
This story is about a phenomenon. A phenomenon that for many
years,
seemed like just another haunted house,
but that turned out to be much more man made. I don't
know what is scarier - the prospect of evil spirits tormenting people or the
realization that
it was our own government that was doing it.
I grew up on the east side of Detroit, Michigan in the sixties and
seventies and lived in the same house from the time that I was born until I was
30 years
old. For as far back asI can remember, there were frightening things happening
in this house.
It was always in the middle of the night, usually between
4:20 and
4:35 in the morning. This phenomenon took several forms. Sometimes, it took the
form of a vivid
nightmare. The nightmares weren't clear, it wasn't like you could describe
people and events in
them. They were more like frightening feelings. It was like being chased by
something very,
very evil. As a child, I recall images of various electrical fixtures, such as
the light in
the bedroom or the outlets coming alive and being instruments of this evil. I
nicknamed
the evil entities "Beebles". (Later in life, I read somewhere
that one of the names for
the devil is Beezlebub).
As I got older, the effects of this phenomenon changed.
Increasingly, it would manifest itself by the feeling of an evil, malevolent
spirit being in the bedroom. All of a sudden, I would snap up, wide awake and
cower in my bed as this sensation enveloped me. I would say a prayer and "order
the demon, in the name of Jesus Christ, to be gone", and it would slowly
disappear.
Like clockwork (literally), this always ocurred between 4:20
and 4:35 in the morning, regardless
of what time of the year it was. It did not occur every night, in fact I only
experienced this
form of the phenomenon perhaps once a month or so. In some cases, a milder form
of the childhood
nightmare would occur in its place. After awhile, I got used to them and wasn't
so afraid of
them.
My sister and monther also reported strange sensations and
ocurrences in the house. Somewhere,
we heard that someone had died in the house in years past. We also learned that
the house
had been built in 1929 from bricks that were salvaged from an old hotel that
was being torn
down at the time of the house's construction. At that time, the hotel was over
100 years old.
This would mean that the bricks were made no later than 1829. I always marveled
at this -
thats less than a half-century after our Constitution was written and before
the Civil War.
Seeing many documentaries and pseudo-science shows on TV, I conjectured
that there was
some sort of evil spirit that came with the bricks. Some of these shows
suggested that
spirits can move with objects, so I assumed that something very old and evil
was present
there.
Time went on and we moved from that house in 1993. I have
since moved out of town to another
major city and went on with my life. One day, in 2001, I was laying in a hotel
room in Albuquerque after
doing work for a client in that area, and my mind began to wander back to that
old house. I had just seen the Ghostbuster's movie on HBO and was thinking
about their theory that spiritual energy can be measured by measuring
disturbances in the electomagnetic field present in a room.
As my mind wandered, I remembered one thing about that
house. It has metal hardware mesh as
the backing for the wet plaster walls. In most old houses, plaster was put up
by first nailing wooden slats across the 2 x 4's and then applying the plaster.
In our house, however, they used a metal mesh instead. Thinking about this, I
realized that the walls and ceilings of that house were all lined with this
stuff and wondered if it was acting as an antenna for spiritual energy. I
also began to wonder if some person or
persons could create a signal in that house by putting a signal onto the power
lines in the area. The signal would be brought into the house by the wiring and
the mesh would act as an antenna to transmit
it to the interior of the rooms. I briefly recall hearing something on the Art
Bell radio show about the CIA's project MKUltra, where the CIA did mind control
experiments on US citizens with drugs, microwaves and other electromagnetic
equipment. I dismissed this all as wild conjecture and went to sleep.
The next morning, the idea was still on my mind, so I
called up my friend Dave (not his real name)
who still lived in the old neighborhood and was an electronics technician. I
explained to him my theory
about the mesh acting as an antenna. Dave told me that it is true that power
lines do carry alot of junk. You could rig up a device that you could plug into
your outlet and you would be suprised what you would hear: other people's radios,
alarm clocks going off, etc. He said that this is especially true since the
"digital age". Digital electronics are very noisy. He said it was
possible that the mesh could be picking up this signal from the house wiring
and it could be acting as an antenna. Dave became as curious about this as I
was. I told him about the wierd things that had happened in the house. My
working theory was that it was something spiritual, but that perhaps, like in
Ghostbusters, this mesh was amplifying or attracting the energy. I really
didn't think that it was some CIA experiment - I wasn't one to really beleive
in conspiracy theories. Dave told me of a friend who was an electrical engineer
who worked for the
Michigan EPA. His most recent assignment was to work on a study of high-voltage
power transmission lines. There was a great concern that the magnetic fields
generated by these lines was causing health problems to people. Mark (not his
real name) would probably have more information.
Several days later, I was in my office in the major city in
which I now live when I got a call. It was Dave. His voice was agitated and I
thought it strange that he would call me long distance in the middle of the
day. He had some urgent news to tell me. He had spoken to Mark (the MEPA
engineer) and had received some startling news. Dave called Mark and explained
the whole thing to him. The "haunted
house", the wire mesh, the 4:30am like-clockwork hauntings, the sensation
of being closed in with something really evil - the whole nine yards. As he
finished his description, Mark started uttering
"OH NO, OH NO, THERE'S ANOTHER ONE OUT THERE SOMEWHERE". Perplexed, Dave
asked him what he
meant by "another one".
Mark explained that in his travels as an engineer, he had
met some people who were investigating
the CIA's mind control experiments called Project MKUltra. Part of this
experiment involved testing
electromagnetic energy to see if it could be used to alter the brainwave
patterns of test subjects and if so, if it could be used to produce illusions
or emotions of various sorts.
One of the things that the CIA did was to go to several
major cities, Detroit
included, and to deploy what he called "CIA Mind Boxes". These
devices generated a signal that would be capable of messing with the mind of
anyone within a certain range. These boxes worked by being plugged into an
electrical outlet. They would not only get electricity from the outlet to
operate, but would generate a signal that would crawl into the house wiring and
out onto the utility pole and into the homes of everyone within a five block area.
The symptoms caused by these boxes were identical to the
ones that I described to my friend Dave. In addition to this, these boxes were on
a timer and were only active for about 15 minutes a day. These folks that Mark
was working with had discovered two of these boxes in Cleveland and had
disconnected them. These folks also found that houses with metal hardware cloth
plaster backing had very high occurences of symptoms.
These boxes were created and installed between 1959 and
1961. The CIA would buy or rent a house and would install these devices and
would board them up in the walls of these houses. He said that they apparently
abandoned them when the MKUltra project was shut down. Some people involved in
the investigation of these incidents did not trust the CIA and thought that
MKUltra was still on-going in spite of the CIA's claim that it had ended.
Bottom line, Dave said, is that there is one of those boxes
loose in the neighborhood somewhere. A day later, Dave called me back. Mark had
contacted his other friends, the ones who were involved in this investigation,
and they send Mark a diagram on how to build a device that could be plugged
into and electrical outlet to detect any signal on the line. This device would
turn the signal into an auditory form. Mark said that, most of the time, you
would only hear static, the result of the AC signal (60Hz) and the
occasional bleed from someone's radio, TV or alarm clock. Mark said that
when this Mind Box came online, you would be able to hear it, clearly and
unambiguously. This was a Wednesday. The device was not too complicated, so
Dave went to work building it and I agreed to come by his house on a Saturday
evening and we would make a night of it, ordering pizza and drinking a few
beers while we awaited the arrival of 4:20am.
When I arrived, Dave plugged in the device and turned it on.
Nothing but static. We did indeed hear the occasional alarm clock tone and the
bleed from someone's TV. (Someone was a fan of "Keeping up ppearances",
the English comedy - we heard about 5 minutes of an episode that I had seen
before).
The clock ticked on. 1AM, 2AM, 3AM - all (relativily) quiet.
4AM - nothing yet, 4:15 - nothing yet. The tension was mounting. My heart
raced, 4:20AM, nothing. And them 04:21:02. All of a sudden,
all the static was drowned out by a very clear, repetetive signal. I sat there,
more frightened than I have ever been in my life. My childhood flashed before
my eyes. Memories came back of horrible, frightening nights alone in the dark.
Although I don't think I have ever heard that sound as an audio signal before,
I KNEW IT WELL, and it hit me so hard, that I started to shake uncontrollably.
Dave had to hold on to me to keep me from shaking apart. His wife was ready to
call 9-1-1, thinking I was having a heart attack. I regained my composure, if
ever so slightly and told Dave that this was it - this was what we were
looking for. The sound faded in and out, but was always strong. At 04:35:59, it
stopped abruptly and
was replaced by the background static once again.
We got on the speaker phone and called Mark at home. Dave
had been recording the sounds and played them over the phone for Mark. Mark
asked Dave if he could digitize the tape and send it as an MP3 audio file to
him. Mark would then send it to his investigator friends. Exhausted, I bid Dave
and his wife farewell and went back to my Mom's house out in the suburbs.
Two days later, Dave called me at home. He was on the line
with Mark and the two investigator
friends of his. "Yup," the one investigator said "that signal is
a CIA Mind Box. You need to find it and get rid of it". The
investigator suggested that we modify the device that Dave has built. We would
add an antenna and power it by battery so that it could be carried around. The
idea was to wait until 4:21am and then try to go around the neighborhood to
locate where the signal was the strongest. It would be neccessary to hold the antenna
about a foot above head level and walk along the utility easement under the
power poles. The investigator told us that the, judging from the strenghth of
the signal, it was no more than two blocks away from Dave's house.
The next day, Dave modified the detector device and that
evening he went along his street from a block north of his house to one block
south. He called me the next day, a bit tired from his work, to announce that
his test was inconclusive. The signal didn't seem to vary enough to get a fix.
Dave We conjectured that maybe we needed to move over one block to the east, to
examine the utility corridor behind my old house. I told Dave that I would
leave work early and be back in Detroit
by 4AM so that we could go out
together. Dave was a bit anxious to go out again on his own. He said that he
thought that the police would come along at any time and arrest him. There are
no alleys in our old neighborhood, so he had to dart in and out of people's
back yards to get to the utility poles. I arrived at Dave's house at 3AM the
next morning. We were joined by John (not his real name) one of his lineman friends
from Detroit Edision
who was also interested in this thing. John offered a measure of protection
from suspicious police as he was wearing his lineman's uniform with the DECO logo
and had his ID badge on. As far as they are concerned, John said of the police,
"we are Edison people looking for a line break", he said.
So, off we went, North to Cornwall St between Bedford and
Three Mile Drive. We timed our departure just so we would arrive at 4:21 so we
wouldn't have to stand around in the street looking dumb, waiting for zero
hour. When we arrived, it was 4:22 and Dave donned the headset, flipped the on
switch and immediatly picked up the signal from the overhead secondary mains. We
moved south along Three Mile Drive, quickly darting in and out of backyards.
Unlike the day before, this time the signal did get stronger as we headed
south. Soon were were in the backyard adjacent to my old home. There is was,
old and familiar. I half expected the signal to fade as we left there, thinking
that the damn box was buried right
in that house, but as we left and headed south, it got stronger. We crossed
Munich St as the signal got stronger. We were almost to the next side-street
when we encountered an abandoned house. We darted into its yard and examined
the signal at that point. It was the strongest yet. This pole has a conduit, a
very old one, running down the side of the pole. Dave ran the antenna along it
and the signal was crystal-clear. John looked at it and immediatly knew there
was something odd about it. All of the
houses in this area are fed by overhead drops. "Always been that
way", he said. "There are no
undergounds". Secondly, he said, they NEVER feed secondary voltage to
underground service in
this area. Its always primaries, usually to a padmount transformer. "Very
odd," he said "Looks like an illegal tap".
We shrugged it off and moved out and continued to head
south. As we did, the signal faded and
we got farther away from that abandoned house. All of us had the same thought -
that has to
be it! The odd conduit, the non-compliant underground feed. The very old, rusty
conduit on the pole. No one said a thing as we headed back up Three Mile Drive,
but we all dashed into that backyard again. John looked up at the pole and said
"THAT is an ILLEGAL FEED, I don't care how old it is, there is NO REASON
FOR IT TO BE THERE", he said, noting that all four of the houses adjacent
to that pole had overhead power drops connected to them.
Dave suddenly uttered a curious "Hmmmm.." and
shuffled his feet. "Whats this", he said as he brushed the twigs and
leaves aside to reveal a shiny metal object. It was a manhole cover. There
isn't anything unusual about that, since all of the sewers in the neighborhood
run in the back of the houses along the fenceline. About halfway down each block,
someone's backyard will be plagued with an ugly manhole cover. Its just the way
the neighborhood was built.
John looked at it and said "I want to see whats in
there, wait here", he said as he ran from the yard leaving Dave and I
standing alone in the yard of this abandoned house. The wind picked up, blowing
leaves around and I suddenty felt quite frightened. We head a truck pull up
across the street. John had gone to his house (about a block away) and came
back with his truck. He reentered the yard with two Detroit Edison hardhats, each with a little "miners"
light on it. He hefted a metal rod that looked like a tire iron, but was really
a specialized tool that was used to lift off manhole covers. The cover came off
along with a whiff of nasty sewer gases. We all stood back to let things air
out. John shined his flashlight into the hole and we all peered in. It was a
long shaft, at least 20 feet, but you could see the water flowing at the bottom.
The sewer main was huge, a man could walk upright in it. Each side of the shaft
has climbing rungs, like a ladder. The shaft as well as the sewer line itself
were made from bricks, an
indication of how old the system was. John put away his flashlight and donned
his miner's light on his hardhat and began to climb down. About halfway down he
stopped and hollared up at us. "One of you come down here and help me -
climb down the other side of the shaft, put on one of those hats". Being
more curious and angry than afraid, I grabbed the hat and climbed in. When I
got to John's level, he motioned with his head towards the wall of the shaft.
"Look!", he said. The bricks had been removed and replaced without
any mortar in a 18 inch by 18 inch section. We both must have had the same
thought because we both started using our free hand to pull out the bricks with
one free hand while holding on to the rungs with the other hand. One by one the
bricks fell away and we could hear them splash into the raging sewage below.
Behind the bricks, there was a metal frame that fit inside
of the dug out section of the earth. Sitting right there inside was a black
metal box, about a foot square. The conduit that came down the pole terminated
there and the wires went into an opening in the box. We looked at one another
with amazement. "Looks like we found it", I said.
"Yeeeup", John said. We both climed out of the
hole, much to Dave's relief. John pulled the cover
back up over the hole. "Lets get out of here", he said. We gathered
up our stuff while Dave
questioned us "What did you see?, what did you see?". "Lets go
across to my house and we'll
talk about it", John replied.
We walked out of the yard and Dave tossed the tools into the
cab of his truck. He went around
the block and pulled back in his driveway as we stood on his front porch. He
opened the front door with his key and we all filed into his kitchen where we filled
in Dave. We debated what to do. That box had to be removed, but could we get in
trouble for it? John said that he would check the blueprints for the
distribution grid in this area to see if that feed was on any circuit maps. If
not, he said, it would be an illegal feed and it was "his duty as a Detroit Edison lineman, to
disconnect it." We also discussed the
fact that if this was part of MKUltra, that we had a perfect right to take away
that box since MKUltra was an illegal operation that congress had
forbidden.
We decided to remove the box and study it. We sat there till
7am hatching our plot. We would
go back in there at 2am the next morning. John would bring his lineman tools
and shimmy up
the pole and cut the feed. Dave and I would then cut the other end of the line
and removed the box by tying it to a rope that would be fastened up above. We would
then hoist the box out of the manhole and take it to Dave's house. Later that
day, John called. He was down in the
Edison map room. There was no mention of that feed anywhere. It was an
"illegal tap". We had the green light.
We arrived at John's house at 1:55 and hopped onto the back
of his truck and he drove the half-block to the abandoned house and parked in
the same spot he had the night before. Like a bunch of trained special forces
commandos on a raid, we jumped off the truck, grabbed our hats and tools and
sprang into action. John climbed the pole with his lineman's boots and cutters
as Dave and I rigged up a sling made of rope. We tied it off to the fence. I
pulled off the manhole cover, taking care to step back to let the gases
air out. I then crawled in and started to climb down one side of the shaft,
with Dave following closely on the other side. John hollared down at us that he
had cut the power. I reached in with the insulated sidecutters and clipped all
three of the leads - the 2 hot leads and the neutral lead. I tried to move the
box but it was stuck to the floor of its perch. "Give me the pry
bar", I said to Dave. Instead, he reached in himself with the pry bar and
broke it loose. We struggled for about 10 minutes trying to slip the sling around
it, finally succeeding. We pulled the box out and it fell about 2 feet before
hanging suspended by the rope.
Dave climbed out first, followed quickly by me. We pulled up
our prize and placed it on the ground and gathered up the tools. I picked up
the unit and carried it under my arm It was heavy for its size, about 30 pounds. I felt a measure of satisfaction
that I now had in a hammerlock, the very device that tortured me for all of my childhood.
I remember wishing it were the head of the CIA jerk who had devised such a
scheme to torture American children.
We hopped onto the back of the truck and John drove us to Dave's house. We took the box down into his basement, to his workshop. It was made of steel, painted back, with a few rust spots on it. On top of it was a a smaller box that looked like a small walkie-talkie. Dave grabbed it and pulled it loose from the clip that held it to the main box. It had a small rigid wire sticking out of the top of it. "Thats an antenna", Dave said. He quickly popped it open with a screwdriver to reveal a printed circuit board inside along with a battery.
Almost as if he was holding something hot, he dropped it, backed away and then grabbed it again and quickly removed the battery. "Its a transponder, it sends a homing beacon", he said. Dave had turned quite pale and I was worried that he would pass out. "Its old", I said, "no one is looking for it anymore". He grabbed me by the shoulders "No, you dont understand," he whispered. "Its not old. The box may be old, but this isn't. Look!", he said, pointing to an IC chip on the small circuit board. "I began to get the meaning when he chimed in again.
"This chip wasn't manufactured before 1989", he said. "I can
look it up, but they didnt have IC's or minurature electronics like this in the
late 50's and 60's". We went upstairs to contemplate this. The box was old
- 1950's vintage, but the transponder was no more that 12 years old. The
battery was still fresh (Dave tested it) and they only last at most 12 months.
This means that the unit was recently outfitted with the transponder and
that the battery was no more than 6 to 12 months old. MKUltra was
supposed to be terminated in 1963. All sorts of ideas sprang forth. Were they still
using this thing for something? Who?
Maybe it was a bunch of rogue scientists who used to work on the project. But
why? What would they gain? How would they be able to study their subjects? How
would they be able to even identify who was being affected?
Dave decided to call Mark and the investigators the next
day. They said that their work in Cleveland did not reveal any transponders and
this development startled them. One of them came to Dave's shop several weeks
later to look at things. Yes, the box was a CIA Mind Box, but the transponder
was news to them. Upon studying it, they discovered that it would send a digital
signal every 30 minutes on 22.475MHz. The transmission was a simple 9 digit
number: 229010874. A serial number? A signal saying "MindBox 229010874 checking in
- alive and well"??
The icing on the cake came several days later. As I told
you, John, the lineman, lives on Three Mile Drive, across the street from and
about 4 houses north of the abandoned house in whose yard the box was ound.
It was a weekday, about 5pm. John was getting ready for work on the night
shift when he looked out his window. There in the driveway of the old house was
a dark blue car. In front of the house was another grey car. John suddenly got
the urge to walk his dog. He snapped on the leash and led the dog south on
Three Mile Drive, on the opposite side of the street. As he approached the
abandoned house, he noticed that both cars had US Government license plates on
them. As he passed adjacent to the driveway, he could see one man emerging from
the manhole and the other looking up at the pole
with his hands on his hips. John quickly moved on and is sure they didn't see
him looking. It has been two months. No further incidents have been observed.
There is no longer any MindBox
signal on the power lines in the neighborhood. The abandoned house was torn
down several weeks ago and John can now see clearly from his front porch, the
utility pole in that backyard. The feed is disconnected still and the manhole
cover is back in place. No one has disturbed it since. Mark's friends hooked us
up with some MKUltra investigators in the Great Lakes region and we have formed
an informal group called the "MindBox
Hunters". We are currently investigating several anomalous situations on
the southwest side of Detroit
as well as the Roger's Park neighborhood in Chicago.
If you have any reason to beleive there may be a CIA MindBox operating in your
neighborhood,
please contact me and we can put you in touch with some folks who can help you
find it. Beware. All evidence supports the conclusion that MKUltra or its successor
is still alive and well in 2001. We must stamp out this plague and restore our Constitution
and make our children's nights a time of sleep and not horror.
Taka,
a MindBox Hunter