If you're new to the topic of government mind control experiments, the subject of this post will sound like complete science fiction. Even if you think that you have a pretty good handle on what was involved in the notorious MKULTRA and related projects, the chances are high that you will still be highly skeptical of what I'm about to discuss. In either case, I can guarantee that after you finish reading this, and after you've investigated the truth claims made by Cathy O'Brien and other survivors of these experiments for yourself, you will never look at American and world history, politics, or many very well-known individuals the same way again.
I'm going to focus on a single book, Trance Formation of America, by Cathy O'Brien with a forward by Mark Phillips, first self-published in 1995, and now in its 17th edition as a Kindle book (US$9.99, or free with Kindle Unlimited). I truly believe that this book is the Rosetta Stone with which the public can finally educate ourselves about some very dark and deeply buried crimes which collectively explain much about the problems of the world we live in, if only we accept that sometimes outlandish claims are also true facts. The definition of the word “outlandish” doesn't imply falsity, but merely bizarre, grotesque, strange, odd, and unusual, all of which apply to Cathy O'Brien's life history.
I want to first provide a content warning for the book, because it's filled with many explicit details of child and adult sexual abuse, coercive control, murder, blackmail, and many other serious and violent crimes. O'Brien relates that some of her earliest memories are of being sexually abused by her father and many other individuals, and that her father, Earl O'Brien (as an aside, I don't think I've ever seen a creepier photo used for someone’s obituary), bragged about forcing her to sexually gratify him since infancy. So that's what you're getting into when you read this book, and the graphic descriptions of sexual abuse alone are going to be too much for many to handle.
I want to emphasize that none of the explicit details are written in such a way as to be pornographic or arousing, unless you're the type of extremely deviant individual who would want to participate in such crimes. Everything is recounted very plainly. The first criticism that I had after first reading it (back in 2002), and during the years when I had convinced myself that she couldn't possibly be for real, was that, while it’s not literally pornographic, it could be characterized as “conspiracy porn”, since the personalities, actions, penis sizes, and other intimate details of the public figures she writes about are exactly what someone who dislikes and distrusts those people would like to believe about them. Does this mean that we merely “want to believe”, or does it mean that her testimony has the ring of truth? Since she’s mostly talking about people who appear cruel, or at least not particularly caring or empathetic, in public, it’s not so hard to believe them to be even crueler and more vicious in private.
While reading this book, which I recommend to anyone interested in this topic, I suggest keeping in mind the possible explanations for her story, and then weighing the evidence for each, including the year that it was first published, the mainstream view of the political issues it purports to explain (including the War on Drugs, government complicity in drug smuggling, the passage of NAFTA, the “Satanic Panic”, “false memory syndrome”, “Manchurian candidates”, and the manipulation of the mass media and of public education for the purpose of discouraging critical thinking), and cross-referencing it with the testimony of many similar survivors and the mental health professionals who've treated them. In that last category, I particularly recommend reading the notorious “Greenbaum Speech” by D. C. Hammond, as well as the work of Dr. Colin A. Ross, a psychiatrist specializing in dissociative identity disorders and researcher of government mind control projects.
O'Brien writes that her father forced her to participate in child pornography, including bestiality, and sold her services through Masonic Blue Lodges, which makes sense considering that we know that as a male-only social club with secret rituals and sworn oaths of secrecy and mutual aid, Freemasonry provides a perfect breeding ground for all manner of criminality. Other groups O'Brien claims were involved in her exploitation and mind control research include the Jesuits, other elements within the Catholic Church, the Department of Defense, CIA, DIA, other intelligence agencies, and even NASA. That last one may seem out of place, but it makes sense given that the Space Race was ongoing during her upbringing and provided a perfect cover for less savory experimental research, especially given the number of Nazi scientists who were imported as part of Operation Paperclip, some of whom had performed cruel medical or psychological experiments on concentration camp victims.
The event that led to O'Brien becoming an unwilling participant in MKULTRA mind control research, and specifically a project known as Project Monarch, whose existence or official name(s) have never been proven through declassified documents (many of which were destroyed in 1973 on the orders of CIA head Richard Helms), was that the US Postal Inspection Service discovered the child sexual abuse materials her father and his friends were distributing through the mail, and made him an ultimatum he couldn't refuse: either they would prosecute him and send him to prison, or he could sign up his daughter and her siblings to participate in "trauma-based mind control" experiments where she ultimately became a “mind-controlled sex slave”.
Naturally, he chose the second option, and the man who made that ultimatum was the then obscure Michigan politician Gerald Ford, who would later become, through an unusual sequence of scandals (the resignation of Nixon's first Vice President, followed by Nixon's own resignation under the cloud of Watergate), the unelected President of the United States from 1974 to 1977.
Most Americans are either too young to remember who Gerald Ford was, or if they do, they probably think of him as a bland, somewhat boring, “moderate” placeholder between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Perhaps they remember Chevy Chase’s comedic portrayal of Ford as a clumsy bumbler, just as many people remember Dana Carvey’s portrayal of George Bush better than they remember Bush. More on George Bush later in the narrative.
However, according to Cathy O'Brien, Gerald Ford was in fact deeply complicit in organized crime activities in the state of Michigan, as well as being a pedophile (more precisely, willing to sexually abuse females of all ages). Not many people realize how high up Gerald Ford was in Freemasonry: he received the 33rd Degree of the Scottish Rite in 1962, was made Honorary Grand Master of the Order of DeMolay in 1975, and was also a member of the Shriners and the invitation-only Royal Order of Jesters.
The Shriners play an outsized role in many child abuse survivor stories, and four Jesters and public officials were convicted of human trafficking for prostitution in 2008. Without Cathy O’Brien and others’ testimony, no one would have been any the wiser as to what else these secretive fraternal groups had been doing to women and children. While many outrageous allegations have been made over many centuries of Freemasons controlling world affairs, that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been many legitimate abuses and criminal conspiracies concealed by this secret society. The most notorious mobbed-up Masonic lodge of the 1900s was the Italian Propaganda Due.
As a child, O'Brien claims to have been forced to sexually gratify other US and foreign leaders, including Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau (father of Justin Trudeau, the Canadian PM since 2015), as well as her primary government handler, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who is today about as obscure as Gerald Ford, but was a powerful US Senator for over 51 years, from 1959 until his death in 2010. Apparently Sen. Byrd liked to torture O’Brien as a girl while playing the fiddle (it’s documented that he was a talented fiddle player) before molesting her with his very small penis. That last detail, if true, is especially ironic given that Sen. Byrd got so much federal funding for so many federal projects over so many years in his home state of West Virginia and then had them all named after himself. Overcompensating?
Sen. Byrd played a pivotal role in another area of the deepest secrecy that I’d like to cover in future posts, the planning for the unconstitutional operation of the federal government by a group of unelected bureaucrats in the event that the Presidential line of succession, Congress, and/or the Supreme Court were to be wiped out in a nuclear war or other apocalyptic event. Besides Sen. Byrd, other politicians who show up in mind control testimonies, including Dick Cheney, also show up in Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die, my recommended reading for that history.
O'Brien's other abusers in her home town of Muskegon, Michigan, included Catholic priests, and later on, other politicians including future Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney, who, according to O'Brien, forced her to play “the most dangerous game”, hunting her on a secure military base in Wyoming for sport before raping her with his oversized penis (which would explain the smirk) and threatening her with murder. Also implicated are a notorious figure named Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, an open Satanist and purported Nazi who shows up in the survivor testimonies of many others, as well as several notorious child abuse scandals that were all hushed up and portrayed as “Satanic panic” and “false memories”, and O'Brien's first husband and “handler”, a ventriloquist named Alex Houston, who also appears in the testimonies of other survivors who claim to have been targeted for abusive mind control experiments as children.
The most notorious politician in O'Brien's story, who also appears in the abuse narratives of other survivors, was then-VP and later President George H. W. Bush, who allegedly molested O'Brien's daughter and apparently preferred sex with little girls. Bush and his friends, including Dick Cheney, Sen. Byrd, Michael Aquino, and Alex Houston, used hypnosis, drugs (including MDMA wafers called “Wonderland wafers”), rape and other forms of trauma, stun guns, food deprivation, and other horrors, to coerce O'Brien into believing that she had no choice but to obey their commands or else be murdered (later, they threatened to have her child tortured and murdered). One unusual aspect of their hypnotic orders was the frequent use of puns (“Robert C. Byrd / Sea Bird”, “paradise / pair of dice”), hand signals, and imagery and coded references from The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland.
The Wizard of Oz movie occurs frequently in survivor testimonies, and I should note that, in the days before VCRs and DVDs, this children's movie was broadcast on TV in 1956, and then again every year from 1959 to 1991 (except for 1963). Other survivor testimonies talk about Disney movies such as Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland being used for mind control programming purposes, as well as sci-fi TV series and movies like Star Trek and Star Wars. O'Brien claims she was forced to watch The Wizard of Oz on TV every year, while her father sexually abused her and performed other government-specified “programming”. She's not alone in this claim.
I don't want to even try to summarize all of the claims made in Trance Formation, or the story of how she was rescued from being killed, along with her daughter, in a snuff film at the hands of actor Michael Dante, so that she would never reveal their secrets, because this post is already long enough. Instead, I want to consider some alternative explanations for the existence of this book, and why I believe she's telling the truth, as she remembers it, accurately, with a great number of specific details which she recovered in the process of journaling; crucially, no drugs, hypnosis, or other controversial psychological techniques were used to recover the memories that her handlers believed would be permanently buried under dissociative amnesic layers, making it that much harder to accuse her of hallucinating her memories.
The first possibility that comes to mind for someone who finds it very hard to believe that so many well-known, and not-so-well-known, people could be willing and eager participants in such vile crimes is that O’Brien must be delusional, or have an over-active fantasy life which she confused with real memories. The reason I don't accept that explanation is that there are simply too many specific details and accusations about specific people, all of which check out (I spent probably over 100 hours over a period of months cross-referencing every claim in the book against biographical and Ancestry.com records and found no contradictions). Remember that she published the book in 1995, before the Internet was available to most people, and a decade before Google, Wikipedia, and other Internet resources became available.
Theoretically, O'Brien and her second husband and rescuer, Mark Phillips, could have spent many hours in public libraries, reading Congressional records, biographies, and newspapers on microfilm, and then crafted a highly elaborate hoax intended to excite the rising subculture of conspiracy theorists to whom they sold copies of their book at gun shows and other pre-Internet gatherings of conspiracy theorists.
It's certainly a possibility that the two of them were clever con artists who hatched an audacious scheme to craft such a story, but there are several reasons why I don't think that was the case. First, O'Brien and Phillips have always seemed to me to be completely sincere and motivated by the search for justice or at least spreading awareness of what was done to her, her daughter, and many other victims, rather than seeking fame or notoriety for its own sake. They can’t have become wealthy from selling her books and from speaking events. Mark Phillips could have made much more money selling electronics components, which he was doing before meeting O’Brien. If it is a hoax, then they’re the most lucky people in the world that the plot hangs together so well nearly 30 years after publication.
Second, it would indeed be an audacious move to fabricate so many stories and to libel so many different individuals, both public figures and private citizens, effectively daring them to sue her for libel. While one can imagine why politicians such as Dick Cheney, Gerald Ford, George Bush, and Sen. Byrd wouldn't want to draw attention to her book by suing her, and thereby potentially jeopardize their careers by people believing her claims, why wasn't she ever sued by her father, her first husband, or by Michael Aquino, who was always quite vocal in claiming his innocence of the scandals in which he was implicated? Instead, all parties simply ignored her and claimed she was “crazy”, except when O'Brien used the court system to try to get justice, in which case the cases were all, according to her, shut down “for reasons of national security”. The National Security Act of 1947 has allegedly been used to quash many such cases.
Finally, there are the testimonies of many other survivors that make O’Brien’s book appear to be much less likely to be a hoax than if her story were an isolated case. The existence of so many other overlapping survivors’ testimonies, and their discovery of Cathy O’Brien after recounting them, if they knew of her at all, was what ultimately convinced me that there must be legitimacy to all of this and not a group delusion.
One final argument you might make for why O'Brien's testimony couldn't be true is that, if she is telling the truth, why is she still alive? Wouldn't she have been likely to be murdered, killed in a staged “accident” or by a suspiciously well-timed fatal illness, or even “suicided”, as so many others claimed to have been involved in this sordid secret history have been? Jeffrey Epstein's death is only the most recent, but his death was so notorious and so suspicious that Epstein has become another Rosetta Stone to crack open and shine the light of truth on what has been going on. Indeed, several other victims in O’Brien’s book died under mysterious circumstances.
My best guess is that O'Brien and Phillips formed a good team to protect themselves and each other from being harmed by the powers that be. Publishing Trance Formation was also a perfect insurance policy, because after she had committed her testimony to print, if anything suspicious were to happen to her in the years since 1995, it would only serve to draw unwanted attention to her book, which is exactly what the alleged conspirators don't want to happen. Far better for her to live happily in semi-obscurity into the present era, where she's active on social media, and for her to be seen by the mainstream media as a “kook”, than for the general public to suddenly become aware of her and then take her claims with the seriousness that they deserve.
I want to end this post on a personal story. From 1995 to 1999, I was a college intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where in my first group I was introduced to an extremely troubled individual named Dennis Bishop. He always kept to himself, in his office with the door shut, and was the subject of strange gossip from the office admin and the other engineers in the group. Everyone knew that he was extremely troubled, and was particularly uncomfortable around women, but nobody had any idea what was wrong with him. The few times I talked to Dennis or observed him in the halls, he seemed to me to be one of the most broken souls I'd ever met. Something had seriously damaged him but none of us knew what.
In late 1996, Dennis took a leave of absence for psychiatric reasons, and when he came back he wasn't very much changed, although he was rumored to perhaps be on different medications for whatever ailed him. His story came to an abrupt and tragic ending on Jan. 24, 1997, when I learned upon arriving at work the next day that he had killed himself by renting a hotel room in Pasadena on a high floor, then jumping to his death from the balcony, a violent ending that haunted me for many years. Something about the manner of his death screamed “Manchurian candidate” to me, as if he'd been programmed to end his life.
In early 2023, I had become convinced that, contrary to my previous assumptions, Cathy O'Brien's story was most likely true, because I had come across so many other survivor testimonies which all had the ring of truth to them and all corroborated each other in certain themes, while each containing their own unique elements. I become obsessed with researching the family trees of many of the people named, as there appear to be multigenerational and occult aspects to many of the families who participated, willingly or unwillingly, in “mind control” projects.
I thought to investigate what I could find out about Dennis F. Bishop, which was relatively difficult given that his name was relatively common and I didn't know his exact birth date (Aug. 19, 1955). I knew that after his death, his body had been sent back to his home town in Michigan, but I didn't think I was told its name. There are no news stories about his death, even though one might think that a shocking suicide of a JPL engineer might at least make the local papers. When I finally narrowed down my search, imagine my shock to discover that Dennis's hometown was Muskegon, Michigan, the very same small town that Cathy O'Brien hailed from!
Furthermore, while O’Brien attended a private Catholic high school, Dennis attended a private Calvinist Christian school (Western Michigan Christian High School). He was only two and a half years older than her. It appears that the cohort of Americans born in the years around 1955 were especially likely to have been caught up in MKULTRA and other mind control projects, based on testimonies and public sources. It also appears that certain cities, including Muskegon as well as Nashville, Tennessee and the country music scene, were hotbeds of MKULTRA activity in the late 1900s.
This post is dedicated to Cathy O'Brien, her late husband Mark Phillips, and my former coworker Dennis Bishop, may he rest in peace. I found a picture of Dennis's grave and his headstone is engraved with a book on which is written “Thy Will Be Done”. Dennis had an older sister named Jeanne, who died in 1977 at the shockingly young age of 27, and her headstone is also engraved with a book inlaid with “Thy Will Be Done”. How very Calvinist. When dealing with the strong feelings of outrage that anyone with a heart must feel when reading about the atrocities I've summarized, or the ones I hope to cover in future posts, it's perhaps best to cultivate faith that in the end, justice will be served, and Good will triumph over Evil. Amen.