Six Minutes Past Midnight: Weird Science from Russia

Sharon Weinberger has a new must read article posted on-line at WIRED: The Weird Mind-Control Research Behind a DHS Contract

Fans of Jon Ronson's book, "The Men Who Stare at Goats," will recall the Russian scientist Igor Smirnov's mind control technology, which was explored by numerous intelligence types in the 1990's here in the United States.

Smirnov died in 2004, but his wife and partner Elena Rusalkina continues working on new mind-reading technology, according to the article by Weinberger, which is accompanied by photographs of the Psychotechnology Research Institute in Moscow, provided by Nathan Hodges.

And now the Department of Homeland Security is interested in the Russian's research. According to Weinberger:

What's gotten DHS' attention is the institute's work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject's involuntary response to subliminal messages.

SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory.

Last year Starstream Research received information about government funded projects to develop 'mind-reading' technology using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

In fiscal year 2007, DHS allocated $973 million for science and technology and recently announced Project Hostile Intent, which is designed to develop technologies to detect people with malicious intentions.

The copy we received of the contract for the fMRI research being conducted here in the United States claimed a small but important step towards the ability to detect confabulation -- the ability to tell if a person is lying.

Although perhaps inspired by anecdotal reports, nothing we've heard in the way of 'mind-control' technology comes close to the alleged extraterrestrial version. I'll have more to say about allegations of ET's telepathic mind-to-mind technology in another post.