Category Archives: Issue 9

Trois Semaines en France

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Elsa Lang Lively

I had been dreaming of participating in an exchange to France for years.  All throughout high school, my weekends involved researching the most cost effective exchange program I could afford.  And although I had managed to find several that would have been incredible, nothing was really within my price range.  So I had accepted the fact I would just have to wait until college when I could spend a semester or year abroad in France.

What I did not anticipate, however, was that a military family had just moved in two doors down from my house.  My mom and I initially went over to invite the family to a neighborhood Oktoberfest party at our house, and we found out the mother was actually from France.  She had met her American husband while he was stationed in Germany, and they eventually were married and moved back to the United States.

Not even a few hours into our neighborhood party, the mother asked me if I was available to babysit in the near future.  This was an ideal family to babysit for, as I could practice French with their three bilingual children and just walk two doors down to get to their house.  As the months went by, our families became very close, spending holiday parties together and talking about various European experiences and cultural differences.  I had also become a regular babysitter for them, allowing them to go out on date nights and get some shopping done in preparation for the birth of their fourth child.

The times I spent over at this family’s house are truly unforgettable.  Sometimes, I would go over to make French desserts or sample imported Swiss cheese while looking at pictures of the Franche-Comté region where the mother grew up.  It was wonderful to be able to witness the three children embracing their bicultural home life, speaking both in French and English.  Going over to their house was almost like entering another country.  It was a fusion of French and American cultures, with pictures of both the Alps and California all over the house, and French desserts fresh from the oven to sample in the kitchen.

Around Christmas of 2011, I started talking to the mother on one particular instance about my interest in doing an exchange in France for several weeks to improve my French.  Within the following week, I started to receive e-mails from her saying she had already written to several of her relatives in France, and they had said they would not mind hosting an American exchange student one bit.  Now the only thing left to do at the time was to select a family to stay with, and then try to convince my parents to let me go alone.

So, several months and lots of planning later, I found myself on my first international flight without my family to Geneva, Switzerland.  My stomach had been in knots for a few days at that point, because I was so nervous and excited to be starting my own French adventures at last.  So as the plane took off, the questions and anxieties began to resurface, such as … “What if my host family forgets to pick me up from the airport?  How do you say ‘I need my inhaler’ in French?  What if customs doesn’t let me into Switzerland?  Boy, I would be really angry if the plane crashed on the way over and I never got to see France….”

Needless to say, I did not get any sleep on the overnight flight to Geneva.  Instead, I spent almost the whole seven hours listening to Edith Piaf on my iPod and cramming new useful French phrases into my mind … just in case.  And it didn’t hurt one bit that the elderly man sitting next to me was actually from Egypt and was trilingual.  He was on his way to Lausanne, Switzerland to visit his mother who only spoke French.  He was so nice I forgot about being so nervous and practiced some French with him before he fell asleep.

After landing early the next morning in Geneva, clearing customs, and picking up my luggage, I met my French host mother and her daughter named Floriane, who is the same age as me.  Immediately, they began asking me questions about the flight, my family, and school in rapid-fire French.  It certainly didn’t help matters I had barely slept in two days.  They were very nice with me, however, and understood I was pretty drained from the trip.  So they didn’t seem to mind too much when I just mumbled “uhhh… oui…” to virtually every question they asked.

After a thirty-minute ride across the Swiss-French border to Vétraz-Monthoux, or simply “Vétraz” as the locals say, I promptly fell asleep in my shared room with Floriane after a brief tour of the house.  A good five hours later, I awoke to whispering and giggling from Zoé, the youngest child in the family.  At four years old, she was looking for someone to play with her and was curiously looking me up and down as if she had never seen an American before.  She had come to wake me up and let me know that my lunch was waiting downstairs for me if I felt like eating anything.  My lunch was comprised of fish sticks and Mac and cheese. How’s that for a first French meal?

The rest of my first day in France went very well, although I was still trying to recover from jetlag.  The nice part about immersion programs in this sense is you are so physically and mentally drained from speaking and translating a secondary language all day long you are exhausted at the end of the day and can more easily adapt to the time change by not staying up all night.  I had met all the six children in the family as well as both of the parents and had even managed to find time to play their upright piano in the living room.  Two of the daughters played piano, so we were able to exchange sheet music and teach each other new songs.

In the days that followed, I began to settle into my temporary French lifestyle, attending school with Floriane and Anthony, the oldest son.  A typical school day in France, on average, is much longer than in the United States, often with  three-hour long classes at a time and an enormous exam called the baccalauréat (or just “le bac”) that determines a student’s academic fate during the eleventh and twelfth grades concerning plans for universities.  And for good reason, the students who were preparing for their bac (Floriane included) had to study for hours per day in order to achieve high marks on their diplomas.

This meant I had a lot of downtime during my three weeks in Vétraz.  I didn’t mind necessarily, though, because I had plenty to read and could always watch Disney movies in French or practice piano when things got dull around the house.  During my stay, I managed to read the first Harry Potter book en français and an entire Belgian comic book series about American cowboys.  Needless to say, these comic books, or “bandes dessinées,” were full of stereotypes about the American Wild West and about American culture overall.

When asked what Americans thought about the French people, I really only had two stereotypes to tell them — that the French don’t shower often and that they are snobby.  Both of these sound quite ludicrous once you experience authentic French culture.  By this, I mean if you go beyond Paris to see “la vraie France,” you will meet some of the nicest, most hospitable people in Europe.

Yet when I asked about the stereotypes the French have about the Americans, I was instantly met by close to fifteen or twenty stereotypes about Americans.  Some of these included: Americans are fat (which I could not truthfully deny), Americans are narrow-minded, Americans are not environmentally-conscious, Americans are very emotional, and Americans think they are better than everyone else.  Honestly, I could understand where many of these opinions were coming from, but there are also many things about American culture the French people I talked with could simply not understand given their own cultural backgrounds.

For example, I was explaining one night to my French father all of the men in my extended and immediate family had previously served in the military or were entering into some type of military service.  He was shocked to hear how supportive I was of our military and the need for American presence in the Middle East.  In France, he explained, the military is seen as being a necessary evil.  The only support the military in France gets occurs once a year on the French national holiday on the fourteenth of July because of military parades in Paris.  He also said military officers in France are usually those who did not do well enough in school to attend universities or obtain well-paying jobs.  Coincidentally, however, he is a huge fan of American war movies and television shows.

Other interesting topics that arose when talking with my host family included the French socialist system and gun control.  They seemed to be very content with their socialized health care, saying it was well-organized and met all their family needs.  When I tried to tell them how socialism might work well in France in some aspects but could not work as effectively in America, they could just not understand how the government providing for people of every income and circumstance could ever be a bad thing.  And when it came to talking about guns, there was almost no way I could reason with them about why it is a good thing Americans have the right to own weapons.  According to them, guns should only be used when hunting animals.  There is no need beyond that to own a gun as a civilian.  I concluded there were just some things we would have to agree to disagree about.

All in all, my stay in France could not have been any better.  I was able to make a home away from home among a family that called me their daughter and sister, eat the most delicious cheese and bread day after day, and wake up amidst the beautiful French alps each morning.  I miss my French family very much and think about my experiences in Vétraz every day.  In fact, I have already been invited to go back and go skiing this winter.  And hopefully, Floriane will be able to stay with my family here in Virginia next summer and have her own kind of foreign adventures in America.

For those who are considering doing an exchange to a foreign country, I would deeply encourage you to pursue your options to spend a few weeks or even a year abroad.  The more time you spend abroad, the more comfortable you will become using the language and grow more accustomed to the daily life of your host family.  I hope to return to France next summer and stay with relatives for six to eight weeks in order to improve my French even more.  Once you get over the initial homesickness and jetlag, you will discover how to make the most of every opportunity where you are at the moment.

Most importantly, do not be afraid to take some risks and step out of your comfort zone a bit.  Remember spending time abroad experiencing another culture is not something you get to do every day.  Making mistakes while practicing another language is completely natural and unavoidable; therefore, just be prepared to laugh at and learn from your mistakes.  When you decide not to let your shyness or self-consciousness get the best of you, I guarantee you will make some of the most incredible memories of your life and have some great stories to tell for years to come.

MK Ultra and Today

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Jared Emry

After World War II, the USA initiated Project Paperclip in order to keep Nazi scientists out of Soviet hands, so that America could maintain a technological advantage.  Project Paperclip is known for bringing over about six hundred rocket scientists to America, but what is not as well known is that several hundred scientists that worked in the Nazis’ mind control program were also brought over.  These mind control scientists were recruited by the CIA for a top-secret program called MK-Ultra in the early 1950s.

The semi-synthetic drug LSD had been invented in 1938, and it would later attract the attention of several major superpowers for its strange properties.  In the early 1950s, the CIA came to believe the Soviet Union was developing a truth serum.  In response to the perceived threat, the CIA decided to hire scientists to search for and experiment with psycho-active drugs.  Originally the program only experimented on people with their consent.  The CIA finally had MK-Ultra officially established in 1953 and started broadening its scope of research.  MK-Ultra grew and had operations in about 80 universities that served as fronts for the project.  Unfortunately, the CIA decided they didn’t have enough test subjects and began to experiment on American and Canadian citizens without their consent.

Shortly after its official sanctioning and establishment in 1953, MK-Ultra began to pick subjects for unwilling experimentation.  The project began to choose citizens in situations where they could be drugged, tortured, observed, and would be unwilling to tell the tale.  The project would even hire prostitutes to drug their clients who would be embarrassed by their actions.  The victims would often illegally go through several kinds of tortures.  These tortures could be physical, verbal, sexual, or emotional.  The tortures were severe enough to cause permanent damage to the victim’s psyche.  The person was damaged in an attempt to see if it was possible for someone to become like a Manchurian Candidate.  These weren’t terrorists or traitors.  These were ordinary people who were often just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The project took a darker turn when a Canadian psychologist named Donald Ewen Cameron was hired to practice concepts like “psychic driving.”  In psychic driving, first he would talk with the patients and find out their fears and what they felt guilty over.  Later, he would lock his victims in isolation, often on a psychoactive drug and have the worst parts of the confession replayed to them extremely loudly.  These experiments of his were the basis for the invention of the two-stage torture.  Dr. Cameron often would take his patients, some of whom suffered from nothing more than a mild depression, label them as schizophrenic, and then hospitalize them so he could perform his government sanctioned experiments.  Dr. Cameron would take normal shock therapy and increase the shock by up to fifty percent.  The doctor would also occasionally put his patients into drug-induced comas.  Some of his victims forgot everything, including how to eat or speak.  Dr. Cameron was paid to develop methods designed to destroy a person’s mind, and he was very good at it.

The entire project was about six percent of the CIA’s budget but remained a secret until 1975, when Congress informed the people of the project after the Church Committee’s investigation.  MK-Ultra was not the only illegal experimentation the United States Federal Government has committed against its own citizens.  It is also known the U.S. Army during the MK-Ultra time period experimented with biological weapons on the citizens of Savannah, Georgia and caused serious medical conditions across the city, including stillbirths, encephalitis, respiratory problems, and typhoid.  The U.S. Government has a record of illegal experimentation on its own citizens.

MK-Ultra has often been cited in many conspiracy theories since it is such an obvious show of government powers being abused.  Many conspiracy theorists of today believe the government has continued illegal mind control experiments under another name.  One of these supposed projects is thought to be called Project Monarch, but the only support for its existence is the word of a psychic.  That fact rightly causes Project Monarch’s existence to be doubted.  But is it really unimaginable the government is conducting some nightmarish experiment now?  It is very possible.  In this day and age, with new technologies and with information being carried around the world in a faster and easily accessible way, many postulate that such a project’s existence would be found on the ’nets.  It would only be found if people happened to be looking for it.  About 91,000 terabytes of information exist on the Internet, but Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines only retrieve the same 167 terabytes of the Internet.  The remaining leftover information is called the Deep Web.  Most people will only check the first ten or twenty results on the search engine of their choice.  However, despite that, a new mind control conspiracy theory arose from the primordial depths of the Deep Web.  The conspiracy theory dragged up something that might have been a long-forgotten operation of MK-Ultra.

The new theory stems from an experiment from the same time period, but instead of illegal experimentation of drugs on people, this other line of research dealt with electromagnetic low frequency (E.L.F.) microwave radiation.  The concept first reached public attention on March 21, 1979, in the Los Angeles Times article entitled “Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves Are Murdering Him.”  The story was about a man named Kille who previously had brain surgery (without his consent) that involved him getting 20 electrodes implanted in his head for experimentation, and later was known to wear an aluminum foil hat to try to stop the signal reaching the electrodes and shocking him.  The psychologists who said he was hallucinating had not been told about the electrodes in his head.  The story had been brought back up when people started to report they were being gang stalked with the addition of several types of technological harassment including the use of E.L.F. microwave to torture them from a distance.  The FBI has stated they have begun a search for these gang stalkers but still haven’t made any progress in the investigation.  The E.L.F. is supposedly used on the targeted individuals from a distance and can supposedly torture them by causing involuntary movement, electroshock, and just plain old pain.  Although these claims are disputed, it should be noted that E.L.F. microwaves have been studied and have been shown able to drastically change people’s moods.  Depending on the frequency, the person under the influence of the E.L.F. can be made to hallucinate and show signs of a major psychotic breakdown, simply feel depressed, or act like someone with a mania.  The E.L.F.s have also been shown able to have an effect on weather if it is broadcasted into the sky.  One targeted family used common scientific instruments to search for the microwave radiation and found it came from their neighbors’ house.  In an attempt to block the radiation, they put sheets of aluminum between the two houses and found an immediate improvement to both their mental and physical health.

The FBI’s inability to track down the supposed gang stalkers has sparked some more controversy.  Some people have begun to think maybe the FBI isn’t really investigating the source of these reports and is actually just covering up for another MK-Ultra-type project.  There is always the possibility that might be the case.  MK-Ultra sets up a perfect example of how the government has done similar things in the past.  Also, to support the idea of a modern-day government conspiracy to control people’s minds is the fact there is never any trail left behind by the gang stalking.  One instance of gang stalking reported and investigated by Federal agents involved a break-in at the targeted individual’s house.  Inside the house, the dishwasher had been reduced to its core pieces, the safe was drilled into and opened, all the clothes were out of the drawers, and the doorknobs were taken apart.  Several witnesses claimed it could not have been a hoax because the house was untouched just before the victim left to go to the grocery store.  No one saw anyone enter or exit the house.  Even with all of that, there were no fingerprints, nothing was stolen, and law enforcement officers remained baffled.  Another family daily experienced threatening calls on their phones that would tell the victims what every single member of the family was doing at the moment, even after they moved and changed all their phone numbers.  Again, the gang stalkers still haven’t been found.  Maybe that is because the government does not want them to be found.  The family histories of targeted individuals have been studied, and in many cases their families have all had grandfathers who were openly against programs like the Manhattan Project.  Although the correlation does not necessarily indicate a similar cause for the targeting, it should be noted coincidences tend to be just pieces of a bigger picture left behind because they either conflict with one’s beliefs or because one is simply too lazy to try to look at the bigger picture.  Pawns in the game are not victims of chance.  The evidence in these cases lacks a trail, but that in itself just points back to the Federal Government.  Prior to the hearings that exposed MK-Ultra to the Congress, the director of the CIA ordered the destruction of all MK-Ultra documents in an attempt to destroy the trail.  Even though he failed, almost 90% of the MK-Ultra data was destroyed.  The CIA had made the mistake of holding on to most of the paper trail until the last minute … would they make the same mistake twice?  Probably not.  The almost perfect lack of evidence seems to point to experience and power.

Overall, it is known the United States Federal Government does have a criminal record when it comes to human experimentation.  It is always a good idea to be cautious and pray you won’t be added to the list of victims.  And if MK-Ultra could stay a secret for so long and after being declassified still is widely unknown….  The atrocities of another nation are an outrage, but the atrocities of “our” side often go unheard of and are dismissed by many who hear of them.  The history surrounding MK-Ultra should cause one to pause and consider that maybe your government is not as benevolent as it seems.  Although the theories are not “proven,” maybe it would be best to be on the safe side and make oneself a nice sturdy aluminum foil hat, because tin foil doesn’t work.