CURIOSITIES OF HIGH STRANGENESS: Jonestown...a CIA mind control experiment?

(Jim Jones)

Jim Jones founded The Peoples Temple in 1955, headquartered in San Francisco, California. The Temple drew poor people, social activists, Blacks and Hispanics, young and old. The message was racial harmony and justice, and criticism of the hypocrisy of the world around his followers. The People's Temple members were subjects of local scandal in the news. Jim Jones claimed these exposes were attacks on their newly-found religion, and used them as an excuse to move most of the members to Guyana, and in 1974 The Peoples Temple sign an land lease in Guyana and the temple was relocated.

The official record of the Jonestown massacre reads as follows...Disturbing reports continued to surround Jones and The Peoples Temple. Those reports came to the attention of congressional members like Leo Ryan. Stories of beatings, kidnapping, sexual abuse and mysterious deaths leaked out in the press and Ryan decided to go to Guyana and investigate the situation for himself. On November 18, 1978, 913 men, women, and children supposedly drank cyanide laced Kool-Aid in a mass suicide. They were said to be a part of the "brainwashed cult" of Reverend Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. Congressman Leo Ryan and four others flew into Guyana to investigate whether or not US citizens were being abused or held against their will at Jonestown, and they were shot dead by Peoples Temple security forces before their plane could leave, and supposedly, that is that.

(Jim Jones)

(Ariel shot of dead temple members)

(Scene of Leo Ryan's ambush)

However there is more than meets the eye here. Leo Ryan's aide William Holsinger had been investigating complaints of a concerned relatives group in 1978 in regard to Peoples Temple members, and the night in which Ryan was murdered and the "mass suicide" took place, he received a phone call from an unidentified man who said "your meal-ticket just had his brains blown out." Holsinger later said "whether there was some broader conspiracy and what it might have consisted of, are matters I have determined to leave to future generations." When the deceased were first discovered, the body count started out around 200, then the next day's papers reported 363, and it eventually escalated to 913. The official word was that adult bodies had been on top of kids, so apparently 500 bodies were hidden under the first 363....? Though, that contradicts what was reported by the very first medical doctor on the scene. Dr. Leslie Mootoo Guyana's chief medical examiner reported that the first 83 bodies to be recovered were those of children. All it took was a cursory glance around the compound to know that there were vastly more corpses then 200 or even 363.

Dr. Leslie Mootoo, Guyana's chief medical examiner and the first forensic specialist on the scene examined the bodies within the first few days and took specimens. His conclusion was that at least 700 of the cases, it wasn't suicide, but homicide. He was even quoted as such in the New York Times, 12/17/1978. He observed puncture wounds on the shoulders of many victims, so maybe they were held down and forcefully injected with poison against their will? He also found cyanide in bottles labeled Valium, which probably meant that what some members of the temple thought they were taking was a tranquilizer, not a deadly poison. Dr. Mootoo did find evidence of cyanide in most of the victims stomachs, and passed his samples along to a representative of the American Embassy in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown expecting them to be forwarded to American forensic pathologists, except they disappeared.

(Dr. Mootoo and his wife)

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine seven months later found six leading medical examiners describing the handling of the bodies by the US military and others as "inept", "incompetent", "embarrassing", and so on, with only circumstantial evidence of "probably cyanide poisoning". It also added that only 1/3 of the bodies could be positively identified, and that a medico-legal autopsy should have been performed on each one. It turns out that only seven bodies were autopsied, and not until a month after they were embalmed!

Some images show victims wearing ID bracelets, but these also vanished somewhere between Jonestown and the US air base where the bodies got shipped. The order to remove the medical tags is said to have come from the National Security Council's staff coordinator for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Robert Pastor.

(Transport of temple members bodies by U.S Military)

Shortly after the massacre became public, a psychiatrist named Dr. Hardhat Sukhdeo came to Georgetown to talk with the survivors. There were 33 of them, and most of them ran off into the jungle. He called Jim Jones "a genius of mind control, a master". This quote was widely used in the press and framed the official Jonestown story. Sukhdeo later admitted that his trip had been paid for by the State Department, and when he returned he met privately with FBI agents. Did he debrief the Jonestown survivors on behalf of the government, trying to find out what they might have seen? And why were Dr. Mootoo's conclusions ignored by the media, while Dr. Sukhdeo's speculation was praised?

It's also interesting that "virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre was eventually treated" at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, where Jones himself had once been under psychiatric care. Despite attempts to obtain Jones' medical file, it's never been released. Lots of the research done at Langley-Porter happens to be classified, much of it by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency. Some of this research involves the effect of electromagnetic fields on human beings, and behavior-modification techniques including hypnosis-from-a-distance.

Before his unfortunate trip to Jonestown, Congressman Ryan had been making a name for himself as a government watchdog. One amendment that he sponsored required the CIA to get congressional approval before it could undertake any covert acvitity. After stories of MK Ultra had surfaced, Ryan wrote a letter to the CIA "requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facitlity at Vacaville", from which Jones was reportedly getting members of his church as part of a rehab program. Ryan wrote that he was especially interested ina former inmate Donald "Cinque" DeFreeze. The CIA responded that yes, it had sponsored tests on some volunteer inmates at Vacaville, but not involving DeFreeze, "in so far as our records reflect the names of participants." . Of course most MK-ULTRA records had already been destroyed. A month after this correspondence, Ryan ended up dead on the tarmac in Guyana.

One of Jones' boyhood friends was Dan Mitrione, later an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency For International Development. They both grew up together in Lynn, Indiana and remained friends though life. Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs. Jones admitted to staying friends with Mitrione, and even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jonestown.

(Dan Mitrione)

After the Jonestown massacre, the CIA claimed that its file on "the Rev. Jimmie Jones" was almost empty. But actually, the CIA's Office of Security had opened a 201 file on Jones in the early 1960's, when he took off for Rio De Janeiro. Agency records showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. It's possible that Mitrione recruited jones into the CIA, using the State Department as his cover.

An autopsy on Jones body concluded that he didn't take poison, but had killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, but the pistol was found 200 ft from his body. Other researchers think the body identified as Jones couldn't have been him, because it didn't match his essential physical characteristics. One said that "photos of his body do not show identifying tattoos on his chest. The body and face are clearly not recognizable due to bloating and discoloration. The FBI reportedly checked his fingerprints twice, a seemingly futile gesture since it is a precise operation. A more logical route would have been to check dental records."

Here's what Congressman Ryan's friend Joe Holsinger once wrote about Jonestown...

"The more I investigate the mysteries of Jonestown, the more I am convinced there is something sinister behind it all. There is no doubt in my mind that Jones had very close CIA connections. At the time of the tragedy, the Temple had three boats in the water off Brazil. The boats disappeared shortly afterwards. Remember, Brazil is a country that Jones is very familiar with. He is supposed to have money there. And it is not too far from Guyana. My own feeling is that Jones was ambushed by CIA agents who then disappeared in the boats. But the whole story is so mind-boggling that I'm willing to concede he escaped with them."

A two part Documentary on Jonestown/CIA