Hypnosis: From Stage Performance to a CIA Plan for Controlling People

In 1960, American counterintelligence officers set three objectives for a secret hypnosis program: place a person under suggestion quickly without that person knowing, create a lasting gap in memory, and plant an instruction to be carried out after waking. Those objectives appear in a CIA paper on hypnosis in covert operations, not in a novel. The paper also assigns field testing to the counterintelligence side of the agency.

That changes the story people usually hear about hypnosis. The public sees a performer make a volunteer forget a name or hold an awkward pose on stage. Researchers study focused attention, pain relief, and changes in memory. In MKULTRA, the CIA combined hypnosis with drugs, interrogation, and behavior research. At a 1977 Senate hearing, the agency acknowledged that people had been used in behavior-control tests without being properly informed.