Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

West reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. He was ensconced in a civilian institution, and evidently he found it a less oppressive setting than Lackland had been. In a paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. In case the CIA didn’t grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”