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Conspiracy file · The legend since 1995

Project Monarch

The claim that a secret branch of the CIA's MK-ULTRA used extreme childhood trauma to split victims' minds into separate, programmable personalities. MK-ULTRA is documented. No record of a Project Monarch has ever surfaced.

Also known as Monarch Programming · Monarch Mind Control

On the recordTimelineFrom the comicsIn Paranoid American comicsSources & further reading

Project Monarch, a panel from a Paranoid American comic
From Time Samplers #3

The story

Project Monarch is said to be a CIA program that took children, broke them with systematic trauma and programmed the separate personalities that formed, producing couriers, spies and slaves who could be switched on with a trigger word. The name is usually explained by the monarch butterfly.

The documented part belongs to MK-ULTRA, the CIA's real mind-control research program. Approved in April 1953 and run by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, it funded more than 150 subprojects on drugs, hypnosis and interrogation, some on people who never consented. Director Richard Helms ordered most of its files destroyed in 1973. What survived came out through the 1975 Church Committee and a 1977 FOIA release of about 20,000 documents.

Monarch itself first appears in 1995, in Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips's self-published Trance Formation of America, which describes O'Brien's claimed programming. Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler followed in 1996 with a manual-style account of the method. The story arrived on the heels of the satanic ritual abuse panic, which an FBI guide had found no corroborating evidence for in 1992, and scholar Michael Barkun notes that histories of MK-ULTRA make no mention of a Project Monarch.

Memorandum for the recordSubject: Project Monarch

On the record

  1. CIA Director Allen Dulles approved MK-ULTRA on April 13, 1953; chemist Sidney Gottlieb ran it.
  2. MK-ULTRA funded more than 150 subprojects on drugs, hypnosis and behavior, at universities, hospitals and prisons.
  3. Some subjects never knew. Army scientist Frank Olson died in a fall from a New York hotel window in November 1953, days after he was secretly given LSD.
  4. In 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MK-ULTRA files destroyed.
  5. About 20,000 surviving documents surfaced through a 1977 FOIA request, leading to Senate hearings that August.
  6. Canada later compensated patients of Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose Montreal experiments the CIA had funded.
  7. Histories of MK-ULTRA based on the surviving files make no mention of a Project Monarch (Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy).

The theory

  • Project Monarch was a secret branch of MK-ULTRA that kept running after the program was exposed.
  • Children were selected, often from particular bloodlines, and traumatized until their minds split into separate personalities.
  • Each personality could be programmed and called up by a trigger: a word, a song, an image.
  • Some versions say the name comes from the monarch butterfly, a symbol of the victim's transformation.
  • Cathy O'Brien says she was a Monarch slave herself and names powerful people she says abused her.

Timeline

  1. 1950The CIA starts Project Bluebird, its first behavior-control program
  2. 1951Bluebird becomes Project Artichoke
  3. 1953Allen Dulles approves MK-ULTRA (April 13)
  4. 1965MKSEARCH carries the research on
  5. 1973Richard Helms orders the MK-ULTRA files destroyed
  6. 1975The Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission expose the program
  7. 197720,000 surviving documents surface; Senate hearings (August 3)
  8. 1992An FBI guide finds no evidence to back satanic ritual abuse claims
  9. 1995Trance Formation of America is published
  10. 1996Springmeier and Wheeler publish The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave

From the comics

Panels straight from the page. Click one to read it full size.

From Time Samplers #3: Dignity Colony · Page 7

The Woodpecker Grid

Colonel Zarota shows Dr. Vodnar how a candidate is made: caged, deprived, shocked at random, then "rescued" and broken in two. It's the comic's take on Project Monarch, the program described in 1990s books by people who say they survived it. Nothing like it has ever been documented.

The Woodpecker Grid, 1 of 6
The Woodpecker Grid, 2 of 6 The Woodpecker Grid, 3 of 6
The Woodpecker Grid, 4 of 6
The Woodpecker Grid, 5 of 6 The Woodpecker Grid, 6 of 6
  1. Woodpecker Grid: the comic's invention. The name echoes the "Russian Woodpecker", the nickname shortwave listeners gave a Soviet over-the-horizon radar whose tapping signal filled the airwaves from 1976 to 1989.
  2. Splitting: the heart of Monarch lore. In Cathy O'Brien's Trance Formation of America (1995) and Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler's 1996 book, severe trauma splits a child's mind into separate personalities that can be programmed and called up by a trigger. Histories of MK-ULTRA find no trace of such a program.

Get the evidence

In Paranoid American comics

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