Table of Contents
1. Appreciation of Paranoia
2. Eric Frank Russell
3. Viktor Tausk
4. James Tilly Matthews
5. Richard Shaver
6. Hearing Voices
7. Conclusion
1
Appreciation of Paranoia
In 1973 Stanford University professor David Rosenhan conducted an experiment where eight perfectly healthy people were sent to psychiatric hospitals. The doctors didn’t know that the “patients” were healthy. The experiment was to find out if psychiatrists can reliably discern between mental health and illness. The patients lied about only one thing, claiming they “heard voices”. These voices said three things: “Empty”, “Hollow” and “Thud”. All eight of the test subjects were admitted and once admitted, they all stopped play acting that they were mentally ill. They behaved normally, cooperated and asked to be discharged.
But the psychiatrists didn’t let them go! Every word and action was reinterpreted as a symptom of their mental illness. Everything was viewed through the lens of mental illness and interpreted accordingly. Writing notes was labeled “obsessive behavior”, quietly sitting was labeled “attention seeking”, politeness was labelled “controlled behavior”. Seven of them were falsely diagnosed with schizophrenia, one with manic depression. The “patients” remained hospitalized for up to 19 to 52 days.
Even though the doctors didn’t recognize that they were healthy, some of the patients did. No study did more to damage and debunk the profession of psychiatry, but after a brief period of outrage, scandal and fanfare, the psychiatric profession continued on as if nothing had happened. After all, having all these “mentally ill” people to administer drugs to, was profitable for pharmaceutical companies.
After Rosenhan published the study, the psychiatric world challenged him to send more imposters, promising they would catch them. Rosenhan agreed. Little did they know that he didn’t send a single imposter. Despite this, the psychiatric hospital falsely identified 41 supposed imposters. With that, the reputation of the psychiatric profession had taken a second beating within a short period.
The experiment eventually led to the large scale “deinstitutionalization” of most mental patients. It was learned that psychiatric diagnosis was largely created by context and expectation not by any inherent reality.
While I agree that there are questionable aspects to modern psychiatry, this still leaves many people who are suffering and frankly, people who should not be walking the streets in their condition. We call them “mentally ill” and prescribe drugs that have not proven to heal. They have proven to make the “mentally ill” zoned out, docile, dull and sleepy. That’s not “healing” it’s merely a suppression.
The primary weakness of psychiatry is that it ignores the subject of entities. In my book Clearing Entities I suggest that our ancestors were correct in labeling a large part of mental illness as entity possession, demon possession, jinn possession, energy-parasite possession or whatever you wish to call it. I’ve successfully cured people from various mental problems, pains and illnesses through entity clearing – which is simply a more modern and universal term for exorcism. If that permanently cures them, there is no need for drugs or lengthy and expensive “therapies” while locked away in impersonal, fluorescent-light hospital wards. I’ve also learned first-hand that temporary fasting leads to the “miraculous” disappearance of severe mental problems. Despite my success in this area not a single doctor has ever inquired about my methods. How much do they really want to know?
Modern psychiatry also ignores other factors that could lead to mental disturbances. Horrific Government experiments such as MKUltra, Satanic Ritual Abuse and Trauma-Based Programming just to name a few. These are real problems that “modern society” has put a lid on. People who have blown the whistle on these crimes have been labeled “paranoid schizophrenics” by our courts, doctors and media.
Instead of finding relief, their testimony is belittled. You can’t heal people if you dismiss their reports. Just because their reports sound fanciful doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.
Not all psychiatrists are this narrow-minded. Some venture outside of the box they’ve been trained to think in, but are hamstrung by laws and regulations and pressure from peers.
Modern psychiatry dismisses a host of other problems. One of them is the topic of this article: Influencing Machines (also known as Psychotronic devices or Remote Mind Control).
This is the most “paranoid” article I’ve ever written and I enjoyed every minute of it. Decades of research are summarized here. Paranoia is actually hyper-awareness and hyper-vigilance against evil. It only becomes problematic when it’s mixed with fear. That’s the slippery slope that can turn hyper-awareness into bitterness and finally to something resembling mental illness. When everything is seen through the lens of nefarious plots, schemes, double-talk, obfuscation, suppression, cover-up and ill-intent, a person destabilizes and casts self-as-victim. This leads to errors in judgement, distortions of perception and a perpetually angry attitude where it’s “I’m the only one fighting the powers that be but all these morons don’t get it”.
But reality isn’t like that. The game of life is the perfect balance of good and bad, easy and challenging. The fearless person, on the other hand, enjoys the detective work required to uncover potential deception. Nothing trains investigative intelligence more than several layers of smoke and mirrors. From the fearless perspective, conspriacy-thinking brings out the hero-self, not the victim-self. “Because we’re up against such a formidable enemy, we have to self-improve to levels not believed possible”.
We live in an age of cognitive warfare, where millions of ideas compete with each other. I’m interested in this: Who is pulling the strings? What kind of trance are we in to allow so many undesirable things to happen? Are there means of hidden influence that could make large parts of the population more docile, dumb and compliant? It is my experience that the majority of people are living below their means, thinking below their ability, acting below what they know is good, true and beautiful. Why is that?
In previous works I’ve highlighted various means of hidden influence from subliminal advertising to social-media control, from media-manipulation to social engineering. This article looks at hidden influence from so-called “influencing machines” – a topic so well hidden that most people have never heard of it. The only people who go on about it are paranoid schizophrenics who are locked away in mental institutions. Among these the topic is so common, I’ve come to ask myself whether they were locked away and labelled mentally ill because they discovered a truth.
In the late 1700s, the British intelligence operative James Tilly Matthews claimed that the British Government was operating an “influencing machine” called the Air Loom to manipulate world events and start wars. Matthews was subsequently put into an insane asylum for the rest of his life and his case was used as the first thoroughly documented case of a condition described as “Schizophrenia”.
In 1919 a colleague of Sigmund Freud, Viktor Tausk wrote an article titled “”On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia.” This was the first scholarly introduction to the fact that many patients suffering from “schizophrenia” claim their problems are being caused by an “influencing machine”. Patients say the evil device is operated by demons, entities or aliens.
In 1939 the science-fiction author Eric Frank Russell wrote a book titled “Sinister Barrier” where he claimed that aliens were remote-manipulating humanity and harvesting their energy. Nothing unusual, except that in the preface of his book the author claims that the story is true but must be published as fiction to protect his identity. Russell predicted World War II before it started.
In the late 1940s, Richard Shaver began publishing in Amazing Stories, the prime science-fiction magazine of the era. Shaver claimed that subterranean entities he called “The Dero” used ancient machines to manipulate people and world events on the surface of Earth. Shaver too claimed that his stories are true, but the publisher chose to embellish them and publish them as sci-fi.
It’s possible that these people were simply mentally ill. Officialdom insists they were mentally ill.
But what if they weren’t? Having read almost ALL the works not only OF these authors but also ABOUT them, I’m inclined to believe there may be more to these stories than meets the eye.
On the same day I wrote this forward, the U.S. Department of Defense finally admitted that they have been using “Directed Energy Weapons” (Space Lasers!) for some time. It’s one of hundreds of “paranoid”, “silly”, “kooky”, “stupid”, “moronic”, “dangerous”, “lunatic”, “paranoid”, “schizophrenic” conspiracy-theories that turned out to be true. Every time an idea, maligned by the majority, turns out to be true it bolsters my confidence in the value of “paranoia”.
Appreciate Paranoia, minus the fear. It gives you a different take on any story the powers that be wish to sell. And studying different takes is not “dangerous” or “extremist”, it’s thinking outside of the box. Sometimes you need to think so far outside the box that it causes cognitive dissonance or great discomfort to people who hear it. It rattles their belief-system. They get upset. But some of us have to do it, otherwise nothing new is discovered.
2
Eric Frank Russell
Eric Frank Russell, 1905-1978
In 1939 the science-fiction author Eric Frank Russell wrote a book titled “Sinister Barrier”. I’m not one to take science-fiction as literal fact, if it weren’t for this cryptic forward that Russell wrote to the book:
“It would be idle to pretend and dishonest to suggest that Sinister Barrier is anything other than fiction. Some may regard it as fantasy because it is placed in the future and depicts certain developments likely in times to come. But I regard it as a sort of fact-fiction solely because I do sincerely believe that if ever a story was based upon facts it is this one. Sinister Barrier is as true a story as it is possible to concoct while presenting believe-it-or-not truths in the guise of entertainment”.
The author goes on to cite news-clippings to support his belief that we – humanity – are “property of” or secretly controlled by invisible alien beings. Russell cites the non-fiction author Charles Fort (1874-1932) as one of his knowledge sources. It was Fort who coined the phrase “humanity is property” and went on to collect thousands of news-stories of anomalies and mysterious occurrences from around the world which he collected in six books. It is from his namesake we got the term “Fortean phenomena” which relates to unexplained happenings such as disappearances of ships in the Bermuda Triangle, raining frogs, timeslips, ghost sightings, UFO sightings, Bigfoot sightings, anomalous ancient artifacts and thousands of other things that don’t fit into the box that our education system tries to squeeze us into.
Having read Sinister Barrier, I know the author has every right to claim reality because of how many things he accurately foresaw. If accurate predictions are not a sign of sanity, what is? The book was published in 1939 and written before World War II started, but it predicts a World War built on staged, false flag deception. A false flag is where a disaster is caused by one party and then blamed on an enemy or someone not involved in the attack. In the book the Chinese are deceived into attacking America and vice-versa.
The book predicts handheld devices were you could video-call with people. Video phones only came out in the early 2000s, more than 70 years after the book was written. Television is portrayed as a fact of daily life, which it wasn’t in the 1930s. News is read on electronic devices, not in papers. The book far surpasses the knowledge-level of the average 1939 person.
In the book, the hidden aliens are called “Vitons”, presumably a wordplay on what they did: Sucking our vital life force by attaching their (to us invisible) tentacles into the back of our heads to harvest the energy out of our spine, where most of it is stored. The mechanism of energy harvesting captured my interest because I implied the same in my books “The Electromagnetic Self” and “Human Harvesting”. I wrote those books before knowing Russells book. I quote:
“…not only are the Vitons composed of energy, but also that they live on energy, feed on it-our energy! So far as they’re concerned, we exist as energy-producers which kindly nature has provided to satisfy whatever they use for bellies. Thus, they breed us, or incite us to breed. They herd us, drive us, milk us, fattening on the currents generated by our emotions in precisely the same way that we fatten on juice involuntarily surrendered by cattle to whom we have given fodder containing stimulants for lactation. Show me the highly emotional man whose life has been healthy and long, and you show me the Vitons’ prize cow, the medal-winner!”
The aliens kill anyone who is onto them or discovers their presence. The story begins with many scientists getting killed before they can get the truth out into the world. The beings are telepathic. They can read our intentions before we even utter them. Thus, anyone who discovers the horrible truth is quickly removed.
The secret to seeing them lies in making changes or adjustments to our optical nerves via iodine and methylene blue. The substances, according to the book, allow humans to see far into the infrared spectrum and make out these blue orb or blob-like beings that look similar to ball lightning.
You may recall my article about UFO-Researcher Trevor Constable, who believed UFOs are living creatures that can be seen with infrared photography. Constable, in his 1970s book “The Cosmic Pulse of Life” claimed that UFOs only appear as solid metallic craft but are actually shapeshifting amoeba-like forms, some of them hostile. He first proposed the theory in the 1950s. He is not the only researcher that suggested a different idea about UAPs and UFOs than the CIA-sponsored “space brothers riding in flying saucers” hypothesis, but the most prominent. Constable notably points out how UFOs that can’t be seen with the eyes can still be picked up by radar.
Russell’s references to Iodine, Methylene Blue and the aliens as “brain parasites” are interesting. The first time I heard of Methylene Blue was when U.S. Health Secretary (at the time of this writing) Robert F. Kennedy mentioned them. Kennedy not only claimed to have gotten rid of brain parasites that had damaged his vocal chords. He was also spotted on an airplane, taking methylene blue. The video caused a flurry of speculation about the substance on social media, as it was put into a glass of water with what appeared to be an eye-dropper. From the Internet:
In February 2025, a video of
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went viral showing him adding a, vibrant, dark-blue liquid to his beverage while on an airplane, prompting widespread internet speculation that the substance was methylene blue.
Context: The undated video began circulating on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit as Kennedy was awaiting Senate confirmation for his nomination as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.
Speculation: Internet users and biohacking enthusiasts widely speculated the liquid was methylene blue, a compound popular in some alternative wellness circles.
Purported Uses: Adherents, including some biohackers, claim methylene blue boosts cognitive function, improves mitochondrial function, and enhances oxygen delivery, which they suggest is useful for mitigating the effects of poor air quality on flights.
From the Internet:
It could be a mere coincidence that I became aware of these facts at around the same time I was reading Sinister Barrier.
Russells “Viton” creatures feed off of emotion. The more emotionally aroused, fearful, terrified, sad, ashamed or angry a person is, the more energy can be harvested. This is a common theme not only in science-fiction but also in ancient and modern mythology. C.S. Lewis has said as much and more recent ideas around “loosh harvesting” say the same. If people of all ages, religions and cultures have been carrying these ideas around, perhaps there’s some truth to them.
From the book:
“When you see this world riddled with suspicion, rotten with conflicting ideas, staggering beneath the burden of preparation for war, you can be certain the harvest time is drawing near-a harvest for others. Not for you, not for you-you are only the poor, bleeding suckers whose lot it is to be pushed around. The harvest is for others!”
And:
“If I were showing you a micro- photograph of the edge of an ordinary saw, its peaks and valleys would be a perfect graph representing the waves of emotion which have upset this world with damnable regularity. Emotion-the crop! Hysteria-the fruit! Rumors of war, actual wars, ferocious and bloody, religious revivals, religious riots; financial crises; labor troubles; color rivalries; ideological demonstrations, specious propaganda; murders, massacres, so-called natural disasters, or slaughter in any emotion-arousing form; revolutions and more wars.”
And:
“Since all our data points to the fact that the Vitons sway opinions any way they want them, subtly guiding the thoughts that best suit their own purpose, it is well nigh impossible to determine which views are naturally and logically evolved, which implanted”.
Because humans start seeing the “Vitons” and look for ways to get rid of them, the aliens start a world war, for distraction. They remote-influence the minds of people and an all-out war breaks out that soon turns nuclear (again, the book was written in 1938, seven years before the first nuclear bomb was dropped).
The question Russell is asking is familiar to all of us: Why war? Nobody appears to want war and yet at no time in human History have we been without wars. Maybe it’s time to start looking at alternative explanations.
In Sinister Barrier, things get so bad that a breakaway civilization builds subterranean tunnels to live and operate out of the sight of the telepathic alien harvesters. The intelligence community and numerous scientists dwell in subterranean caverns because the telepathy of the Vitons don’t reach that far. This is another prediction that came true. Today the most important intelligence and military facilities are below ground.
The “happy end” of the book is that a few intelligence operatives finally find a way to defeat them through direct-energy-weapons, described in the book as 0.5. centimeter shortwave weapons.
Some technical details of the weapon, from the book:
“We’ll have to see that silver darned quick, else it’ll come too-” He stopped, rubbed his pulsing arm, stared at the other. “I seem to remember something about photons changing their double-eights to true spirals when rebounding from polished silver.”
…”The problem’s largely one of refraction versus reflection, but silver might do it. There’s a good chance that so short a wave might spiral if the beam could be bounced off a silver plate-especially if we use a Berg- strom magnetic-field impeller to make the stuff hard and fast by – cutting down absorption.”
And:
“Polarization! That’s it-polarization!” He stirred his finger vigorously in the air. “Circular or elliptical polarization”.
I quote these as examples of oddly specific technical details that are scattered throughout the book.
Whether real or not, it’s an enjoyable read because of the teaser at the beginning. If it were marked as pure fiction, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it because then it’s just a sci-fi tale like any other.
The idea of a hidden alien influence is prevalent not only in mythology and among the mentally ill, but also a staple of science fiction, including sci-fi cryptically labeled as fact. There are many other famous science fiction books along the same lines, most famously Robert Heinlein’s “The Puppet Masters” and Phillip K. Dick’s “The Cosmic Puppets”, but Russells work was among the earliest.
3
Viktor Tausk
Viktor Tausk, 1879-1919
In 1919 a student and colleague of Sigmund Freud, Viktor Tausk wrote an article titled “”On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia.” This was the first scholarly introduction to the fact that many patients suffering from “schizophrenia” claim their problems are being caused by an “influencing machine”. Patients say the evil device is operated by demons, entities or aliens.
It’s more than strange that “influencing machines” were part of the earliest research in psychiatry but most psychiatrists have never heard of the topic. Sigmund Freud, “the father of psychoanalysis” said of Tausk that he was “a brilliant but troublesome student”. He was reportedly jealous of Tausk’s youth and vigor, as well as his relationship to Lou-Andreas Salome. In 1919 Tausk allegedly commit suicide, after which Freud showed remorse for his hostility toward him.
From a news-clipping of the time:
On July 3, 1919, psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk committed suicide by a combined method of hanging and shooting. He tied a curtain cord or braid around his neck and simultaneously fired a pistol into his right temple. The mechanism caused him to hang himself as he fell. Tausk, a, student of Sigmund Freud, left suicide notes for Freud and his fiancée, Hilde Loewi, calling his death the “healthiest, most decent deed” of his life.
Many have cast doubts on the suicide, suggesting instead homicide. One of them was political scientist Paul Roazen who wrote an entire book investigating the suicide and concluded that Freud was culpable in Tausk’s death. Others have noted that Freud called Tausk a “threat” and “wild man” prior to his death. What might have made Tausk so threatening to Freud? After Tausks death, Freud wrote to Salome that he was “relieved” that Tausk was dead and did not miss him.
Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, reported having had a dream that Tausk’s fiancée had rented an apartment across the street from the Freud family to kill her father with a pistol. The dream is presumably inspired by her fathers sense that Tausk was a threat. But why? Is it possible that Tausk’s interest in “influencing machines” may have had something to do with him becoming nuisance to the founders of modern psychology and psychiatry? Freud’s teaching is that our problems come from childhood trauma, not from some external psychotronic device, much less from aliens or demons. The early 1900s were the formative days of modern psychiatry and it’s possible that the powers-that-be thought it necessary to get rid of any hint of hidden influence. From then on, mental science had no place for it.
Some of Tausk’s students said they had thoughts and beliefs that are not their own, forcibly implanted. They heard voices that commanded them to harm or kill. Most of these disembodied commands were negative (which makes sense, as a positive influence would probably not force their message). This doesn’t surprise me. Note the overwhelming amount of people who claim to have committed murder because a voice told them to. Newspapers ranging back hundreds of years are filled with such tales. Modern psychology however, dismisses them all, insisting that it these are created in the patients own imagination.
The “influencing machines” described by Tausk’s students are often large contraptions with wheels, gears, tubes and pipes. They project images and rays and “magnetic fluids”, “electrical charges”, “air currents” and imprint thoughts on the victims. In many cases the pictures are flat not three-dimensional and are beamed into the persons mind from a black box that is part of a larger machine. The devices can cause pain if the victim does not follow orders. It not only implants emotions and thoughts, it can also remove them.
Both Tausk and Freud claimed that this idea is a “fantasy created as an outward manifestation of internal confusion between external and internal worlds” and that it is caused by developmental problems in early childhood. A child does not differentiate between inner and outer world they say. As they become an adult, they learn to tell the difference and this constitutes sanity. If one can’t tell the difference between imagined and reality, it means they are insane. This is why Freud discarded such stories entirely, but Tausk continued to research.
On this flimsy basis, psychiatrists completely sidestep our ancestors beliefs that “voices in the head” are caused by demons, jinn and other disembodied entities.
It’s interesting that Tausk describes some influencing machines as a “black box that emanates pictures” – many years before the invention of Television. If the existence of such an influencing machine were real, it’s also conceivable that the Television (tell-a-vision) was inspired or modeled after it. I can imagine someone saying “Why not make an influencing box that works not only in the etheric realm, but acts directly on the eyes and ears and that people themselves want to own?” In this context it’s perhaps not a coincidence that the founder of Netflix, Marc Bernays Randolph, is a family relative of Sigmund Freud.
Fact is that Tausk’s paper “The Influencing Machine” was published in 1919, shortly after which he supposedly “commit suicide”.
4
James Tilly Matthews
The earliest fully documented case of “Influencing Machines” goes back to James Tilly Matthews who I first learned of in the book “The Air Loom Gang”, a book written by Mike Jay.
The book documents Matthews, the most prominent early 1800s case of “visionary madness”. Because of Matthews belief in a Government conspiracy, he was locked into a mental asylum for most of his life, placed in the custody of a pompous, self-important doctor who developed his volumes on the new illness of “schizophrenia” based on the case.
A quote from the book (bolding mine):
The Air Loom’s power was pneumatic, but its effects were accomplished by harnessing the mysterious magnetism which ran through all living things, a technique popularized in pre- Revolutionary France by the Viennese doctor Franz Anton Mesmer. Mesmerism could cure disease, twist and constrict the body, and control the speech and brain, all without the subject even being aware of it. The Air Loom used its pneumatic force to expand these powers far beyond those of even the most skilled human mesmerist. Man had made a machine that could turn men themselves into machines.
It was the Air Loom that was now filling the Prime Minister’s lungs with magnetic airs and his mouth with sonorous, pre-scripted verbiage. Pitt’s eyes were waxy; his frame sagged like dead meat inside his clothes. Others had noticed this: the cartoonist James Gillray had recently lampooned Pitt as a sleepwalker, with nightshirt and candle, mesmerized by the war with France. But only one man knew that he was really mesmerized by a machine. The Prime Minister was a pneumatic puppet, programmed to maintain the line that war with France was inevitable and irreversible. Pitt spoke for nearly three hours.
…Pitt’s message, even for those who knew nothing of the Air Loom, had been entirely predictable: war was a patriotic necessity.
..the man in the gallery gasped, then held his mouth open, starving himself of breathe. He felt the Air Loom’s current pass over him, sweep down and seek out Ereskin”
Elsewhere in the book we read:
“As he stared down at Lord Liverpool, the man felt a new rhythm to his own breathing. The bellows were taking control of his chest, like an incoming tide. He had lost concentration; the rays had found him. The air inside his lungs was reaching into his vitals, moulding itself into spectral fingers, twisting his guts into spasm. Liverpool continued, untroubled by the machine’s attention, for he was already doing its bidding. It was clear from the King’s Message, he insisted, that the French, ‘far from desiring peace, were determined that the negotiations should never arrive at that stage”
A live reconstruction of the Air Loom Machine as described by Matthews, by artist Rod Dickinson.
Matthews was specific about who operated the machine, who was affected and why. From the book (bolding mine):
“Over the following years the facts of Matthews’ case, his madness or his sanity, would be investigated in more detail than that of any suspected lunatic in history. Arguments for both sides would be rehearsed by doctors and lawyers, judges and governors, family and friends and other witnesses, who would produce a torrent of affidavits and contradictory testimonies as to his state of mind. But this initial claim after his arrest, that he had been involved with the British and French governments on a secret, high-level political peace mission, would only ever be discussed as evidence of his mental condition. None of them would ever consider that it might have been true.
Every word of it was. Matthews’ shout of treason in the House was no random outburst of lunacy, but the last act in an astonishing adventure, one which might indeed have changed the history of Europe. But, by this point, there was no-one left to confirm the truth of his story. Most of the witnesses were dead, and those who had survived were quite definitely not talking. But the medical diagnosis was understandable in the light of Matthews’ further claims, which placed him – implausibly, to say the least – centre stage in the political intrigues following the French Revolution. The Committee of Public Safety, which enforced martial law under the Jacobins, had apparently been set up for the specific purpose of intercepting Matthews’ letters. In Britain, the Traitorous Correspondence Bill had been passed for the same purpose. In Flanders, the Duke of York had commanded his army to make ‘various marches and Countermarches to beset him’, all with the sole intention of handing Matthews over to the enemy as a spy. But the Duke of York, marching his men up the hill and down again, was by no means the prime mover in the plot. It was, in fact, the King of Prussia who, according to Matthews, was ‘at the bottom of a deep scheme by which the Duke of York was to have been made King of France’.
“…The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognized immediately as a classic paranoid delusion.But in 1797 it was something which had never been encountered before and it would emerge as the main leitmotif of a case which was unprecedented in almost every imaginable way. Subsequently, it would become one of the most celebrated delusions in medical history, and the first recorded example of an ‘influencing machine’: a fantastic device which sends messages and controls minds. For everyone who has since had messages beamed at them through their fillings, or their TV sets, or via high-tech surveillance, MI5 Masonic lodges or UFOs, James Tilly Matthews is Patient Zero“.
“…The next task for today’s psychiatrist would be to establish whether these delusions could be shaken or dismantled. But, as we shall see, Matthews was nothing if not tenacious. He had many reasons for persisting with his story, some very good ones among them. He was convinced that his mission could not possibly be of greater importance, that he was the only person capable of stopping Europe from destroying itself through war, and that he had no choice but to continue to attempt this by any means necessary. Apart from anything else, quite a lot of his story was true”
At the time, schizophrenia was not yet an official classification, it was virtually unknown. They called it a “byproduct of the modern industrial age” or a response to the stresses of modern life that didn’t exist before the 1800s. This classification neglects the fact that the affliction did in fact exist before the 1800s but it was called something else: spirit possession. How strange that schizophrenia was called “a new and emerging illness”. Changing a label does not make its long history go away.
The book by Mike Jay explains that Bedlam, the mental asylum that housed Matthews, had a reputation for unjustly locking up political adversaries under false claims of mental illness. Over the years of his confinement, numerous family members, political colleagues, friends and even doctors demanded that Matthews be released on the grounds that he appeared perfectly sane to them, but their demands were always refused by authority of the Government itself. Matthews was a “high profile” inmate and his wife persisted to get him freed her entire life but was always brushed off. Eventually she was no longer allowed to visit her husband at all because her visits were claimed to increase his mental illness.
The book says that banning visitors from Bedlam Hospital was extremely unusual, much less visits by relatives. From the book (bolding mine):
“Haslam felt that Matthews was in the grip of an acute mania that would only subside once the doctor, not the patient, was setting the agenda: the doctor must have mastery over the patient’s moods if the ‘most violent state of the disease’ is ever to pass. Part of his delusion is that he is sane, and his wife is reinforcing it; cruel as it may seem, she must be banished”
Did you catch that? If other people believe that he is sane, that’s just part of the delusion. Thus, the label of mental illness is extended to any other people who disagree with one doctor. Circular reasoning at it’s worst! To me this looks more like imprisonment than healing.
From the book:
“Conspiracies among the crowned heads of Europe continued to dominate his view of the world, along with even stranger convictions”.
He was put into an insane asylum for life because “conspiracies dominated his view of the world”
There is nothing strange, much less “mentally ill” about believing in organized crime. That’s what conspiracies are – organized crime. Crime happens. It’s no problem if you accuse people of a crime, except when it comes to people in positions of power. Then a mere crime accusation suddenly turns into a “delusion”.
They managed to lock up Matthews for life by pronouncing him “incurable”.
“This new dispensation might have made life easier for Haslam, but Matthews’ family was still unwilling to accept his diagnosis of lunacy. They continued to press for his release: shortly after he was pronounced incurable, they petitioned the governors for a second opinion. Matthews was taken from Bedlam for the first time since his arrival and driven by carriage to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the home of Lord Kenyon, the Lord Chief Justice”.
There is no trace of the results of this hearing, we only know what his captor, Doctor John Haslam said about it. According to this, Matthews detailed a conspiracy to start the French Revolution, one of the bloodiest events in History. The conspiracy involved the occult magician Count Cagliostro and others going against Marie Antoinette. Spouting such theories was apparently enough to lock him back up. Even though Matthews posed no danger to society, the mere existence of “thought crime” was enough to remove him from society.
Matthews claimed that a magnet had been implanted into his brain so that others could control his thoughts – a claim echoed by many conspiracists that would follow Matthews.
One of many attempts to free Matthews was a lawyers letter presented to the Hospital in 1809 ordering that they explain to the Lord Chief Justice of the Court why Matthews was still being held there. Several witnesses were called, all holding wildly contradictory views about him. From the book (bolding mine):
The family’s opening testimony was dramatic: two affidavits signed by independent doctors named George Birkbeck and Henry Clutterbuck. Both were fully qualified MDs and, as it transpired, each had paid no fewer than six extended visits, together and separately, to Matthews in Bedlam over the preceding months. Both, too, were in complete agreement. According to Birkbeck’s testimony, he had ‘attempted by every mode of examination he could devise to discover James Tilly Matthews’ real state of mind’, and ‘the result of such careful & repeated & unprejudiced examinations has been that the said James Tilly Matthews is not insane’.
But despite verification of sanity by independent doctors, Matthews was not released and would never be. Later it was discovered that Matthews was being detained at the order of Lord Liverpool:
“…Matthews was being confined ‘in consequence of a letter from Lord Liverpool, directing his being there detained’.
This, if true, was more than curious. It suggested a possibility which had hitherto never been raised: that Matthews’ madness or sanity wasn’t, after all, the issue. Was he actually in Bedlam not because he was mad, but because he was an enemy of the state, and specifically of Lord Liverpool? In short, were his persecution fantasies real?”
The book goes on recounting attempts to free Matthews, chapter after chapter but to no avail. His original crime had been that he claimed the French Revolution and Englands war against France were a conspiracy. The “delusional” part was that they were manipulated by an “influencing machine”.
“The verdict was, in one way or another, a disaster for all concerned. Bedlam might have won, but its case was a shambles of contradictions and evasions. The profession’s statutory body, the Commissioners in Lunacy, had presented the thinnest of evidence, which had turned out to be irrelevant in any case. The governors had used their own physicians to support their case and then instructed the judge to ignore their professional opinions. It was a victory that would turn out within a few years to contain the seeds of their destruction, a calamity in which Matthews’ case would play a conspicuous part.
It was no less of a disaster for Haslam. He had presented the only medical evidence of any quality, and in return had been humiliated with another casual reminder of how little authority he held, even within an institution so sorely in need of professional competence. His opinion had been contradicted by Birkbeck and Clutterbuck, and no conclusion had been still be there. According to the letter of the law, he was neither insane nor a political prisoner. No wonder the most prominent symptom of his supposed madness was persecution mania.
To make matters worse, the architect of his persecution had been exposed, and nobody had paid the slightest attention. Whatever had happened in France, it had ended with Matthews accusing Lord Liverpool of treason. Now, twelve long years later, Lord Liverpool had personally intervened to make sure that he stayed in Bedlam until his death. It was surely obvious to everyone that there was more behind this than an isolated incident in the House of Commons one afternoon in the previous century. If this was the whole story, then the Home Secretary’s persecution mania was surely more extreme than that of the alleged lunatic. Matthews had by nobody’s account even threatened violence against Liverpool – at least, until he entered the looking-glass world of Bedlam. Witnesses were now queueing up to take responsibility for him, stressing that he was no longer a public nuisance. It was barely credible that Liverpool should have even remembered Matthews’ interruption unless it concealed a bigger story, one in which the Home Secretary had something quite serious to hide”.
Later in the book, we learn that Matthews, rather than being a nutcase, was not who everyone thought he was.
“In Williams’ account, and many subsequent official documents, we also receive a second snippet of context: Matthews is a businessman, a wholesale tea-dealer. This locates him in a second milieu that dovetails neatly enough with the first.
“The late eighteenth century was boom-time in the tea trade. Tea had been one of the great success stories of the century, but for most of that time the traffic had been sewn up by the East India Company, which had a monopoly on imports China”
“But James Tilly Matthews was still playing out his mysterious role in London. On 28 January he wrote to Pitt, requesting a second meeting. Now he was presenting himself unambiguously as a British spy, a loyalist who had been taken into the confidence of the French embassy and ‘wormed my way into their secrets’. He has done this, he claims, ‘without Williams’ knowledge’; this intrigue, in other words, isn’t more of the same, but a new initiative. His message is that ‘chance has given me the opportunity to serve my country by perhaps making these Gasconnades [Girondins] humble themselves to your utmost wishes. I shall cheerfully’, he offers, ‘repair to Paris even tonight.’
“This is the first time we hear from Matthews in his own words, and if it were the only time, we would probably have little hesitation in assuming that he was a British agent who had travelled to France as an undercover spy. On the face of it, he seems to be straightforwardly betraying his fellow republicans, going behind Williams’ back and scheming to force the Girondins to cave into the British. But, more likely, this is exactly what he wants Pitt to think. Between the lines, we can read this letter as a last throw of the dice, an offer of the only bait he can think of to cajole Pitt and Grenville into engaging once more with the secret peace negotiations. ‘Without Williams’ knowledge’ might be a ploy to whet their appetites, implying that this is a new avenue of opportunity, and one much more to the government’s advantage. Perhaps he even plays the role of loyalist spy with too much relish: do such people really describe themselves as ‘worming their way into secrets?”
Evidence points to Matthews being not only a businessman but also an intelligence agent. This re-contextualizes the entire story of his “insanity”. Few people in the world were or are more informed about secret operations than spies. And nobody is more paranoid than a spy. If a normal person were to say “I am being manipulated by an influencing machine” it rings different than when an intelligence operative who worked at the highest levels of Government and for the largest corporation in the world (The East India Company), says it.
“…when Williams returned to London on 12 February Matthews was waiting for him with a carriage. They drove together to the Foreign Office to deliver the letter…”
“…channels outside the usual diplomatic ones. It would have needed agents loyal to the plan, but outside the French government – agents such as Williams and Matthews. The mind becomes dizzy even contemplating what the effects of this plan might have been had it succeeded. No Revolutionary Wars – or, if it had come to war, Napoleon and Wellington on the same side. Beyond that, the entire story of Europe would most likely be unrecognizable from that which the history books now record. It was, as everyone appreciated at the time, a moment of destiny, the crucible in which the future of the world was being forged – a future which the alliance of Britain and France would have sent in an entirely different direction. It would have been almost unique in history for the extent to which a single ordinary individual, James Tilly Matthews, could have changed the world”
At the center of the Air Loom story is the “science of mesmerism” which is hypnosis via a person’s “magnetic fluid” (life force, prana, chi). From Mike Jay’s book:
“Chavanay opened the conversation with the following words: ‘Mr Matthews, are you acquainted with the art of talking with your brains?’ Matthews replied that he was not, and Chavanay expanded somewhat obscurely: ‘It is effected by means of the magnet.
“This is the wild card in Matthews’ French adventures: the disputed science of mesmerism, which of course will eventually become the motive force behind the Air Loom. Was Matthews mesmerized by Chavanay? He doesn’t tell us, but it would explain a great deal”.
…
“Air Loom, whose mechanics are predicated on the idea that invisible airs and magnetic fluids can be ‘woven’ into different configurations and projected at a subject who is somehow charged to receive them. Within this logic, however, the details are undeniably bizarre. It is powered by a long list of the most putrid substances imaginable – ‘seminal fluid, male and female … effluvia of dogs – stinking human breath… stench of the sesspool horse’ – which are stored and magnetized in barrels. From gaz from the anus of the here, they are fed into the main body of the loom, where their release can be controlled and modulated by an array of levers and keys, functioning perhaps like organ-stops to emit the charged airs in different combinations, forces and frequencies. Thereafter the gaseous magnetic fluid passes into the upper parts of the machine, which were always blurred to Matthews but which seemed to incorporate arrangements of cylinders and canvas sails; from here, the magnetic rays finally emerge, programmed to seek out their subject and render the effect selected by the operators.
…
The range of ‘event-workings’ is a ‘formidable catalogue of human miseries’, with every operation vividly christened. ‘Fluid lock- ing’, for example, is the name for ‘constricting the fibres at the root of the tongue’, which impedes speech; ‘kiteing’ is a force which ‘contrives to lift into the brain some peculiar idea, which floats and undulates in the intellect for hours’; ‘lengthening the brain’ is an effect analogous to a distorting mirror at a funfair, which twists any serious and important notion until it becomes irresistibly hilarious – significantly, it can cause good sense to appear as insanity’. ‘Bomb-bursting’ distends the stomach by filling it with gas and remotely detonating it, at which ‘a horrid crash is heard in the head’; ‘gaz-plucking’ is the extraction of precious magnetic fluid, bubble by bubble, from the anus; ‘dream-workings’ force the subject to endure whatever dreams are transmitted to him in sleep. Many other workings are more or less self-explanatory, such as ‘thought-making’, ‘laugh-making’, ‘brain-sayings’, ‘foot-curving’, ‘vital-tearing’ and ‘fibre-ripping’. And there are also fatal operations such as ‘lobster-cracking’, which increases the magnetic pressure around the subject ‘so as to stagnate his circulation, impede his vital motions, and produce instant death’.
The third and final part of the Air Loom scenario focuses on the operators themselves, the gang. Here Haslam finds a par- ticularly happy match between Matthews’ profusion of curious details and his own jocular intentions, and he lists them with the mock-earnestness of a butterfly collector: ‘of their general habits little is known…’ When engaged in Air Loom business, however, they ‘hire themselves out as spies, and dis- over the secrets of government to the enemy, or confederate 10 work events of the most atrocious nature’. They are ‘pro- foundly skilled in pneumatic chemistry’, and they work out of cellar near London Wall. Just round the corner, as it happens, from Bedlam itself.
The gang are seven. Their leader is Bill the King, who ‘exerts the most unrelenting and murderous villainy; and he has never been observed to smile’. His second-in-command is Jack the Schoolmaster, who takes notes on the machine’s operations and sometimes ‘makes a merriment of the business’, making wisecracks like ‘I’m here to see fair play’. Third is Sir Archy, foul-mouthed and low-minded, who wears old-fashioned breeches and is ‘always cracking obscene jokes and throwing out gibes and sarcasms’; some of the gang speak of him as a woman in drag, but Matthews is unable to verify this. The fourth and last man is known only as The Middle Man, who is said to be ‘a manufacturer of air looms, and possesses the first rate skill in working this instrument’.
The first of the women is Augusta, who seems to be the public face of the gang. She rarely works the machine, and is usually to be found liaising with other spies and ‘corresponding with other gangs at the west end of town’. Charming when she gets her way, when thwarted she ‘becomes exceed- ingly spiteful and malignant’. The second, Charlotte, seems to be French and, unlike Augusta, rarely leaves the cellar. She is half-naked, poorly fed and apparently often chained; Matthews believes she may well be ‘equally a prisoner with himself’. The final member, known only as the Glove Woman, is virtually part of the machine. She operates it with incredible skill and, despite regular teasing from the others, ‘she has never been known to speak’. Matthews suspects that she wears gloves because she has ‘the itch’ – scabies.
There is more, too. Even for the jaded, thrill-hungry reader, this is impossibly rich stuff, full of crystalline detail that begs else. Kiteing, for instance – the sense that messages from out- being forced into the brain – is a symptom any side are psychiatrist today would recognize immediately; ‘lengthening the brain’, where an important thought is ridiculed, would be equally familiar as the self-sabotaging chatter of internal voices. Such routinely observed symptoms now have their own shorthand classification of passivity phenomena’, and the Air Loom itself is the prototype for one of the now-standard delusional frameworks for such passivity: the influencing machine’.
This retrospective neatness must, as ever, be set against the slippery diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia today. If we consider the syndrome more broadly, it could be argued that Matthews is a less than perfect match. Schizophrenia in males is most commonly a condition with onset in the teens or early twenties. We don’t know Matthews’ exact age but, as a businessman with a young family, it’s likely to be somewhat over the top end of this scale. ‘Disordered thinking’, another crucial check-box, fits less well, since Matthews plainly presented as sane to casual examination. Again, the highly encapsulated nature of his delusions may save us here. Hearing voices, the first sign most psychiatrists look for in cases of suspected psychosis, would clearly apply, but its validity as a marker of schizophrenia is no longer universally accepted: recent research by Marcus Romme at Maastricht University, who has set up a support group called the Voice Hearing Network for non-schizophrenic sufferers, suggests that this phenomenon is not uncommon among the wider population. ‘Emotional flattening’ – a loss of affect, and disengagement from consensus reality – is hard to assess, partly because we have ample evidence that Matthews was frequently bright and chatty, and partly because emotional flattening is a trait anyone confined in an asylum for twelve years, mad or sane, may be excused.
The book leans toward the explanation that Matthews was simply insane, but I focused on the parts that give rise to doubts. Matthews worked at the highest levels of Government and was locked away by the same, so declaring “he’s insane” is a too simple explanation. It’s possible that the Air Loom Machine really existed. It’s also possible that it didn’t exist but that he was hypnotized into believing such a machine existed. Being an intelligence operative his a “high risk” profession for various mental and emotional issues due to the pressures and uncertainties of the profession.
Matthews “influencing machine” was the idea of mesmerism taken to a much grander scale. Traditionally, mesmerism involved the transfer of “rays” and “magnetic fluids” (energy) from one person to another. Franz Anton Mesmer created entire tubs with Iron rods where the group energy put people into states of ecstasy and generate miraculous healing. The very real “science of Mesmerism” was suppressed by modernist materialism and later devolved into mere Hypnotism. The process that Matthews describes, using semen, blood, etc. to exert influence on people is nothing new or uncommon. It’s called “black magic” or “sympathetic magic”. Neither this book nor other treatises on the Air Loom make any mention of that, which is odd. The Air Loom then, used a “black magic” version of Mesmerism to bring about the French Revolution. This only seems far-fetched or “mentally ill” to people who don’t know all that much.
5
Richard Shaver
In the late 1940s, Richard Shaver began publishing in Amazing Stories, the prime science-fiction magazine of the era. Shaver claimed that subterranean entities he called “The Dero” used ancient machines to manipulate people and world events on the surface of Earth. Shaver too claimed that his stories are true, but the publisher chose to embellish them and publish them as sci-fi.
Shaver claimed that the subterraneans use something called a “Telaug” device (notice the wordplay on Television and Augmentation). These are machines left behind by a more advanced civilization that perished in a worldwide flood. Some of the subterranean “Dero” (from “Abandero”, the Abandoned ones) are degenerate spawns of these people. They no longer know how to build the devices themselves but use those that are still intact.
Writes Richard Shaver:
“Centuries ago, when our Solar System was young (long before the present human races had appeared), these planets were colonized by a space-roving people – “The Elder Races”. Their science was so advanced that it puts ours to shame. They were able to extend their lives to unbelievable spans of thousands of years. Since it is an inescapable law of nature that nothing can remain stationiony, it must either grow or decay. So, their immense age was also accompanied by great size which continued to increase as long as they lived.
Synthetic food, clothing, and all other desired articles were made by fully automatic machiner called “Mechs”. This machinery was made so well that is required little, if any, attention, and it was practically indestructible from any source except wanton and willful intent to do so. A super television set could pick up three dimensional images in natural color and sound from any place without the need of a relay station, such as our sets must have, in spite of many miles of intervening rock. There was also a reverse form of this Mech, the “telesolidograph”, which could project sound and images to any point. In Norse legends, it was called “Odin’s Eye”.
For defense purposes, these Titans had several weapons. Most popular was the “Stun ray”, or beam. This would temporarily paralyze people without doing any permanent harm. This was a prominent weapon for these ancient man-Gods did not believe in the destruction of human life unless absolute necessity warranted such measures. Then, they resorted to such Mechs as “Blast beams” which caused explosions at distant points, and “Dis guns” and “Dis cannons” could destroy people and objects by disintegrating them into pure energy. Another favorite weapon was one that could act upon the brain and circulatory system to cause a “stroke” or “heart attack”.
In addition, they had wonderful medical Mechs which could restore life, heal broken bones or serious flesh wounds in seconds, and cure all ailments and diseases. One of the most cherished of their Mechs was the “Stim Ray” which played upon the emotions of a person by augmenting it a thousand fold, much in the same manner that music, movies, theaters and literature do in our world. The most important, and probably the most used, was the “Telaug” which picked up and amplified, augumented and transmitted telepathic thought radiations. This device was originally used as a means of communication between people, and it could be recorded on tapes for later scanning. It is from these tapes that Shaver claims to have gotten most of his information about the ancient Elder Races. The effect on a person who receives these tapes is like being in a motion picture theater with three dimensional natural color, and you immediately take on the personality of the originator of the “tape”. Not words, but “THOUGHTS”, are received in the brain. You become one enmeshed in the body of another being that is completely alien to your every fiber. These machines, today, are called “Dream Mechs”.
The technology, called “Mechs” by shaver got their power from the Earth’s magnetic force lines or cosmic energy and gravity. According to shaver, Gravity is not a mass attraction but “a flow which penetrates and passes through any object – the denser the object, the greater the resistance”. The “Elder Races” built large cities below Earth, allegedly to shield against the sun, which was harmful to them. They carved out caverns many miles under the earth so that today the “underworld” is much larger than the surface world and includes many levels. In ancient times, each underground race had a “surface colony” that was connected to the upper world by elevators. The two main races on and below Earth are “pythons” (reptilians) and humans. There has been a bitter strife between the two races since ancient days.
Endless books were published by and about Richard Shaver. I’ve read most of them as a teenager, but have still not formed any conclusion on their reality. But again, knowing what I know on ancient mythology and the research in my book “Levels of Heaven and Hell”, I wouldn’t discount “the Shaver Mystery”.
6
Hearing Voices
Most readers already know that “hearing voices that told me to do it” accounts for many murders and mass-shootings throughout History. Here’s a sampling of examples from the 1970s and 1980s, taken from Shavertron Magazine (an old, out-of-print magazine dedicated to exploring the “Shaver Mystery”). Based on these examples you will find many more from every era, up to this very day.
This small sampling of tens of thousands of similar cases should make it clear that there’s a little more going on than “it’s just the Imagination”. Modern psychiatry has not solved this problem because they misdiagnose it. A correct diagnosis solves a problem. In my view, the correct diagnosis is that these people are under some kind of foreign influence. This could be entities, demons, aliens, humans or even humans using influencing machines. If all these possibilities are dismissed, no long-term solution will be found.
7
Conclusion
To me it’s long been obvious that humanity is not “alone”, that there are other beings, some of them far advanced. Throughout History, these have exerted benevolent and malevolent influence on humans. Isn’t this the essence of every religious teaching? Of course it is, so what I’m saying here is nothing new, much less “mentally ill”. Instead, it could be considered “mentally ill” to discard any possibility of hidden influence as the products of imagination. The blanket dismissal by our “authorities” of anything outside the most limited scope of thinking should be grounds for skepticism. Despite reading countless books on the subject, I still can’t say for certain that “influencing machines” exist. I have never seen, experienced, operated or been victimized by one. This could be because they don’t work on me because I’ve worked myself up to a level of consciousness where I’m not easily influenced. Similar to how someone putting a voodoo spell on me doesn’t work. Nor am I suggestible to hypnosis. Just because I’m not aware of the machines, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. If hundreds of thousands of people have said they do exist, who am I to mock them? I’d therefore file this under “more research needed”. We also need more research into the nature of schizophrenia and mental illness. The science is not settled.