In 1973, Joseph C. Sharp, an experimental psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, set up a landmark experiment on the road to synthetic telepathy (the principal means by with the Central Intelligence Agency communicates with its prisoners in the ECCS). He aimed a microwave beam, modulated to resemble acoustic waves, at the back of his own head and was able to hear his own voice count off the numbers from one through ten. This experiment was never published but it is described in James C. Lins' book, "Microwave Auditory Effects and Applications" [Thomas, 1978]. The phenomena discovered by Sharp became widely known in scientific circles as the microwave hearing effect, but in the subject patent is referred to as the radio frequency or RF hearing effect.
About a year ago, Allen Barker, a prisoner in the ECCS, called our attention to United States Patent 6,587,729 "Apparatus for audibly communicating speech using the radio frequency hearing effect". He had tracked the inventors back to a laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base and, indeed, they have assigned the military applications of their invention to the Secretary of the Air Force.
Apparently, Sharp's original equipment produced only a seriously distorted resemblance to speech. If the listener did not know the content of the message, the audio signal was unintelligible. The purpose of this patent is to protect "a novel technique for the intelligible encoding of signals", particularly speech. The invention also overcomes the problem of the brain becoming heated from receiving extended messages, which the inventors cautiously describe as "undesirable".
The significance of this patent is that it is no longer possible to say that a person hearing voices is suffering from schizophrenia, and that it is no longer possible to say that a person hearing threatening voices is, ipso facto, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. And it is no longer possible for the U.S. Government to contend that it knows nothing at all about the feasibility of producing "voices in the head", which is the principal complaint of persons incarcerated in the ECCS.
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