LRAD - Long Range Accoustic Device

LRAD is basically a focused beam of sound. Originally, it was designed to emit a very loud sound. Anyone whose head was touched by this beam, heard a painfully loud sound. Anyone standing next to them heard nothing. But those hit by the beam promptly fled, or fell to the ground in pain. Permanent hearing loss is possible if the beam is kept on a person for several seconds, but given the effect the sound usually has on people (they move, quickly), it is unlikely to happen. LRAD works. It was recently used off Somalia, by a cruise ship, to repel pirates. Some U.S. Navy ships also carry it, but not just to repel attacking suicide bombers, or whatever. No, the system was sold to the navy for a much gentler application. LRAD can also broadcast speech for up to 300 meters. The navy planned to use LRAD to warn ships to get out of the way. This was needed in places like the crowded coastal waters of the northern Persian Gulf, where the navy patrols. Many small fishing and cargo boats ply these waters, and it's often hard to get the attention of the crews. With LRAD, you just aim it at a member of the crew, and have an interpreter "speak" to the sailor. It was noted that the guy on the receiving end was sometimes terrified, even after he realized it was that large American destroyer that was talking to him. This apparently gave the army guys some ideas, for there are now rumors in Iraq of a devilish American weapon that makes people believe they are hearing voices in their heads.

This made more sense when an American advertising firm recently used an LRAD unit to support a media campaign for a new TV show. LRAD was pointed at a sidewalk in Manhattan, below the billboard featuring the new show. LRAD broadcast a female voice providing teaser lines from the show. The effect was startling, and a bit scary for many who passed through the LRAD beam. It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using "spoken" (as opposed to "screeching") LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the "word of God" into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

Meanwhile, the microwave powered ADS, a non-lethal weapon that looks like a radar dish, languishes in politically correct limbo. The ADS "radar dish" projects a "burn ray" that is about four feet in diameter. It is effective in fog, smoke and rain. When pointed at people and turned on, it creates a burning sensation on the skin of its victims, causing them to want to leave the area, or at least greatly distracts them. The microwave weapon has a range of about 500 meters. ADS is carried on a hummer or Stryker, along with a machine-gun and other non-lethal weapons (like LRAD). The proposed ROE (Rules of Engagement) for ADS were that anyone who kept coming after getting hit with microwave was assumed to have evil intent, and could be killed. The microwave is believed to be particularly useful for terrorists who hide in crowds of women and children, using the human shields to get close enough to make an attack. This has been encountered in Somalia and Iraq.

Deployment of ADS has been delayed for years because of concerns about how non-lethal it really is. ADS has been fired, in tests, over 2,500 times. Many of these firings were against human volunteers, and the device performed as predicted, without any permanent damage. But generations of exposure to lurid science fiction descriptions of "death rays" has made the defense bureaucrats anxious over the negative public relations potential if something like ADS was actually used. From a publicity perspective, using more lethal "non-lethal-weapons" is preferable to deploying something safer, but that could be described, however incorrectly, as a "death ray." In any event, it appears that the cheaper, smaller (about 45 pounds), gentler and more flexible LRAD has taken ADS's place in the American arsenal. At least for now.

Hypersonic Sound. (HSS) The sound of things to come.

By Marshall Sella

Woody Norris has reinvented acoustics. Big news for the world of music. Bigger news for advertising and crime-fighting and combat.

No one ever notices what's going on at a Radio Shack. Outside a lonely branch of the electronics store, on a government-issue San Diego day in a strip mall where no one is noticing much of anything, a bluff man with thinning, ginger hair and preternaturally white teeth is standing on the pavement, slowly waving a square metal plate toward people strolling in the distance. "Watch that lady over there," he says, unable to conceal his boyish pride for the gadget in his giant hand. "This is really cool."

Woody Norris aims the silvery plate at his quarry. A burly brunette 200 feet away stops dead in her tracks and peers around, befuddled. She has walked straight into the noise of a Brazilian rain forest -- then out again. Even in her shopping reverie, here among the haircutters and storefront tax-preparers and dubious Middle Eastern bistros, her senses inform her that she has just stepped through a discrete column of sound, a sharply demarcated beam of unexpected sound. "Look at that," Norris mutters, chuckling as the lady turns around. "She doesn't know what hit her."

Norris is demonstrating something called HyperSonic Sound (HSS). The aluminum plate is connected to a CD player and an odd amplifier -- actually, a very odd and very new amplifier -- that directs sound much as a laser beam directs light. Over the past few years, mainly in secret, he has shown the device to more than 300 major companies, and it has slackened a lot of jaws. In December, the editors of Popular Science magazine bestowed upon HSS its grand prize for new inventions of 2002, choosing it over the ferociously hyped Segway scooter. It is no exaggeration to say that HSS represents the first revolution in acoustics since the loudspeaker was invented 78 years ago -- and perhaps only the second since pilgrims used "whispering tubes" to convey their dour messages.

As Norris continues to baffle shoppers by sniping at them with the noises he has on this CD (ice cubes clanking into a glass, a Handel concerto, the plash of a waterfall), some are spooked, and some are drawn in. Two teenage girls drift over from 100 feet away and ask, in bizarre Diane Arbus-type unison, "What is that?"

Norris responds with this affable mantra -- "In'nat cool?" -- before going into a bit of simplified detail; how the sound waves are actually made audible not at the surface of the metal plate but at the listener's ears. He doesn't bother to torment the girls with the scientific gymnastics of how data are being converted to ultrasound then back again to human-accessible frequencies along a confined column of air. "See, the way your brain perceives it, the sound is being created right here," Norris explains to the Arbus girls, lifting a palm to the side of his head. "That's why it's so clear. Feels like it's inside your skull, doesn't it?"

In the years Norris has demonstrated HSS, he says, that's been the universal reaction: the sound is inside my head. So that's the way he has started to describe it.

Just to check the distances, I pace out a hundred yards and see if the thing is really working. (I've tried this other times -- in a posh hotel in Manhattan, in another parking lot in San Diego -- but HSS is so often suspected of being a parlor trick that it always seems to bear checking. Norris pelts me with the Handel and, to illustrate the directionality of the beam, subtly turns the plate side to side. And the sound is inside my head, roving between my ears in accord with each of Norris's turns.

The applications of directional sound go quite a bit beyond messing with people at strip malls, important as this work may be. Norris is enthusiastic about all of the possibilities he can propose and the ones he can't. Imagine, he says, walking by a soda machine (say, one of the five million in Japan that will soon employ HSS), triggering a proximity detector, then hearing what you alone hear -- the plink of ice cubes and the invocation, "Wouldn't a Coke taste great right about now?" Or riding in the family car, as the kids blast Eminem in the back seat while you and the wife play Tony Bennett up front. Or living in a city where ambulance sirens don't wake the entire neighborhood at 4 a.m. Or hearing different and extremely targeted messages in every single aisle of a grocery store -- for instance, near the fresh produce, "Hey, it's the heart of kiwi season!"

No observer would expect a technological revolution -- any revolution -- from Elwood G. Norris. At 64, he has the demeanor of nothing so much as  a high school football coach. He lacks every single cliché of how inventors are supposed to act and look: the eccentricities of hairstyle, attire and vocabulary. He dresses as if he lives a life of Saturdays, perpetually in khakis and polo shirts. He is utterly normal -- even peculiarly normal.

Norris's office might easily be that of an assistant sales manager for something. Insurance, maybe, or drill fittings. His company, American Technology Corporation, is painstakingly nondescript, tucked away on the same unadorned and unadorable industrial-ghetto roundabout as Teradyne and Intel. Set randomly among the offices and cubicles of his 30 employees, Norris's own room is tiny and generic to a fault. There is a map of the world's ocean floors, also a plant of some kind. "Yep, it is small," he says, staring around him as if taken by surprise. "We're puttin' all our cash into production of HSS. That's the plan."

Norris wasn't the first to think of focusing sound waves. Far from it. Since the advent of the cone-shaped megaphone, every major acoustics company has traveled similar terrain. "If I'd known how many people had tried to invent this thing, and how smart those people were, I never would have touched it," he says. "Once we designed our own emitter -- which was not an obvious choice -- we patented every nut and bolt." Today, A.T.C. has 14 patents in the U.S. and hundreds pending worldwide. The company has spent millions on patents alone.

In the last year, Norris has not spent his time loitering at Radio Shacks and hoping for the best. A sampling of the companies that are in active talks with A.T.C. includes Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Dolby Laboratories, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi, major TV networks and film studios, cell phone makers and museums all over the world, to say nothing of the world's big-ticket speaker manufacturers. The U.S.S. Carl Vinson and the U.S.S. Winston S. Churchill are now equipped with A.T.C. speakers, and the Navy has expressed interest in outfitting every carrier in the fleet. "The L.A.P.D. wants to try it on high-crime alleys," Norris says. "The Army might use HSS for decoy troop movements. And Disney is nuts about it!" Even Florida Power and Light has been given a taste. It seems endangered canaries have been sparking themselves to death on power lines and could do with some warning.

HyperSonic Sound, on its face, has some very alluring features for major companies. With HSS, there is no piston-like action that moves the air and causes the distortions heard from conventional speakers; there are virtually no moving parts at all, so the device generates next to no heat. All of which actually makes HSS equipment cheaper. More to the point, an HSS transmission can travel 450 feet -- at practically the same volume all along its path. Translated: at a concert, there's no need to melt the eyebrows of people sitting in the front rows. They'd hear the music at the same level as those lounging a football field away. "A multibillion-dollar company we're dealing with wants one that'll carry for a mile," Norris says. "And that is easily possible."

In the past months, Norris and his staff have made a further, key improvement to HSS -- instead of sending out a column of sound, they can now project a single sphere of it, self-contained, like a bubble.

This is all potentially very bad news for conventional speaker companies, which Norris insists are essentially box merchants. That is, given the fact that there are only a handful of "driver" manufacturers in the world, it's often merely design that distinguishes high-end from low-end audio speakers. It's never the C.E.O.'s of major acoustics firms who go pale when they see demonstrations of HSS; it's the engineers, a fact that delights Norris no end. "Those companies make slide rules and are being offered calculators," he says. "There's a smugness that goes with being a huge company. The big fish say, 'If it's so great, why didn't we invent it?' But how'd you like to be makin' buggy whips when cars came along?"

High technology, of course, is a slow-turning ship, and some trade heavyweights believe that HSS, while interesting, has real limits. Floyd Toole, a vice president of acoustical engineering at Harman International -- the $1.8 billion corporation that owns JBL and Infinity -- is skeptical. "HyperSonic Sound is not going to revolutionize the world, not going to replace the loudspeakers that we've all grown to love," Toole says. "I was once quoted, incompletely, as saying HSS is 'a great party trick' -- and it still is! Actually, it's also a very useful device. In basic communication, its applications are limited only by the imagination. Though, the last time I saw it, three months ago, it still had a lot of distortion. It had no low range. You wouldn't want to enjoy music using HSS, but it can really hit a target. Still, we're not threatened. Nor is Woody trying to take our domain."

Woody is not. His strategy is to avoid confronting major speaker firms -- for the time being. Better to start small, to look for places that currently don't have much to do with the acoustics trade. Museums, soda machines, produce aisles. "We're gonna go after the low-hanging fruit, places where you don't yet find sound, so HSS will not be regarded as  a threat," he says, before showing some of the flick-knife steel that had to be buried in there somewhere. "And when we get strong, that's when we hit with a vengeance. We'll license with some Goliath of the industry -- a Sony or a Philips. Know how many new speakers were installed in 2002, from buses to boomboxes? Fifteen billion units. In'nat cool?"

Not surprisingly, people who've heard of HSS have responded variously. On any given day, Norris might receive 17 e-mail messages from a company in Hong Kong begging to manufacture HSS -- and several from civilians who think he's either a genius or a psychopath. One man recently wrote to insist that Norris "be jailed" if he fields this product (curiously, sending this demand to Norris). And a woman wants to secretly install HSS in her lover's car or golf bag so that she may continually transit a message deep into his head: Marry Donna. ... Marry Donna.

Let some rave and others rage. It's all cool. Woody Norris is at his ease. He made his fortune 35 years ago and is now wealthy beyond his own ability to measure. His first invention was  a medical product, simply because he was approached by a few friends who wanted to form a company but had nothing to sell -- and the man with the most money to invest was a doctor. So Norris went and bought a flashlight at Radio Shack (evidently his spiritual home), then picked up a piezoelectric crystal and fine-tuned his knowledge of the Doppler effect until he puzzled out a way to detect clots in blood vessels. This entire process took a Friday night and most of a Saturday. "It was called 'Transcutaneous Doppler,'" he recalls wistfully -- before adding, as a throwaway, "Eventually, it evolved into the sonogram."

There were a score of other inventions. Some panned out; some didn't. American Technology Corporation came into being in 1980 to nurture a long-play tape recorder, one that could fit 20 hours of sound on a regular cassette. Of course, CD technology put an end to all that. Shame, too, Norris says. They'd worked with drama students and everything -- had the whole New Testament recorded on one tape.

Despite his claim that he is "a fundamentally lazy man," Norris was always tinkering. There was his innovation of the digital recorder in 1994 (another Popular Science "Best of" pick); the world's tiniest FM radio, weighing less than one-quarter of an ounce; a tracking device for wayward toddlers. These days, Norris's new love is the AirScooter, a personal helicopter that takes no more than an afternoon to master. It's slow; smooth and lacks the complexities of an actual copter. And, as it has been whittled down to meet the government's "ultralight" standard -- weighing less than 254 pounds -- you need not be licensed to fly it.

Often, Norris says, inventions are the result of some left-field theory he blurts out before he has time to think it through. Scientists at NASA once got wind of an offhand remark he had made about  wireless receivers and flew him to Texas; they'd been having trouble with boom microphones slipping around inside space helmets. "Suddenly I hear these words coming out of my mouth," Norris recalls: "'Well, I can give you a one-piece system so you won't need a boom mike at all. The sound can come through the bones in your head!' And the NASA guys were like, 'Yeah. Right.'" Thirty days later, Norris had  a prototype, which the space agency grabbed with both hands. Norris translated the concept into an "all-in-your-ear headset" that came to be called Jabra.

"I did that technology in a weekend on my Mac at home!" he says, roaring like a con man. "And it's still selling. Some New Yorkers bought it for a couple million bucks -- and eventually it sold for $75 million to, I don't know, some Dutch company." Norris is often hazy on whatever happened to his original concepts, as he abandons them once they near the manufacturing stage. He just loses interest. With some (the digital recorder, for example), he's not even exactly sure if he's still receiving royalties. Presumably, his money managers know.

Of all Norris's inventions to date, though, it's HSS that could prove the most pervasive. The specter of a world shattered into billions of potential advertising spheres -- of inescapable, intrusive voices, as in a less-rainy version of "Blade Runner" -- has a way of concerning people.
To Norris's way of thinking, however, a shop with 100 confined spheres of sound is preferable to one where 12 speakers are blaring over each other. Of course, you might argue that Norris needs to believe that. After all, A.T.C. has seven years and over $40 million in this project. But that isn't exactly so. Besides being wealthy to the point where he's sheepish about it, Norris has already moved on to other inventions, a few books and even a sci-fi screenplay in which, he says, both Fox and Sony have shown real interest.

For the moment, though, HSS is unfinished business. As night must follow day, there are Defense Department applications. Norris and A.T.C. have been busy honing something called High Intensity Directed Acoustics (HIDA, in house jargon). It is directional sound -- an offshoot of HSS -- but one that never, ever transmits Handel or waterfall sounds. Although the technology thus far has been routinely referred to as a "nonlethal weapon," the Pentagon now prefers to stress the friendlier-sounding "hailing intruders" function.

In reality, HIDA is both warning and weapon. If used from a battleship, it can ward off stray crafts at 500 yards with a pinpointed verbal warning. Should the offending vessel continue to within 200 yards, the stern warnings are replaced by 120-decibel sounds that are as physically disabling as shrapnel. Certain noises, projected at the right pitch, can incapacitate even a stone-deaf terrorist; the bones in your head are brutalized by a tone's full effect whether you're clutching the sides of your skull in agony or not. "Besides," Norris says, laughing darkly, "grabbing your ears is as good as a pair of handcuffs."

If the U.S.S. Cole had been equipped with a HIDA system, the attack of October 2000 could never have succeeded. Most of the sounds under military consideration are classified, but some are approved for public consumption. One truly harrowing noise is that of a baby crying, played backward, and combined with another tone. As usual, Woody Norris is pleased to demonstrate. Woody Norris is pleased about everything.

Nimbly holding a big black plate, Norris stands with me in an A.T.C. sound chamber. Since he's poised behind the weapon, he will hear no sound once it's powered up: not a peep. "HIDA can instantaneously cause loss of equilibrium, vomiting, migraines -- really, we can pretty much pick our ailment," he says brightly. "We've delivered a couple dozen units so far, but will have a lot more out by June. They're talking millions!" (Last month, A.T.C. cut a five-year, multimillion-dollar licensing agreement with General Dynamics, one of the giants of the military-industrial complex.)

Norris prods his assistant to locate the baby noise on a laptop, then aims the device at me. At first, the noise is dreadful -- just primally wrong -- but not unbearable. I repeatedly tell Norris to crank it up (trying to approximate battle-strength volume, without the nausea), until the noise isn't so much a noise as an assault on my nervous system. I nearly fall down and, for some reason, my eyes hurt. When I bravely ask how high they'd turned the dial, Norris laughs uproariously. "That was nothing!" he bellows. "That was about 1 percent of what an enemy would get. One percent!" Two hours later, I can still feel the ache in the back of my head.

Norris grew up in Cumberland, Md., living in what may justly be called abject poverty. Until he was out of high school, indoor plumbing was not a feature of his home life. His mother was a devout Mormon who had a succession of husbands, none of whom was much of a force in the boy Norris's life. "I was embarrassed by some of my relatives," he says, making a rare break in eye contact. "All they ever did was drink. I had a terrible fear of not being normal -- of not seeming normal. So I went to the library and read every psychology book I could find. Anything about how normal people behave."

Even his identity seemed constantly in flux. Until he was 17, his surname was Harden. For reasons he remains hazy about, his mother deemed it necessary to haul the boy down to the courthouse and legally change his name at that rather advanced age. Discussing it, Norris's jaunty tone never falters, but a deadness in his eyes transmits -- quite directionally -- the blunt truth that these were dark times for him, rooms of his memory he doesn't care to revisit. His new life is brighter and built to his liking.

Despite his lumbering, sports-fan exterior, there were no sports in Woody's kidhood. His passion was visiting local radio-repair shops and talking them out of their scraps. "I must've ripped apart 20 or 30 radios," he says. "There were broken TV's in our chicken coop." He read everything about electronics he could lay two hands on. At an age where boys are immersed in Salinger or Henry Miller, young Woody was mesmerized by "Understanding Radio."

Through all those desperate attempts at normality, Norris remained a staunch Mormon. After serving in the Air Force, he spent 16 years living in Salt Lake City and achieved the level of high priest. He wore the "sacred undergarments," married his first wife in the Temple, the works. But by the early 90's, having previously written a book on Mormonism, he had lost his faith and now has a 1,000-page manuscript stashed away that, he says, takes strong issue with the Book of Mormon. Still, debunking Joseph Smith will have to wait. There are screenplays to polish. There are impossible machines to conceive, then abandon.

While Norris's work quarters are cramped and modest, his house is quite the other thing. To thrust some dime-store psychology upon him, Elwood Norris has sought to expunge the privations of his youth with garishly expressed prosperity.

The Norris estate is Mediterranean style, on what seems the highest hill near San Diego, surrounded by what appear to be a few counties of rolling coastal sage. Outside the place, overlooking its 44 acres, there's a vanishing-edge pool, a guest house, garage space for the family's three Lexus cars (with a slot to spare). Freshly antiqued Roman columns and statues of stallions blot out shards of the mountain view. Sculptured cherubs' faces, affixed to the house here and there, turn out to be modeled after Norris's youngest daughter, Tiffany, whereabouts unknown -- though, since the edifice is 20,000 square feet, no one would be the wiser if she were throwing a huge party in there somewhere.

Not a surface of the mansions' interior is deprived of gilt or silk or velvet; you'd swear it. There is a mind-bendingly well-stocked screening room, a pistol range, miniature models of towns assembled in rooms that seem designed specifically to showcase miniature models of towns. Only the wine cellar is underwhelming. Norris, the lapsed Mormon who hadn't a sip of alcohol or caffeine until the age of 50, is new to the stuff. Seven bottles of Something French are huddled together under a table at the back of the room, as if hiding in hostile territory.

Norris claims he wanted the house to be twice its size, but his wife put that idea to rest with all speed. Though he recognizes opulence when he sees it, much of the glitter still seems foreign to him. He knows that there are 335 miles of wiring in the place -- but can only approximate the number of bathrooms. He is sure there are six or seven bedrooms. I'll find out and get those numbers to you tomorrow," he says distractedly, as if these are business stats. "I'm better on other numbers. There are 60 surveillance cameras inside, 15 on the property. And 130 motion detectors. I can check out the whole place from any computer terminal in the world."

Out in a garage, Norris has stashed the prototype of his AirScooter; even this comparatively clunky incarnation acts on him like a tonic. Laying a loving hand on the thing, he marvels at the breakthrough of giving it two oppositely directed blades to counter the gyroscopic effect; a flexible pivot between the blades and the seat keeps the pilot ever-steady. "The fact that there are two blades and that it doesn't need a tail rotor," he says, "That was so not intuitive. There's a million bucks in this."

I ask the inescapable question: if anyone can buy and fly one of these helicopters, isn't there the possibility of, well, grim and horrible chaos?

"Oh, not at all," he says. "Look. There are hundreds of thousands of hang gliders in this country. Same with motorcycles. And you rarely even see one of 'em!"

The AirScooter's inception was typical of Norris's restless habit of simply walking away once an invention seems to have taken final shape. At A.T.C., once HyperSonic Sound was near completion, he started musing about the science of aviation. That was a frontier he'd never crossed, despite the hang-gliding scar that is lost in his well-creased forehead.

So he worked backward, as usual. "It went like this: I've always wanted to fly, but I don't like going to the airport," he says, ticking off his logic, one pink finger at a time. "I don't want to have to get a license. And I really don't want to go 100 m.p.h. So that set out the parameters right there. I consulted with Boeing engineers briefly, then raised $2 million in 20 minutes. My friends wanted in."

Though HSS and the minicopter are making headway -- the full-size AirScooter will be available to the public by year's end, with a starting price of about $50,000 -- Norris is deeply involved in two new projects. He refused to discuss these in any detail. His lab, in a rickety building near his house, smells of stingingly powerful glue and is cluttered with disparate apparatus; a gas chromatograph, transistor oscilloscopes, a one-million-Gauss magnet strong enough to tear fabric and human flesh alike. I ask if there's anything here that will betray Secret Things he's working on, but Norris has already disinfected the place of clues.

One project, he acknowledges, involves hydrogen and fuel cells. Of course, a man with secrets divulges first what he values least. It's Norris's way that, the more open he is with his first statement, the more he will clamp shut with his next. This is no exception.

The second project, he says, would make the rest of his career pale by comparison -- and he claims he has had early success. In all of this work, Norris has employed the tradecraft of his chosen profession to keep everything close to the vest. He buys his equipment at several machine shops so that no one can get an inkling of what he's doing. He hires separate scientists at separate universities to perform separate experiments -- and pays computer experts to train him to do the final, what he calls "fourth-level," stage of analysis. "I need to work that way," he says. "It's like when two guys discover gold together. One kills the other."

When I press him for a single word that would offer at least a vague idea of the Big Invention's category, he squints for a full minute and, seemingly in pain, whispers one out: matter. Then he searches my face for signs of recognition, half terrified that I'll guess what the technology is and half hoping I will. He is dying to say. It's his holy grail.

No one will ever know what makes inventors capable of staring at that which does not yet exist. Perhaps some form of hardship, in one's early years, is a factor. Edison went practically deaf as a boy; Alexander Graham Bell lost both his brothers to tuberculosis and was so sickly that his family moved to Canada in the hope of bracing him up. Then again, Benjamin Franklin and the Wright Brothers sauntered through childhood without a scratch. Woody Norris, in his formative years, was by no means unhealthy, but poverty left indelible marks. Maybe, in his case, that was a catalyst. Maybe mechanical figments were the cure when reality wasn't enough.

Lunch seems to offer Norris at his most philosophical. There's nothing like potato soup to remind you of the big picture. "I'm very simple," he says, quite seriously. "I have to be. I'm not very smart. I start broad, then go deep where I'm interested."

Focus is Norris's real meat and drink -- but he will always go broad before going deep. He never finished college. He didn't want some university to foist a narrow course upon him. Instead, he veered all over the map, from physics to the philosophy of religion. "I'm not even an engineer," he says, though he can only mean this in the most technical terms. "I don't have a college degree; I hire guys with college degrees."

Perhaps because ignorance has served him well (of the history of acoustics research, for example), he is protective of his limitations. He knows better than to swim in all the oceans. "These guys, like Hawking, they look too far away," he says. "They make it too complicated. Eleven dimensions, whatever. The answer is in front of your nose."

Suddenly, it strikes Woody Norris that he has been speaking to a clear plastic straw for the past several seconds: pondering it, turning it around in his hands and in his head. "This is so cool," he says, almost in awe. "It's so cheap, so elegant. People throw these away! Someday this thing is gonna lead to a real invention."

SIDEBAR:

How HSS Works

At the source, in the circuitry of the emitter, audio frequencies are "stirred together," as Norris puts it, with ultrasonic frequencies and then sent out as a "composite frequency" that is inaudible to the human ear. The sound "hitches a ride on the ultrasonic frequency," Norris says, which travels in a laserlike beam in whatever direction it is pointed. "And here's the beauty part," he says. "The air molecules themselves convert this ultrasonic frequency back down to a frequency that can be heard." So unlike sound that travels on radio waves and has to be converted by your stereo's receiver, you simply need to be standing in the path of an HSS beam in order to hear the sound.

The Voice of God Weapon Returns

By Sharon Weinberger

The Voice of God weapon — a device that projects voices into your head to make you think God is speaking to you — is the military’s equivalent of an urban myth.  Meaning, it’s mentioned periodically at defense workshops (ironically, I first heard about it at the same defense conference where I first met Noah), and typically someone whispers about it actually being used. Now Steven Corman, writing at the COMOPS journal, describes his own encounter with this urban myth:

At a government workshop some time ago I head someone describe a new tool that was described as the “voice of Allah.” This was said to be a device that would operate at a distance and would deliver a message that only a single person could hear. The story was that it was tested in a conflict situation in Iraq and pointed at one insurgent in a group, who whipped around looking in all directions, and began a heated conversation with his compatriots, who did not hear the message. At the time I greeted this story with some skepticism.

Is there any basis to this technology? Well, Holosonic Research Labs and American Technology Corporation both have versions of directed sound, which can allow a single person to hear a message that others around don’t hear. DARPA appears to be working on its own sonic projector. Intriguingly, Strategy Page reports that troops are using the Long Range Acoustic Device as a modified Voice of God weapon:

It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using "spoken" (as opposed to "screeching") LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the "word of God" into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

And as Corman also notes, CNET recently wrote about an advertisement in New York for A&E’s TV show Paranormal State, which uses some of this technology. Beyond directed sound, it’s long been known that microwaves at certain frequencies can produce an auditory effect that sounds like it’s coming from within someone’s head (and there’s the nagging question of classified microwave work at Brooks Air Force Base, that the Air Force stubbornly refuses to talk about).

That brings us back to the Voice of God/Allah Weapon. Is it real or bogus? In one version — related to me by another defense reporter — it’s not just Allah’s voice — but an entire holographic image projected above (um, who decides what Allah looks like?).

Does it exist? I’m not sure, but it’s funny that when you hear it brought up at defense conferences, no one ever asks the obvious question: does anybody think this thing will actually convince people God is speaking to them? I’m thinking, not.

Nonlethal Weapons Could Target Brain, Mimic Schizophrenia

By Sharon Weinberger

Of all the crazy, bizarre less-lethal weapons that have been proposed, the use of microwaves to target the human mind remains the most disturbing. The question has always been: is this anything more than urban myth? We may not have the final answer to this question, but a newly declassified Pentagon report, Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons , obtained by a private citizen under the Freedom of Information Act, provides some fascinating tidbits on a variety of exotic weapons ideas.

Among those discussed are weapons that could disrupt the brain, as well as my longtime obsession, the "Voice of God" device, which creates voices in people’s heads. As the report notes, "Application of the microwave hearing technology could facilitate a private message transmission. It may be useful to provide a disruptive condition to a person not aware of the technology. Not only might it be disruptive to the sense of hearing, it could be psychologically devastating if one suddenly heard ‘voices within one’s head.’"

Voices in your head disturbing? Heck, yeah, considering it’s something most people associate with schizophrenia. The age-old question is whether such a weapon is possible. According to the report, it’s not only possible, it’s already been demonstrated in crude form:

Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent on the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except hat it could only be heard within a person’s head. In one experiment, communication of the words from one to ten using "speech modulated" microwave energy was successfully demonstrated. Microphones next to the person experiencing the voice could not pick up the sound. Additional development of this would open up a wide range of possibilities.
….
This technology requires no extrapolation to estimate its usefulness. Microwave energy can be applied at a distance, and the appropriate technology can be adapted from existing radar units. Aiming devices likewise are available but for special circumstances which require extreme specificity, there may be a need for additional development. Extreme directional specificity would be required to transmit a message to a single hostage surrounded by his captors. Signals can be transmitted long distances (hundreds of meters) using current technology. Longer distances and more sophisticated signal types will require more bulky equipment, but it seems possible to transmit some of the signals at closer ranges using man-portable equipment.

If voices in your head aren’t disturbing enough, the report also goes on to theorize about a microwave weapon that could use electromagnetic pulses to disrupt the brain’s functioning. It would work through "a rhythmic-activity synchronization of brain neurons that disrupts normal cortical control of the corticospinal and corticobulbar pathways that disrupts normal functioning of the spinal motor neurons which control muscle and body movements."
This concept is still very theoretical, the report notes:

Application of electromagnetic pulses is also a conceptual nonlethal technology that uses electromagnetic energy to induce neural synchrony and disruption of voluntary muscle control. The effectiveness of this concept has not been demonstrated. However, from past work in evaluating the potential for electromagnetic pulse generator to affect humans, it is estimated that sufficiently strong internal fields can be generated within the brain to trigger neurons.

Sadly, there’s little context for the report, which is dated 1998, and no specific references to current programs or research, if any, about such weapons.

Mind Games

Mind Games

Truth. KISS (keep it simple stupid)

Just a thought.

Discount tinfoil hats or shielding (doesn't work), gang-stalking* and direct energy weapons** that cause physical torture. 

Focus, instead, on transmitting beta waves capable of reproducing voices and physical pain, etc. in a human subject. 

It's all about alpha and beta waves. 

Think of it this way. Hook your mind up to an EEG. Prick your toe with a needle, record the corresponding beta waves, then playback the digital waves into a person's head and they will feel as if their toe was just pricked with a needle with no needle involved, whatsoever. The same could be said of voices inside your head. Make sense? 

They're trying to convince you of everything but the truth. And the truth is very, very simple.

                                                                                                                        Anjin Hawke 

* It's simply an induced paranoia state brought on by masters of mind manipulation. They are very good at convincing you that other people are involved, like friends, coworkers or passersby. Why would they gang-stalk you in the first place? 
** You cannot use a direct energy weapon on a single person. They're designed to impact crowds, not individuals surrounded by other people.  

 * * *

New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy (most aren't), but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.

Washington Post
By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page W22

If Harlan Girard is crazy, he doesn't act the part. He is standing just where he said he would be, below the Philadelphia train station's World War II memorial – a soaring statue of a winged angel embracing a fallen combatant, as if lifting him to heaven. Girard is wearing pressed khaki pants, expensive-looking leather loafers and a crisp blue button-down. He looks like a local businessman dressed for a casual Friday – a local businessman with a wickedly dark sense of humor, which had become apparent when he said to look for him beneath "the angel sodomizing a dead soldier." At 70, he appears robust and healthy – not the slightest bit disheveled or unusual-looking. He is also carrying a bag.

Girard's description of himself is matter-of-fact, until he explains what's in the bag: documents he believes prove that the government is attempting to control his mind. He carries that black, weathered bag everywhere he goes. "Every time I go out, I'm prepared to come home and find everything is stolen," he says.

The bag aside, Girard appears intelligent and coherent. At a table in front of Dunkin' Donuts inside the train station, Girard opens the bag and pulls out a thick stack of documents, carefully labeled and sorted with yellow sticky notes bearing neat block print. The documents are an authentic-looking mix of news stories, articles culled from military journals and even some declassified national security documents that do seem to show that the U.S. government has attempted to develop weapons that send voices into people's heads.

"It's undeniable that the technology exists," Girard says, "but if you go to the police and say, 'I'm hearing voices,' they're going to lock you up for psychiatric evaluation."

The thing that's missing from his bag – the lack of which makes it hard to prove he isn't crazy – is even a single document that would buttress the implausible notion that the government is currently targeting a large group of American citizens with mind-control technology. The only direct evidence for that, Girard admits, lies with alleged victims such as himself.

And of those, there are many.

It's 9:01 P.M. when the first person speaks during the Saturday conference call.

Unsure whether anyone else is on the line yet, the female caller throws out the first question: "You got gang stalking or V2K?" she asks no one in particular.

There's a short, uncomfortable pause.

"V2K, really bad. 24-7," a man replies.

"Gang stalking," another woman says.

"Oh, yeah, join the club," yet another man replies.

The members of this confessional "club" are not your usual victims. This isn't a group for alcoholics, drug addicts or survivors of childhood abuse; the people connecting on the call are self-described victims of mind control – people who believe they have been targeted by a secret government program that tracks them around the clock, using technology to probe and control their minds.

The callers frequently refer to themselves as TIs, which is short for Targeted Individuals, and talk about V2K – the official military abbreviation stands for "voice to skull" and denotes weapons that beam voices or sounds into the head. In their esoteric lexicon, "gang stalking" refers to the belief that they are being followed and harassed: by neighbors, strangers or colleagues who are agents for the government.

A few more "hellos" are exchanged, interrupted by beeps signaling late arrivals: Bill from Columbus, Barbara from Philadelphia, Jim from California and a dozen or so others.

Derrick Robinson, the conference call moderator, calls order.

"It's five after 9," says Robinson, with the sweetly reasonable intonation of a late-night radio host. "Maybe we should go ahead and start."

The idea of a group of people convinced they are targeted by weapons that can invade their minds has become a cultural joke, shorthanded by the image of solitary lunatics wearing tinfoil hats to deflect invisible mind beams. "Tinfoil hat," says Wikipedia, has become "a popular stereotype and term of derision; the phrase serves as a byword for paranoia and is associated with conspiracy theorists."

In 2005, a group of MIT students conducted a formal study using aluminum foil and radio signals. Their surprising finding: Tinfoil hats may actually amplify radio frequency signals. Of course, the tech students meant the study as a joke.

But during the Saturday conference call, the subject of aluminum foil is deadly serious. The MIT study had prompted renewed debate; while a few TIs realized it was a joke at their expense, some saw the findings as an explanation for why tinfoil didn't seem to stop the voices. Others vouched for the material.

"Tinfoil helps tremendously," reports one conference call participant, who describes wrapping it around her body underneath her clothing.

"Where do you put the tinfoil?" a man asks.

"Anywhere, everywhere," she replies. "I even put it in a hat."

A TI in an online mind-control forum recommends a Web site called "Block EMF" (as in electromagnetic frequencies), which advertises a full line of clothing, including aluminum-lined boxer shorts described as a "sheer, comfortable undergarment you can wear over your regular one to shield yourself from power lines and computer electric fields, and microwave, radar, and TV radiation." Similarly, a tinfoil hat disguised as a regular baseball cap is "smart and subtle."

For all the scorn, the ranks of victims – or people who believe they are victims – are speaking up. In the course of the evening, there are as many as 40 clicks from people joining the call, and much larger numbers participate in the online forum, which has 143 members. A note there mentioning interest from a journalist prompted more than 200 e-mail responses.

Until recently, people who believe the government is beaming voices into their heads would have added social isolation to their catalogue of woes. But now, many have discovered hundreds, possibly thousands, of others just like them all over the world. Web sites dedicated to electronic harassment and gang stalking have popped up in India, China, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Russia and elsewhere. Victims have begun to host support meetings in major cities, including Washington. Favorite topics at the meetings include lessons on how to build shields (the proverbial tinfoil hats), media and PR training, and possible legal strategies for outlawing mind control.

The biggest hurdle for TIs is getting people to take their concerns seriously. A proposal made in 2001 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) to ban "psychotronic weapons" (another common term for mind-control technology) was hailed by TIs as a great step forward. But the bill was widely derided by bloggers and columnists and quickly dropped.

Doug Gordon, Kucinich's spokesman, would not discuss mind control other than to say the proposal was part of broader legislation outlawing weapons in space. The bill was later reintroduced, minus the mind control. "It was not the concentration of the legislation, which is why it was tightened up and redrafted," was all Gordon would say.

Unable to garner much support from their elected representatives, TIs have started their own PR campaign. And so, last spring, the Saturday conference calls centered on plans to hold a rally in Washington. A 2005 attempt at a rally drew a few dozen people and was ultimately rained out; the TIs were determined to make another go of it. Conversations focused around designing T-shirts, setting up congressional appointments, fundraising, creating a new Web site and formalizing a slogan. After some debate over whether to focus on gang stalking or mind control, the group came up with a compromise slogan that covered both: "Freedom From Covert Surveillance and Electronic Harassment."

Conference call moderator Robinson, who says his gang stalking began when he worked at the National Security Agency in the 1980s, offers his assessment of the group's prospects: Maybe this rally wouldn't produce much press, but it's a first step. "I see this as a movement," he says. "We're picking up people all the time."

Harlan Girard says his problems began in 1983, while he was a real estate developer in Los Angeles. The harassment was subtle at first: One day a woman pulled up in a car, wagged her finger at him, then sped away; he saw people running underneath his window at night; he noticed some of his neighbors seemed to be watching him; he heard someone moving in the crawl space under his apartment at night.

Girard sought advice from this then-girlfriend, a practicing psychologist, whom he declines to identify. He says she told him, "Nobody can become psychotic in their late 40s." She said he didn't seem to manifest other symptoms of psychotic behavior – he dressed well, paid his bills – and, besides his claims of surveillance, which sounded paranoid, he behaved normally. "People who are psychotic are socially isolated," he recalls her saying.

After a few months, Girard says, the harassment abruptly stopped. But the respite didn't last. In 1984, appropriately enough, things got seriously weird. He'd left his real estate career to return to school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was studying for a master's degree in landscape architecture. He harbored dreams of designing parks and public spaces. Then, he says, he began to hear voices. Girard could distinguish several different male voices, which came complete with a mental image of how the voices were being generated: from a recording studio, with "four slops sitting around a card table drinking beer," he says.

The voices were crass but also strangely courteous, addressing him as "Mr. Girard."

They taunted him. They asked him if he thought he was normal; they suggested he was going crazy. They insulted his classmates: When an overweight student showed up for a field trip in a white raincoat, they said, "Hey, Mr. Girard, doesn't she look like a refrigerator?"

Six months after the voices began, they had another question for him: "Mr. Girard, Mr. Girard. Why aren't you dead yet?" At first, he recalls, the voices would speak just two or three times a day, but it escalated into a near-constant cacophony, often accompanied by severe pain all over his body – which Girard now attributes to directed-energy weapons that can shoot invisible beams.

The voices even suggested how he could figure out what was happening to him. He says they told him to go to the electrical engineering department to "tell them you're writing science fiction and you don't want to write anything inconsistent with physical reality. Then tell them exactly what has happened."

Girard went and got some rudimentary explanations of how technology could explain some of the things he was describing.

"Finally, I said: 'Look, I must come to the point, because I need answers. This is happening to me; it's not science fiction.'" They laughed.

He got the same response from friends, he says. "They regarded me as crazy, which is a humiliating experience."

When asked why he didn't consult a doctor about the voices and the pain, he says, "I don't dare start talking to people because of the potential stigma of it all. I don't want to be treated differently. Here I was in Philadelphia. Something was going on, I don't know any doctors . . . I know somebody's doing something to me."

It was a struggle to graduate, he says, but he was determined, and he persevered. In 1988, the same year he finished his degree, his father died, leaving Girard an inheritance large enough that he did not have to work.

So, instead of becoming a landscape architect, Girard began a full-time investigation of what was happening to him, often traveling to Washington in pursuit of government documents relating to mind control. He put an ad in a magazine seeking other victims. Only a few people responded. But over the years, as he met more and more people like himself, he grew convinced that he was part of what he calls an "electronic concentration camp."

What he was finding on his research trips also buttressed his belief: Girard learned that in the 1950s, the CIA had drugged unwitting victims with LSD as part of a rogue mind-control experiment called MK-ULTRA. He came across references to the CIA seeking to influence the mind with electromagnetic fields. Then he found references in an academic research book to work that military researchers at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research had done in the 1970s with pulsed microwaves to transmit words that a subject would hear in his head. Elsewhere, he came across references to attempts to use electromagnetic energy, sound waves or microwave beams to cause non-lethal pain to the body. For every symptom he experienced, he believed he found references to a weapon that could cause it.

How much of the research Girard cites checks out?

Concerns about microwaves and mind control date to the 1960s, when the U.S. government discovered that its embassy in Moscow was being bombarded by low-level electromagnetic radiation. In 1965, according to declassified Defense Department documents, the Pentagon, at the behest of the White House, launched Project Pandora, top-secret research to explore the behavioral and biological effects of low-level microwaves. For approximately four years, the Pentagon conducted secret research: zapping monkeys; exposing unwitting sailors to microwave radiation; and conducting a host of other unusual experiments (a sub-project of Project Pandora was titled Project Bizarre).

The results were mixed, and the program was plagued by disagreements and scientific squabbles. The "Moscow signal," as it was called, was eventually attributed to eavesdropping, not mind control, and Pandora ended in 1970. And with it, the military's research into so-called non-thermal microwave effects seemed to die out, at least in the unclassified realm.

But there are hints of ongoing research: An academic paper written for the Air Force in the mid-1990s mentions the idea of a weapon that would use sound waves to send words into a person's head. "The signal can be a 'message from God' that can warn the enemy of impending doom, or encourage the enemy to surrender," the author concluded.

In 2002, the Air Force Research Laboratory patented precisely such a technology: using microwaves to send words into someone's head. That work is frequently cited on mind-control Web sites. Rich Garcia, a spokesman for the research laboratory's directed energy directorate, declined to discuss that patent or current or related research in the field, citing the lab's policy not to comment on its microwave work.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed for this article, the Air Force released unclassified documents surrounding that 2002 patent – records that note that the patent was based on human experimentation in October 1994 at the Air Force lab, where scientists were able to transmit phrases into the heads of human subjects, albeit with marginal intelligibility. Research appeared to continue at least through 2002. Where this work has gone since is unclear – the research laboratory, citing classification, refused to discuss it or release other materials.

The official U.S. Air Force position is that there are no non-thermal effects of microwaves. Yet Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, tagged microwave attacks against the human brain as part of future warfare in a 2001 presentation to the National Defense Industrial Association about "Future Strategic Issues."

"That work is exceedingly sensitive" and unlikely to be reported in any unclassified documents, he says.

Meanwhile, the military's use of weapons that employ electromagnetic radiation to create pain is well-known, as are some of the limitations of such weapons. In 2001, the Pentagon declassified one element of this research: the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses electromagnetic radiation to heat skin and create an intense burning sensation. So, yes, there is technology designed to beam painful invisible rays at humans, but the weapon seems to fall far short of what could account for many of the TIs' symptoms.

While its exact range is classified, Doug Beason, an expert in directed-energy weapons, puts it at about 700 meters, and the beam cannot penetrate a number of materials, such as aluminum. Considering the size of the full-scale weapon, which resembles a satellite dish, and its operational limitations, the ability of the government or anyone else to shoot beams at hundreds of people – on city streets, into their homes and while they travel in cars and planes – is beyond improbable.

But, given the history of America's clandestine research, it's reasonable to assume that if the defense establishment could develop mind-control or long-distance ray weapons, it almost certainly would. And, once developed, the possibility that they might be tested on innocent civilians could not be categorically dismissed.

Girard, for his part, believes these weapons were not only developed but were also tested on him more than 20 years ago.

What would the government gain by torturing him? Again, Girard found what he believed to be an explanation, or at least a precedent: During the Cold War, the government conducted radiation experiments on scores of unwitting victims, essentially using them as human guinea pigs. Girard came to believe that he, too, was a walking experiment.

Not that Girard thinks his selection was totally random: He believes he was targeted because of a disparaging remark he made to a Republican fundraiser about George H.W. Bush in the early 1980s. Later, Girard says, the voices confirmed his suspicion.

"One night I was going to bed; the usual drivel was going on," he says. "The constant stream of drivel. I was just about to go to bed, and a voice says: 'Mr. Girard, do you know who was in our studio with us? That was George Bush, vice president of the United States.'"

Girard's story, however strange, reflects what TIs around the world report: a chance encounter with a government agency or official, followed by surveillance and gang stalking, and then, in many cases, voices, and pain similar to electric shocks. Some in the community have taken it upon themselves to document as many cases as possible. One TI from California conducted about 50 interviews, narrowing the symptoms down to several major areas: "ringing in the ears," "manipulation of body parts," "hearing voices," "piercing sensation on skin," "sinus problems" and "sexual attacks." In fact, the TI continued, "many report the sensation of having their genitalia manipulated."

Both male and female TIs report a variety of "attacks" to their sexual organs. "My testicles became so sore I could barely walk," Girard says of his early experiences. Others, however, report the attacks in the form of sexual stimulation, including one TI who claims he dropped out of the seminary after constant sexual stimulation by directed-energy weapons. Susan Sayler, a TI in San Diego, says many women among the TIs suffer from attacks to their sexual organs but are often embarrassed to talk about it with outsiders.

"It's sporadic, you just never know when it will happen," she says. "A lot of the women say it's as soon as you lay down in bed – that's when you would get hit the worst. It happened to me as I was driving, at odd times."

What made her think it was an electronic attack and not just in her head? "There was no sexual attraction to a man when it would happen. That's what was wrong. It did not feel like a muscle spasm or whatever," she says. "It's so . . . electronic."

Gloria Naylor, a renowned African American writer, seems to defy many of the stereotypes of someone who believes in mind control. A winner of the National Book Award, Naylor is best known for her acclaimed novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which described a group of women living in a poor urban neighborhood and was later made into a miniseries by Oprah Winfrey.

But in 2005, she published a lesser-known work, 1996, a semi-autobiographical book describing her experience as a TI. "I didn't want to tell this story. It's going to take courage. Perhaps more courage than I possess, but they've left me no alternatives," Naylor writes at the beginning of her book. "I am in a battle for my mind. If I stop now, they'll have won, and I will lose myself." The book is coherent, if hard to believe. It's also marked by disturbing passages describing how Jewish American agents were responsible for Naylor's surveillance. "Of the many cars that kept coming and going down my road, most were driven by Jews," she writes in the book. When asked about that passage in a recent interview, she defended her logic: Being from New York, she claimed, she can recognize Jews.

Naylor lives on a quiet street in Brooklyn in a majestic brownstone with an interior featuring intricate woodwork and tasteful decorations that attest to a successful literary career. She speaks about her situation calmly, occasionally laughing at her own predicament and her struggle with what she originally thought was mental illness. "I would observe myself," she explains. "I would lie in bed while the conversations were going on, and I'd ask: Maybe it is schizophrenia?"

Like Girard, Naylor describes what she calls "street theater" – incidents that might be dismissed by others as coincidental, but which Naylor believes were set up. She noticed suspicious cars driving by her isolated vacation home. On an airplane, fellow passengers mimicked her every movement – like mimes on a street.

Voices similar to those in Girard's case followed – taunting voices cursing her, telling her she was stupid, that she couldn't write. Expletive-laced language filled her head. Naylor sought help from a psychiatrist and received a prescription for an antipsychotic drug. But the medication failed to stop the voices, she says, which only added to her conviction that the harassment was real.

For almost four years, Naylor says, the voices prevented her from writing. In 2000, she says, around the time she discovered the mind-control forums, the voices stopped and the surveillance tapered off. It was then that she began writing 1996 as a "catharsis."

Colleagues urged Naylor not to publish the book, saying she would destroy her reputation. But she did publish, albeit with a small publishing house. The book was generally ignored by critics but embraced by TIs.

Naylor is not the first writer to describe such a personal descent. Evelyn Waugh, one of the great novelists of the 20th century, details similar experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Waugh's book, published in 1957, has eerie similarities to Naylor's.

Embarking on a recuperative cruise, Pinfold begins to hear voices on the ship that he believes are part of a wireless system capable of broadcasting into his head; he believes the instigator recruited fellow passengers to act as operatives; and he describes "performances" put on by passengers directed at him yet meant to look innocuous to others.

Waugh wrote his book several years after recovering from a similar episode and realizing that the voices and paranoia were the result of drug-induced hallucinations.

Naylor ... is now back at work on an historical novel she hopes will return her to the literary mainstream. She remains convinced that she was targeted by mind control. The many echoes of her ordeal she sees on the mind-control forums reassure her she's not crazy, she says.

Of course, some of the things she sees on the forum do strike her as crazy. "But who I am to say?" she says. "Maybe I sound crazy to somebody else."

Some TIs, such as Ed Moore, a young medical doctor, take a slightly more skeptical approach. He criticizes what he calls the "wacky claims" of TIs who blame various government agencies or groups of people without any proof. "I have yet to see a claim of who is behind this that has any data to support it," he writes.

Nonetheless, Moore still believes the voices in his head are the result of mind control and that the U.S. government is the most likely culprit. Moore started hearing voices in 2003, just as he completed his medical residency in anesthesiology; he was pulling an all-nighter studying for board exams when he heard voices coming from a nearby house commenting on him, on his abilities as a doctor, on his sanity. At first, he thought he was simply overhearing conversations through walls (much as Waugh's fictional alter ego first thought), but when no one else could hear the voices, he realized they were in his head. Moore went through a traumatic two years, including hospitalization for depression with auditory hallucinations.

"One tries to convince friends and family that you are being electronically harassed with voices that only you can hear," he writes in an e-mail. "You learn to stop doing that. They don't believe you, and they become sad and concerned, and it amplifies your own depression when you have voices screaming at you and your friends and family looking at you as a helpless, sick, mentally unbalanced wreck."

He says he grew frustrated with anti-psychotic medications meant to stop the voices, both because the treatments didn't work and because psychiatrists showed no interest in what the voices were telling him. He began to look for some other way to cope.

"In March of 2005, I started looking up support groups on the Internet," he wrote. "My wife would cry when she would see these sites, knowing I still heard voices, but I did not know what else to do." In 2006, he says, his wife, who had stood by him for three years, filed for divorce.

Moore, like other TIs, is cautious about sharing details of his life. He worries about looking foolish to friends and colleagues – but he says that risk is ultimately worthwhile if he can bring attention to the issue.

With his father's financial help, Moore is now studying for an electrical engineering degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio, hoping to prove that V2K, the technology to send voices into people's heads, is real. Being in school, around other people, helps him cope, he writes, but the voices continue to taunt him.

Recently, he says, they told him: "We'll never stop [messing] with you."

A week before the TIs rally on the National Mall, John Alexander, one of the people whom Harlan Girard holds personally responsible for the voices in his head, is at a Chili's restaurant in Crystal City explaining over a Philly cheese steak and fries why the United States needs mind-control weapons.

A former Green Beret who served in Vietnam, Alexander went on to a number of national security jobs, and rubbed shoulders with prominent military and political leaders. Long known for taking an interest in exotic weapons, his 1980 article, "The New Mental Battlefield," published in the Army journal Military Review, is cited by self-described victims as proof of his complicity in mind control. Now retired from the government and living in Las Vegas, Alexander continues to advise the military. He is in the Washington area that day for an official meeting.

Beneath a shock of white hair is the mind of a self-styled military thinker. Alexander belongs to a particular set of Pentagon advisers who consider themselves defense intellectuals, focusing on big-picture issues, future threats and new capabilities. Alexander's career led him from work on sticky foam that would stop an enemy in his or her tracks to dalliances in paranormal studies and psychics, which he still defends as operationally useful.

In an earlier phone conversation, Alexander said that in the 1990s, when he took part in briefings at the CIA, there was never any talk of "mind control, or mind-altering drugs or technologies, or anything like that."

According to Alexander, the military and intelligence agencies were still scared by the excesses of MK-ULTRA, the infamous CIA program that involved, in part, slipping LSD to unsuspecting victims. "Until recently, anything that smacked of [mind control] was extremely dangerous" because Congress would simply take the money away, he said.

Alexander acknowledged that "there were some abuses that took place," but added that, on the whole, "I would argue we threw the baby out with the bath water."

But September 11, 2001, changed the mood in Washington, and some in the national security community are again expressing interest in mind control, particularly a younger generation of officials who weren't around for MK-ULTRA. "It's interesting, that it's coming back," Alexander observed.

While Alexander scoffs at the notion that he is somehow part of an elaborate plot to control people's minds, he acknowledges support for learning how to tap into a potential enemy's brain. He gives as an example the possible use of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, for lie detection. "Brain mapping" with fMRI theoretically could allow interrogators to know when someone is lying by watching for activity in particular parts of the brain. For interrogating terrorists, fMRI could come in handy, Alexander suggests. But any conceivable use of the technique would fall far short of the kind of mind-reading TIs complain about.

Alexander also is intrigued by the possibility of using electronic means to modify behavior. The dilemma of the war on terrorism, he notes, is that it never ends. So what do you do with enemies, such as those at Guantanamo: keep them there forever? That's impractical. Behavior modification could be an alternative, he says.

"Maybe I can fix you, or electronically neuter you, so it's safe to release you into society, so you won't come back and kill me," Alexander says. It's only a matter of time before technology allows that scenario to come true, he continues. "We're now getting to where we can do that." He pauses for a moment to take a bite of his sandwich. "Where does that fall in the ethics spectrum? That's a really tough question."

When Alexander encounters a query he doesn't want to answer, such as one about the ethics of mind control, he smiles and raises his hands level to his chest, as if balancing two imaginary weights. In one hand is mind control and the sanctity of free thought – and in the other hand, a tad higher – is the war on terrorism.

But none of this has anything to do with the TIs, he says. "Just because things are secret, people tend to extrapolate. Common sense does not prevail, and even when you point out huge leaps in logic that just cannot be true, they are not dissuaded."

What is it that brings someone, even an intelligent person, to ascribe the experience of hearing disembodied voices to government weapons?

In her book, Abducted, Harvard psychologist Susan Clancy examines a group that has striking parallels to the TIs: people who believe they've been kidnapped by aliens. The similarities are often uncanny: Would-be abductees describe strange pains, and feelings of being watched or targeted. And although the alleged abductees don't generally have auditory hallucinations, they do sometimes believe that their thoughts are controlled by aliens, or that they've been implanted with advanced technology.

(On the online forum, some TIs posted vociferous objections to the parallel, concerned that the public finds UFOs even weirder than mind control. "It will keep us all marginalized and discredited," one griped.)

Clancy argues that the main reason people believe they've been abducted by aliens is that it provides them with a compelling narrative to explain their perception that strange things have happened to them, such as marks on their bodies (marks others would simply dismiss as bruises), stimulation to their sexual organs (as the TIs describe) or feelings of paranoia. "It's not just an explanation for your problems; it's a source of meaning for your life," Clancy says.

In the case of TIs, mind-control weapons are an explanation for the voices they hear in their head. Socrates heard a voice and thought it was a demon; Joan of Arc heard voices from God. As one TI noted in an e-mail: "Each person undergoing this harassment is looking for the solution to the problem. Each person analyzes it through his or her own particular spectrum of beliefs. If you are a scientific-minded person, then you will probably analyze the situation from that perspective and conclude it must be done with some kind of electronic devices. If you are a religious person, you will see it as a struggle between the elements of whatever religion you believe in. If you are maybe, perhaps more eccentric, you may think that it is alien in nature."

Or, if you happen to live in the United States in the early 21st century, you may fear the growing power of the NSA, CIA and FBI.

Being a victim of government surveillance is also, arguably, better than being insane. In Waugh's novella based on his own painful experience, when Pinfold concludes that hidden technology is being used to infiltrate his brain, he "felt nothing but gratitude in his discovery." Why? "He might be unpopular; he might be ridiculous; but he was not mad."

Ralph Hoffman, a professor of psychiatry at Yale who has studied auditory hallucinations, regularly sees people who believe the voices are a part of government harassment (others believe they are God, dead relatives or even ex-girlfriends). Not all people who hear voices are schizophrenic, he says, noting that people can hear voices episodically in highly emotional states. What exactly causes these voices is still unknown, but one thing is certain: People who think the voices are caused by some external force are rarely dissuaded from their delusional belief, he says. "These are highly emotional and gripping experiences that are so compelling for them that ordinary reality seems bland."

Perhaps because the experience is so vivid, he says, even some of those who improve through treatment merely decide the medical regimen somehow helped protect their brain from government weapons.

Scott Temple, a professor of psychiatry at Penn State University who has been involved in two recent studies of auditory hallucinations, notes that those who suffer such hallucinations frequently lack insight into their illness. Even among those who do understand they are sick, "that awareness comes and goes," he says. "People feel overwhelmed, and the delusional interpretations return."

Back at the Philadelphia train station, "handlers" had spoken to him only briefly – they weren't in the right position to attack him, Girard surmises, based on the lack of voices. Today, his conversation jumps more rapidly from one subject to the next: victims of radiation experiments, his hatred of George H.W. Bush, MK-ULTRA, his personal experiences.

Asked about his studies at Penn, he replies by talking about his problems with reading: "I told you, everything I write they dictate to me," he says, referring again to the voices. "When I read, they're reading to me. My eyes go across; they're moving my eyes down the line. They're reading it to me. When I close the book, I can't remember a thing I read. That's why they do it."

The week before, Girard had pointed to only one person who appeared suspicious to him – a young African American man reading a book; this time, however, he hears more voices, which leads him to believe the station is crawling with agents.

"Let's change our location," Girard says after a while. "I'm sure they have 40 or 50 people in here today. I escaped their surveillance last time – they won't let that happen again."

Asked to explain the connection between mind control and the University of Pennsylvania, which Girard alleges is involved in the conspiracy, he begins to talk about defense contractors located near the Philadelphia campus: "General Electric was right next to the parking garage; General Electric Space Systems occupies a huge building right over there. From that building, you could see into the studio where I was doing my work most of the time. I asked somebody what they were doing there. You know, it had to do with computers. GE Space Systems. They were supposed to be tracking missile debris from this location . . . pardon me. What was your question again?"

Yet many parts of Girard's life seem to reflect that of any affluent 70-year-old bachelor. He travels frequently to France for extended vacations and takes part in French cultural activities in Philadelphia. He has set up a travel scholarship at the Cleveland Institute of Art in the name of his late mother, who attended school there (he changed his last name 27 years ago for "personal reasons"), and he travels to meet the students who benefit from the fund.

And while the bulk of his time is spent on his research and writing about mind control, he has other interests. He follows politics and describes outings with friends and family members with whom he doesn't talk about mind control, knowing they would view it skeptically.

Girard acknowledges that some of his experiences mirror symptoms of schizophrenia, but asked if he ever worried that the voices might in fact be caused by mental illness, he answers sharply with one word: "No."

How, then, does he know the voices are real?

"How do you know you know anything?" Girard replies. "How do you know I exist? How do you know this isn't a dream you're having, from which you'll wake up in a few minutes? I suppose that analogy is the closest thing: You know when you have a dream. Sometimes it could be perfectly lucid, but you know it's a dream."

The very "realness" of the voices is the issue – how do you disbelieve something you perceive as real? That's precisely what Hoffman, the Yale psychiatrist, points out: So lucid are the voices that the sufferers – regardless of their educational level or self-awareness – are unable to see them as anything but real. "One thing I can assure you," Hoffman says, "is that for them, it feels real."

It looks like almost any other small political rally in Washington. Posters adorn the gate on the southwest side of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, as attendees set up a table with press materials, while volunteers test a loudspeaker and set out coolers filled with bottled water. The sun is out, the weather is perfect, and an eclectic collection of people from across the country has gathered to protest mind control.

There is not a tinfoil hat to be seen. Only the posters and paraphernalia hint at the unusual. "Stop USA electronic harassment," urges one poster. "Directed Energy Assaults," reads another. Smaller signs in the shape of tombstones say, "RIP MKULTRA." The main display, set in front of the speaker's lectern has a more extended message: "HELP STOP HI-TECH ASSAULT PSYCHOTRONIC TORTURE."

About 35 TIs show up for the June rally, in addition to a few friends and family members. Speakers alternate between giving personal testimonials and descriptions of research into mind-control technology. Most of the gawkers at the rally are foreign tourists. A few hecklers snicker at the signs, but mostly people are either confused or indifferent. The articles on mind control at the table – from mainstream news magazines – go untouched.

"How can you expect people to get worked up over this if they don't care about eavesdropping or eminent domain?" one man challenges after stopping to flip through the literature. Mary Ann Stratton, who is manning the table, merely shrugs and smiles sadly. There is no answer: Everyone at the rally acknowledges it is an uphill battle.

In general, the outlook for TIs is not good; many lose their jobs, houses and family. Depression is common. But for many at the rally, experiencing the community of mind-control victims seems to help. One TI, a man who had been a rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard before voices in his head sent him on a downward spiral, expressed the solace he found among fellow TIs in a long e-mail to another TI: "I think that the only people that can help are people going through the same thing. Everyone else will not believe you, or they are possibly involved."

In the end, though, nothing could help him enough. In August 2006, he would commit suicide.

But at least for the day, the rally is boosting TI spirits. Girard, in what for him is an ebullient mood, takes the microphone. A small crowd of tourists gathers at the sidelines, listening with casual interest. With the Capitol looming behind him, he reaches the crescendo of his speech, rallying the attendees to remember an important thing: They are part of a single community.

"I've heard it said, 'We can't get anywhere because everyone's story is different.' We are all the same," Girard booms. "You knew someone with the power to commit you to the electronic concentration camp system."

Several weeks after the rally, Girard shows up for a meeting with a reporter at the stately Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where he has stayed frequently over the two decades he has traveled to the capital to battle mind control. He walks in with a lit cigarette, which he apologetically puts out after a hotel employee tells him smoking isn't allowed anymore. He is half an hour late – delayed, he says, by a meeting on Capitol Hill. Wearing a monogrammed dress shirt and tie, he looks, as always, serious and professional.

Girard declines to mention whom on Capitol Hill he'd met with, other than to say it was a congressional staffer. Embarrassment is likely a factor: Girard readily acknowledges that most people he meets with, ranging from scholars to politicians, ignore his entreaties or dismiss him as a lunatic.

Lately, his focus is on his Web site, which he sees as the culmination of nearly a quarter-century of research. When completed, it will contain more than 300 pages of documents. What next? Maybe he'll move to France (there are victims there, too), or maybe the U.S. government will finally just kill him, he says.

Meanwhile, he is always searching for absolute proof that the government has decoded the brain. His latest interest is LifeLog, a project once funded by the Pentagon that he read about in Wired News. The article described it this way: "The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read. All of this – and more – would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audiovisual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health."

Girard suggests that the government, using similar technology, has "catalogued" his life over the past two years – every sight and sound (Evelyn Waugh, in his mind-control book, writes about his character's similar fear that his harassers were creating a file of his entire life).

Girard thinks the government can control his movements, inject thoughts into his head, cause him pain day and night. He believes that he will die a victim of mind control.

Is there any reason for optimism?

Girard hesitates, then asks a rhetorical question.

"Why, despite all this, why am I the same person? Why am I Harlan Girard?"

For all his anguish, be it the result of mental illness or, as Girard contends, government mind control, the voices haven't managed to conquer the thing that makes him who he is: Call it his consciousness, his intellect or, perhaps, his soul.

"That's what they don't yet have," he says. After 22 years, "I'm still me."

Sharon Weinberger is a Washington writer and author of Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld.

Note: The original article on the Washington Post website is available here. For numerous patents demonstrating the possibility of projecting voices into the head, click here. See informative diagrams and explanations of how it's all done. Read also a revealing essay by a military analyst on advanced weapons of mind control and the race with Russia to develop them.