Scientific Engineering Institute

The Scientific Engineering Institute was a CIA proprietary company located outside Boston, originally set up in 1956 to do research on radar and other technical matters. Its president, who described himself as a "figurehead," was Dr. Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. In the early 1960s, officials of the CIA's Office of Research and Development decided to bring the Institute into the behavioral field and built a new wing for the "life sciences." They hired behavioral and medical scientists who were allowed to carry on independent research as long as it met Institute standards, and who were available to consult with frequent visitors from Washington. The scientists were encouraged to take long lunches with physical scientists and brainstorm about virtually everything.¹

Research Activities

The Institute's activities went far beyond anything attempted under MKULTRA. Researchers looked at the manipulation of genes and gene splicing. "The rest of the world didn't ask until 1976 the type of questions we were facing in 1965," one researcher stated. "Everybody was afraid of building the supersoldier who would take orders without questioning, like the kamikaze pilot. Creating a subservient society was not out of sight." Another Institute man bombarded bacteria with ultraviolet radiation to create deviant strains. ORD also sponsored work in parapsychology, investigating whether psychics could read minds or control them from afar, gain information about distant places, predict the future, or influence physical objects.¹

The Institute had a several-hundred-acre farm in the Massachusetts countryside where experiments were conducted. One involved stimulating the pleasure centers of crows' brains to control their behavior. The Institute also received $30,000 from the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology for Martin Orne's hypnosis research, though Orne stated he was not aware of the Institute's CIA connection at the time.¹

The ORD programs represented a continuation of behavioral research that was years ahead of the scientific community, using space-age technology that made MKULTRA look like the horse-and-buggy era. A Freedom of Information request filed for ORD behavioral research files in December 1977 produced an Agency acknowledgment that ORD had identified 130 boxes of material expected to contain behavioral research documents.¹