Alden Sears

Alden Sears was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota who conducted CIA-funded Hypnosis research beginning in the early 1950s, later moving his project to the University of Denver. The MKULTRA men farmed out most of their hypnosis work to Sears, who worked with student subjects to define the nature of hypnosis. Among other things, he investigated whether a hypnotist could induce a totally separate personality and whether a subject could be sent on missions he would not remember unless cued by the hypnotist. Sears, who later became a Methodist minister, refused to talk about the methods he experimented with to build second identities.¹

By 1957, Sears wrote that the experiments that needed to be done "could not be handled in the University situation." Unlike Morse Allen, he did not want to perform the terminal experiments. Sears maintained the fiction that he thought he was dealing only with a private foundation, the Geschickter Fund, and knew nothing of CIA involvement. Yet a CIA document in his MKULTRA subproject says he was "aware of the real purpose" of the project. Moreover, Sid Gottlieb brought him to Washington in 1954 to demonstrate hypnosis to a select group of Agency officials.¹