George Estabrooks

George "Esty" Estabrooks headed the Psychology Department at Colgate University and was the most vocal partisan of the view that Hypnosis had military potential. Since the early 1930s, he had periodically ventured out from his sleepy upstate New York campus to advise the military on applications of hypnotism.¹

Theories on Hypnotic Control

Estabrooks acknowledged that hypnosis did not work on everyone and that only one person in five made a good enough subject to be placed in a deep trance, or state of somnambulism. He believed that only these subjects could be induced to do such things against their apparent will as reveal secrets or commit crimes. He had watched respected members of the community make fools of themselves in the hands of stage hypnotists, and he had compelled his own students to reveal fraternity secrets and the details of private love affairs, all of which the subjects presumably did not want to do.¹

The Murder Question

Estabrooks realized that the only certain way to know whether a person would commit a crime like murder under hypnosis was to have the person kill someone. Unwilling to settle the issue on his own by trying the experiment, he felt that government sanction of the process would relieve the hypnotist of personal responsibility. "Any 'accidents' that might occur during the experiments will simply be charged to profit and loss," he wrote, "a very trifling portion of that enormous wastage in human life which is part and parcel of war."¹

Wartime Rejection and Fiction

After Pearl Harbor, Estabrooks offered his ideas to the OSS, but they were not accepted by anyone in government willing to carry them to their logical conclusion. He was reduced to writing books about the potential use of hypnotism in warfare, including Hypnotism (1945) and the novel Death in the Mind (1945), co-authored with Richard Lockridge. The novel concerned a series of seemingly treasonable acts committed by Allied personnel: an American submarine captain torpedoes one of the country's own battleships, and the beautiful heroine starts acting in an irrational way which serves the enemy. After a perilous investigation, secret agent Johnny Evans learns that the Germans have been hypnotizing Allied personnel and conditioning them to obey Nazi commands. Evans and his cohorts, shaken by the many ways hypnotism can be used against them, set up elaborate countermeasures and then cannot resist going on the offensive. Objections are heard from the heroine, who by this time has been brutally and rather graphically tortured. She complains that "doing things to people's minds" is "a loathsome way to fight." Her qualms are brushed aside by Johnny Evans, her lover and boss. He sets off after the Germans "to tamper with their minds; Make them traitors; Make them work for us."¹

Prophecy Fulfilled

In the aftermath of the war, as the U.S. national security apparatus was being constructed, the leaders of the CIA would adopt Johnny Evans's mission almost in those very words. Richard Helms, Sidney Gottlieb, John Gittinger, George White, and many others would undertake a far-flung and complicated assault on the human mind. Scientists even more eager than Estabrooks would seek CIA approval for the kinds of experiments they would not dare perform on their own. Sometimes the Agency men concurred; on other occasions, they reserved such experiments for themselves. They would tamper with many minds and inevitably cause some to be damaged. In the end, they would minimize and hide their deeds, and they would live to see doubts raised about the health of their own minds.¹