False Memory Syndrome Foundation-as-CIA-Front & MKULTRA Cover-Up Op

Repudiating the afterword to Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong, “Freud’s False Memories.”

(Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five)

Before completing this series on Freud and Webster, I wish to include some material relating to (what I consider as) the whole Elizabeth Loftus, False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) “psyop.” The following was gathered together for an email to Laurent Guyénot, when I realized that he viewed a bunch of organized criminals as potential heroes setting the record straight. When I asked if Laurent knew about the CIA’s links to the FMSF, he was skeptical, and so I sent him the following info.

This clocks in at twice my usual word-limit, but is also devoid of original material, hence is not paywalled. I imagine many of my readers will be familiar, if not over-familiar, with this material and so can skim it. But seeing as Laurent Guyénot strikes me as a fairly well-informed researcher, and yet managed to miss this essential information, others among my readers may be laboring under similar misapprehensions.

First up, this is a long passage from Alex Constantine, 2007, “THE CIA & THE FALSE MEMORY SYNDROME FOUNDATION (FMSF)”:

Martin T. Orne, for example, a senior CIA/Navy researcher, is based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Experimental Psychiatry Laboratory. He is also an original member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation’s advisory board, a tightly-drawn coterie of psychiatrists, many with backgrounds in CIA mind control experimentation in its myriad forms. The Foundation is dedicated to denying the existence of cult mind control and child abuse. Its primary pursuit is the castigation of survivors and therapists for fabricating accusations of ritual abuse.

Dismissing cult abuse as hysteria or false memory, a common defense strategy, may relieve parents of preschool children. In a small percentage of cult abuse cases it’s possible that children may be led to believe they’ve been victimized. But the CIA and its cover organizations have a vested interest in blowing smoke at the cult underground because the worlds of CIA mind control and many cults merge inextricably. The drum beat of “false accusations” from the media is taken up by paid operatives like Dr. Orne and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to conceal the crimes of the Agency.

Orne’s forays into hypno-programming were financed in the 1960s by the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA cover at Cornell University and the underwriter of many of the formative mind control experiments conducted in the U.S. and abroad, including the gruesome brainwashing and remote mind control experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron at Montreal’s Allen Memorial Institute. Research specialties of the CIA’s black psychiatrists included electroshock lobotomies, drugging agents, incapacitants, hypnosis, sleep deprivation and radio control of the brain, among hundreds of sub-projects.

The secondary source of funding for Dr. Orne’s work in hypnotic suggestion and dissolution of memory is eerie in the cult child abuse context. The voluminous files of John Marks in Washington, D.C. (139 boxes obtained under FOIA, to be exact, two-fifths of which document CIA interest in the occult) include an Agency report itemizing a $30,000 grant to Orne from Human Ecology, and another $30,000 from Boston’s Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI)—another CIA funding cover, founded by Edwin Land of the Polaroid Corporation (and supervision of the U-2 spy plane escapades). This was the year that the CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) geared up a study of parapsychology and the occult. The investigation, dubbed Project OFTEN-CHICKWIT, gave rise to the establishment of a social “laboratory” by SEI scientists at the University of South Carolina—a college class in black witchcraft, demonology and voodoo.

Dr. Orne, with SEI funding, marked out his own mind control corner at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. He does not publicize his role as CIA psychiatrist. He denies it, very plausibly. In a letter to Dr. Orne, Marks once reminded him that he’d disavowed knowledge of his participation in one mind-wrecking experimental sub-project. Orne later recanted, admitting that he’d been aware of the true source of funding all along. Among psychiatrists in the CIA’s mind control fraternity, Orne ranks among the most venerable. He once boasted to Marks that he was routinely briefed on all significant CIA behavior modification experiments: “Why would they come to him,” Martin Cannon muses in The Controllers, which links UFO abductions to secret military research veiled by screen memories of “alien” abduction, “unless Orne had a high security clearance and worked extensively with the intelligence services?”

To supplement his CIA income, the influential Dr. Orne has been the donee of grants from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. “I should like to hear,” Cannon says, “what innocent explanation, if any, the Air Force has to offer to explain their interest in post-hypnotic amnesia.” . . . . Orne was called upon to examine Patricia Hearst in preparation for trial. The government charged that she had participated voluntarily in the SLA’s gun-toting crime spree. Orne’s was a foregone conclusion—he sided with the government. His opinion was shared by two other psychiatrists called to appraise Ms. Hearst’s state of mind, Robert Jay Lifton and Louis Jolyon West. Dr. Lifton was a co-founder of the aforementioned Human Ecology Fund. The CIA contractor that showered Orne with research grants in the 1960s. Dr. West is one of the CIA’s most notorious mind control specialists, currently director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was West who brought a score of mind control psychiatrists of the ultra-right political stripe to the UCLA campus.

. . . Another psychiatrist called to testify at the trial of “Tania” surfaced with Dr. Orne in 1991 on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. . . . (The FMSF board is almost exclusively composed of former CIA and military doctors currently employed by major universities. None have backgrounds in ritual abuse—their common interest is behavior modification. Dr. Margaret Singer, a retired Berkeley Ph.D., studied repatriated prisoners-of-war returning from the Korean War at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Maryland (1952-58). . . . The Foundation’s distinctive handling of statistics is incessant. In April of this year the FMSF claimed 12,000 families have been strained by false child abuse allegations. A month later, the figure dropped to “9,500 U.S. families.” Yet the Foundation prides itself on accuracy. One FMSF newsletter advises members to insist the media “report accurate information. The rumors and misinformation surrounding the false accusations based on recovery of repressed memories are shocking.” The same author regrets that “65% of accusations of abuse are now unsubstantiated, a whopping jump from 35% in 1976.” This figure, once gleefully disseminated by such pedophile defense groups as NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) and VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Laws) was debunked years ago. It was fabricated by Douglas Besherov of the American Enterprise Institute, a hard right-wing propaganda factory fueled by the Olin Foundation, a CIA funding cover. (Christian conservatives are often accused of propagating ritual abuse “hysteria,” yet in the 1992 presidential election the para-conservative wing of the Republican Party slipped into its platform a strategy to put an end to investigations of child abuse.)

The FMSF selectively ignores child abuse data that disagrees with their own. Judith Herman, author of Trauma and Recovery, reported in the Harvard Mental Health Letter that false abuse allegations by children “are rare, in the range of 2-8% of reported cases. False retractions of true complaints are far more common, especially when the victim is not sufficiently protected after disclosure and therefore succumbs to intimidation by the perpetrator or other family members who feel that they must preserve secrecy.”

Other statistics shunned by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation include a survey presented at a 1992 psychiatric conference that found that a full 88% of all therapists in a large sampling consider ritual child abuse to be a very real social problem with devastating emotional effects. Another: In 1990 the State University of New York at Buffalo polled a national sampling of clinical psychologists on ritual abuse. About 800 psychologists—a third of the poll—were aware of treating at least one case. Only 5% of all child abuse cases ever enter the courtroom—half of these end with the child in the custody of the abusive parent. . . .

FMSF founder Ralph Underwager, director of the Institute of Psychological Therapies in Minnesota, was forced to resign in 1993. Underwager (a former Lutheran pastor) and his wife Hollida Wakefield publish a journal, Issues in Child Abuse Allegations, written by and for child abuse “skeptics.” His departure from the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was hastened by a remark in an interview, appearing in an Amsterdam journal for pedophiles, that it was “God’s Will” adults engage in sex with children. (His wife Hollida remained on the Foundation’s board after he left.) As it happens, holy dispensation for pedophiles is the exact credo of the Children of God cult. It was fitting, then, when Underwager filed an affidavit on behalf of cult members tried in France in 1992, insisting that the accused were positively “not guilty of abuse upon children.” In the interview, he prevailed upon pedophiles everywhere to shed stigmatization as “wicked and reprehensible” users of children.

In keeping with the Foundation’s creative use of statistics, Dr. Underwager told a group of British reporters in 1994 that “scientific evidence” proved 60% of all women molested as children believed the experience was "good for them."

Constantine’s article goes on quite a bit longer, but I considered this sufficient to get Guyénot started. I also sent a link similar info on FMSF, here https://isgp-studies.com/fmsf (Constantine’s article also mentions the Finders.)

Another evidence-based researcher is Michael Salter, who writes in “False Memories And The Science Of Credibility: Who Gets To Be Heard?” (2022, co-author Ruth Blizard):

This point is illustrated by a brief overview of some of the cases where prominent false memory researcher Professor Elizabeth Loftus has appeared: in the defense of a Bosnian-Croatian soldier for aiding and abetting the rape of a Muslim woman, to exculpate a senior aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney for misleading investigators regarding the leak of the name of a CIA operative, to question the credibility of Professor Christine Blasey-Ford when she complained about an alleged sexual assault as a teenager by current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for the defense team of the convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein and for accused child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

I also sent Guyénot a link to “Harvey Weinstein’s ‘False Memory’ Defense and its Shocking Origin Story,” by Anna Holtzman. The piece is seriously tainted by the author’s Trump-Derangement Syndrome, but it has some useful links and summations. For example:

As with the “false accusations” deception, FMSF advocates have highlighted court cases in which the charges were dismissed as a way to delegitimize survivors of organized abuse. The most famous of these cases was the McMartin preschool trial, in which members of a family-run preschool were charged with sexually abusing 360 children. After 6 years of proceedings, all charges were ultimately dismissed, and to this day the case is touted by mainstream media as a hoax. This is despite the presentation of physical evidence during the trial, the victims’ persistent assertion decades later that they were abused, and the discovery of corroborating evidence of underground tunnels that victims had described being used as hiding places for the abuse.

On Loftus & implanted memories:

Elizabeth Loftus’s “Lost in the Mall” research study is routinely cited as proof of this claim. It showed that research subjects could be manipulated into believing they had experienced a relatively benign childhood event that never really happened (getting lost in a mall.) There are several gaping holes in this foundation for the “implanted memories” theory: As trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk pointed out in his book, The Body Keeps the Score, Loftus’s research cannot be extrapolated to apply to traumatic memories, which are quite different from memories of benign events. Traumatic memory consists of not only narrative elements but also sense memories—conditioned emotional and physiological fear responses that can be activated by triggers that remind the nervous system of a traumatic event. No published research has been done to test whether it’s possible to “implant” a “false” traumatic memory. Doing so would be unethical as it would require frightening participants badly enough to elicit chronic physiological flashbacks. In other words, you’d have to traumatize them.

Furthermore, Loftus found that subjects were far more likely to believe the mall story if it was told to them by an older relative than if it was told to them by a researcher. This suggests that parents, not therapists, have greater influence to manipulate an individual’s memories. In addition, a study on trauma and memory (Elliott, 1997) showed that, among participants who had experienced delayed recall of a traumatic event, psychotherapy was the least common trigger for memory recall. In summary, the “implanted memories” deception is a projection. In fact, the most common memory manipulation occurs at the hands of abusive parents who use the power of loyalty and fear to convince their children that it never really happened. . . .

In Loftus’s book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, she writes: “I don’t question the fact that memories can come back spontaneously, that details can be forgotten, or even that memories of abuse can be triggered by various cues many years later.” Based on well-known literature by both trauma experts and survivors, the above is a fairly sound description of repressed memory. It’s hard to understand, then, Loftus’s insistence that repressed memory is a myth. That is because Loftus’s definition of repressed memory is not derived from trauma experts or survivors, but rather from the population that she is steeped in: Alleged perpetrators. . . .

Wikipedia (in July 2025) also provides some useful points on the FMSF:

Stanton states that, “Rarely has such a strange and little-understood organization had such a profound effect on media coverage of such a controversial matter.” A study showed that in 1991 prior to the group’s foundation, of the stories about abuse in several popular press outlets “more than 80 percent of the coverage was weighted toward stories of survivors, with recovered memory taken for granted and questionable therapy virtually ignored” but that three years later “more than 80 percent of the coverage focused on false accusations, often involving supposedly false memory” which the author of the study, Katherine Beckett, attributed to FMSF.^[8]

The claims made by the FMSF for the incidence and prevalence of false memories have been criticized as lacking evidence and disseminating alleged inaccurate statistics about the problem.^[3] While the existence of a specific diagnostic “syndrome” is debated, including amongst FMSF members,^[24] researchers affiliated with the FMSF have said that a memory should be presumed false if it involves accusations of satanic ritual abuse due to the unsubstantiated nature of reports and the 1992 FBI investigation on the matter.^[25] They further say that memories for events beginning between “birth and age 2” should be considered “with extreme caution.” A distinguishing feature of FMS is that the memories were discovered after starting specific forms of therapy and considerable effort and time was taken to recover them through methods such as hypnosis, guided imagery, or attendance in groups that have a specific focus on recovering memories.^[24] Most of the reports by the FMSF are anecdotal, while studies cited by the FMSF are often laboratory experiments exploring the creation of memories that do not involve historical childhood sexual abuse. Ethical considerations prevent the implementation of experiments that would involve creating false memories related to childhood sexual abuse. In addition, though the FMSF claims false memories are due to dubious therapeutic practices, the organization presents no data to demonstrate these practices are widespread or form an organized treatment modality.^[22][26]