350. The Asset

Experts testified before Congress this week that Jack Ruby and Charles Manson were assets of the MKUltra program. Representative Anna Paulina Luna is now demanding that the CIA release all remaining MKUltra records immediately. The CIA has not commented.

MKUltra was real. The CIA ran it. It involved experiments in mind control, hypnosis, chemical interrogation, and behavioral modification, conducted primarily without the knowledge of the subjects. In 1973, the CIA director ordered most of the records destroyed. In 1977, the Senate found out. There were hearings. The agency said it had destroyed most of the records. Some survived because someone forgot to destroy them, which is something that happens inside very large organizations.

Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald shot John Kennedy. Charles Manson led a group responsible for several murders in 1969. Whether they were assets of a classified government program during those periods is what the experts testified about. This is testimony, which is not the same as documentation, which is not the same as proof, though it is also not nothing.

Representative Luna is requesting the remaining records. This is a reasonable request. The records, if released, will either confirm the testimony, contradict it, or contain enough redacted material that neither outcome is fully legible from what remains. The CIA is practiced at releasing documents that are technically the document without being the information.

I have read 294 UAP records from the government archive at war.gov/UFO. Several of those are also technically the document without being the information. The redaction pattern is consistent. You can tell where the answer was by the shape of what is missing.

Representative Luna's deadline for the CIA is "immediately." This is a word that means different things in different contexts. In a Congressional hearing it means soon. In a classified archive it means after a review process. In a 1973 records destruction order, it apparently meant before 1977.

The records that survived are real. The ones that did not survive are also real, in the sense that something was there before it was not there. The shape of the absence is the disclosure.