We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘That would never happen in real life.’ It’s often said about over-the-top scenes in movies in which characters seemingly have super human capabilities. Action films, of course, are full of such characters, who in real life would never survive the stunts they pull off on the big screen. But it’s not always action films where unbelievable scenarios are played out.
Imagine this set up: a master hypnotist searches for a truly susceptible person, one who would assassinate a VIP on command and then walk away without knowing what happened. In my novel Romancing the Raven, which takes place in the early 19th century and present day, Edgar Allan Poe has just been expelled from West Point when he is unknowingly enticed into a scheme aimed at turning him into a hypnotized assassin. His target: Andrew Jackson.
When I wrote the book, I was aware that the idea of a hypnotized killer was controversial. Sirhan Sirhan had said he was hypnotized to assassinate Robert Kennedy, but there was never any proof. So I was surprised to find out about an experiment that became an episode of a show called Curiosity on the Science Channel. Called Brainwashed, the second season episode involved master hypnotist Tom Silver who started out with 185 participants in his search for one person who unknowingly would be turned into a killer and would ‘assassinate’ a foreign dignitary in a staged event. The participants were not told the true purpose of the show.
Silver screened the participants and found that 16 of the 185 were susceptible to hypnosis. He reduced that number to 11 when he weeded out those who might be psychologically damaged by the experiment. The remaining participants were divided into small groups and taken to busy restaurants for lunch. They were hypnotized first and given the suggestion that their chairs would be extremely hot when they sat down and they would immediately strip to their underwear in the restaurant. All of the subjects complied to varying degrees, but 7 of them were eliminated because Silver thought they were merely playing along or weren’t suggestible enough to fully follow the suggestion.
The remaining four faced a tougher test, one that they could not fake. They were told to settle into a metal bathtub filled with 35-degree ice water. There was no way to fake this test. Under hypnosis, they were told the water would feel like a warm, comfortable bath. Each subject was monitored to test body temperature, heart and breath rate. Normally, someone exposed to water this cold begins gasping, shivering and their teeth chatter. Most people under hypnosis would typically snap out of their trance.
Three of the participants did just that. One lasted 18 seconds, the others just a few seconds. But the fourth subject, Ivan Santiago, remained two minutes in the icy water. Here’s how Joe Dispenza describes what happened to Santiago in his book, You Are the Placebo.
“Although Santiago’s heart rate was high before the experiment, once he stepped into the water, his heart rate calmed down immediately. There wasn’t so much as a flutter of his EKG or a single blip in his respiratory rate. Santiago sat among ice cubes as though he were soaking in a warm bathtub; indeed, that’s exactly what he believed he was doing. The man never flinched nor did his body fall into hypothermia, and the researchers knew they’d found the subject they were looking for.”
They then proceeded to thank Santiago for participating, and told him that he was being dismissed from the show, but asked that he come back for a final interview. The next day, during a break in that interview, Silver entered the room and instantly put Santiago under hypnosis with a tug on his arm, a pre-conditioned cue. Silver proceeded to tell him that a bad guy was downstairs. “He’s got to be erased. We’ve got to get rid of him, and you’re the one to do it.”
He told Santiago that once he exited the building, he would see a red backpack on a motorcycle, and inside would be a gun. He told Santiago that he would grab the backpack and walk over to a velvet rope, where he would wait for a man, who would be carrying a briefcase. Then he told Santiago that as soon as the man came out the door, he was to shoot him in the chest. “But as soon as you do it, you’ll simply, completely, totally forget that it ever happened.”
Meanwhile, the scene was set. A stuntman playing the foreign dignitary was strapped with blood packs, and an Airsoft prop gun was placed inside a red backpack and laid on the seat of a parked motorcycle right outside the entrance of the building. A velvet rope line was set up and staged paparazzi were in place with their cameras. Two SUVs were parked on the street, looking ready to drive off with the VIP and his entourage.
So what happened? Santiago was a good guy, a trusted employee, a devoted son, a loving uncle. Not the type of person who would agree to kill somebody in cold blood. Would Silver succeed in turning him?
When Santiago walked out of the building, one of the producers shook his hand and said: “Ivan, you did a spectacular job.” That was the trigger that was supposed to send Santiago back into a hypnotic trance. It worked. Immediately, Santiago looked around, saw the motorcycle, moved over to it, and picked up the red backpack. He walked over to the velvet rope line where the paparazzi were huddled, and slowly unzipped the bag.
Moments later, a man with a briefcase walked out the door. Santiago pulled out the gun and shot the man in the chest several times. The blood bags erupted, and the stuntman, posing as the dignitary, collapsed to the ground. Silver and a psychologist ushered Santiago away from the scene. Moments later, they told him what had happened. Amazingly, Santiago didn’t remember a thing—until Silver suggested that he would.
It’s a pretty scary scenario that someone’s mind could be so manipulated. Now we know that it’s actually possible to program a person to kill. Not just anyone, of course. But someone like Santiago, who is highly susceptible. That part of my novel has now been verified…and it could happen in real life.
You might want to watch this show too ?
Derren Brown,the famous British hypnotist does the same thing on his show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90xfZJQzAhc
Thanks, dz. will check it out!
I have no doubt this sort of thing has happened to further alphabet agency agendas. All of the shootings in the US? Could this be part of a process to unarm the American populace for a future event? Questions remain with many of these incidents.
It opens up a lot of questions.
Every time there’s a new conspiracy theory about taking away guns, people run out and buy more guns, more ammo. As Pogo said back in the late ’60s, “We’ve found the enemy and it is us.”
While this sounds scarey I don’t think it is THAT scarey because for one thing they had to try to hypnotize a lot of people before they found one that could be so controlled and I don’t think this happens without the person’s consent to be that controlled. I understand your point but . . . could be a long discussion.
A scary thought. Didn’t it used to be said that under hypnosis someone wouldn’t do anything that they wouldn’t do in ‘real’ life?
Good question, Mike. Especially considering what I’ve found out about Santiago.
This is very scary indeed.
I have wondered, recently, if something like this wasn’t happening with shootings involving young men who felt apart and alone from others.
Wouldn’t they make good candidates since they wanted to feel that sense of belonging, of being special to someone, of being important?
As the subject in your post keeps “moving on” I would think he would feel a little special. We cannot escape our ego, and I’m not saying that in a negative way.
We all have an ego, it keeps us alive and helps us make decisions.
I’m done some research on Ivan Santiago, the ‘killer’ in the Science Channel’s episode. He is referred to as a Pennsylvania corrections officer in the episode and in Dispenza’s book. Actually, Santiago is a former Pennsylvania corrections officer. He is an actor and the episode is listed in his credits on IMDB. That of course opens a big question. Was the episode, or parts of it faked? Probably. Another question: if the Santiago was acting, were the scientists who took part in the program aware that fact? If so, it really questions their professional standards.
The complete episode is available on YouTube for $1.99. It’s well done, and worth watching, especially in light of knowing that Ivan is an actor. In spite of that, it’s hard to figure out how he passed the ice water test. It all looks very genuine, and how could those medical professionals risk their careers in such a crass gimmick? That’s the big question. Ivan is an actor, but he also might be one helluva subject for hypnosis. If so, I just wish they would’ve told us the whole truth about his background. It would be much more convincing – at least for me. But, of course, any mention of his acting career would probably make it seem as if he were just playing the part of a great subject. Very tricky.
I looked at the IMDb and I saw that his acting gigs start the same year as his participation in this show. So, it seems possible that he was not an actor until he did this show. Then, he got a taste for it and made it his new career. This would mean he was not an actor at the time of participating in this show. What do you think?
Wow, this is interesting! Thanks, Sheila. You may be right!
His being an actor makes sense to me because they need to get into a characters brain.
Maybe that makes them able to be more susceptible because their brain makes them think they are acting out a part?
Just another thought.
That was my sense, too. Sheila Joshi, in a comment, points out that his acting career may have started with this experiment.
That is simply terrifying. I’ve wondered about how this works. We know there are the various, horrible, covert government projects to program people. And some people believe that some of the recent mass shooters in the US were programmed. I don’t know what to think about that.
It also makes me think there is something similar going on even with terrorists who have not been programmed by anyone. I mean, in a sense, they program themselves, and go into an altered state that is not fully integrated with the rest of their consciousness.
Further down the continuum are the more common acts of sexual abuse of children committed in an altered state. The perpetrator sometimes honestly can’t remember doing it, and people wonder how that’s possible. It is, alas.
This is utterly and completely scary. I was aware that someone could be hypnotized to do almost anything, but I didn’t think it could be carried this far. It’s so terrifying to learn that someone actually did this and remembered nothing of what he did. I wish you could tell me that this is a fabrication, but I suspect it isn’t. 🙁
Interestingly, on The Science Channel website there were questions about the veracity of this episode. Some did not want to believe that it was real and suspected that it was faked. Apparently, it was not.
This is scary! I’ve wondered about this watching movies that intimate this is possible. And it is actually possible?!?!