Was there a tulpa secret agent?

[sushi]

Candy Jones was the most popular model of the 1940s. In 1946, she married Harry Conover, who not only didn't love her (he was gay) but also left her in 1958, taking over $100,000 of her money, leaving her with only $36. She sued Conover over the money he had taken, and eventually won, but by that point he had already spent all the money. He got two years in jail, and Candy was left in debt to her lawyer.

 

Candy struggled to get by until 1972, when she started dating Long John Nebel, who ran a very popular conspiracy radio show. After one month together, they got married.

 

Almost immediately, John noticed something strange about his wife: sometimes her voice would get deep and her personality would change. The normally loving and gentle woman would become harsh and aggressive.

 

Candy had trouble sleeping. John offered to hypnotize her to help her sleep, but she insisted that she couldn't be hypnotized. He tried it anyway, not telling her that he was hypnotizing her, and it worked very well. She was able to sleep. This became a regular thing for them, John hypnotizing Candy every night, because she couldn't sleep without it. In spite of the regular hypnosis, John couldn't get Candy to admit that he had hypnotized her -- she firmly believed that she could not be hypnotized.

 

John didn't tell her to, but often when he hypnotized her, she'd suddenly regress mentally to childhood, and he'd have a conversation with the child Candy, before putting her to sleep.

 

One night, Candy regressed to a later age. John realized that Candy believed she was talking to a CIA psychiatrist -- the same man who told her that she couldn't be hypnotized. He also discovered that this other person that Candy seemed to become was called "Arlene". Sometimes when he'd hypnotize Candy, he'd talk to Candy, and sometimes to Arlene. Realizing that something unusual was going on, John started deliberately regressing Candy, and recording their sessions.

 

John uncovered that "Dr. Jensen", the CIA psychiatrist, had interviewed Candy for a job. Candy was desperate for money after her divorce, so she was very interested. However, instead of asking normal interview questions, Jensen seemed more interested in talking about Candy's childhood.

 

Candy had told Jensen that her childhood was very lonely. She didn't have real friends, only a cat, a dog, and sometimes the servant's girl. But when Candy was feeling lonely, she would go to her grandmother's room, where there was a large dressing table with three mirrors. Candy would sit in front of that dressing table, and pretend like all of the reflections of herself were different people, and have little tea parties with them. Eventually, she didn't even need the mirrors to talk to them.

 

Jensen was most interested in Arlene, who was a very athletic girl with a domineering personality, who wanted to run things. Again and again, Jensen turned the conversation back to Arlene. He gave Candy a dose of what he called "vitamins", and began to hypnotize her.

 

ARLENE: ...and all of a sudden I was able to say a few words and start to talk again.

 

JOHN: (laughing) And was he surprised?

 

ARLENE: He backed away. I got ahold of his arm, and then he said--

 

JOHN: You mean Dr. Jensen's arm?

 

ARLENE: Yes, with my left hand. And I pulled him over, and he said, "Let go!"...And he said, "What are you trying to do?...And he said, "Candy, Candy, stop that!"...And I said, "This is Arlene."...And he said, "You're hurting me!" (a pleased laugh)...And I was. And he said, "Good God, you're strong."...

 

JOHN: Meaning you, Arlene?

 

ARLENE: Yes. And he said, "You're Arlene."...And I said, "Who were you expecting?"

 

Jensen gave Candy a trigger: she would sit in front of a mirror, just like she did as a child, and he would say something, and she would become Arlene. He could even turn her into Arlene over the phone.

 

They gave Arlene a last name: Grant. It had been Candy's grandmother's name. A passport was made for Arlene Grant, with a picture of Candy wearing a wig and makeup.

 

Arlene was sent off for training, where she learned to search a room, conceal clues, commit suicide with a poisonous lipstick, or kill somebody by poisoning a needle with that lipstic. She learned to use acid and various types of guns, how to climb ropes, write coded messages on her fingernails and paint over them with polish.

 

With this knowledge, she was sent overseas on several missions for the CIA.

 

And in the 70s, Long John Nebel uncovered this story with hypnosis.

 

It's easy to dismiss this story as fiction. After all, Long John Nebel was a host of a radio show about conspiracies, and he had been known to make up stories for his show before. The interesting thing though, is that the book about Candy Jones came out the year *before* the CIA went public about how they'd spent decades doing experiments on hypnosis, drugs, and mind control under the name MKULTRA.

 

So was it true? It's difficult to say, but it's possible that Arlene Grant was the most famous and influential tulpa ever.

 

Candy Jones information: 1, 2, 3.

[Stevie]

This is super interesting, but a lot of things about it strike me as unbelievable. Granted, I'm not an authority on anything

that's not called pro wrestling

I'm just giving mostly useless knee jerk reactions here.

 

I was gonna start this off by calling bullshit on hypnosis, but the internet is telling me that it's true. Though it's not allowed to be used in courtrooms for whatever reason, which I find interesting. I'm still plenty skeptical, though.

 

So like, hypnosis is all about suggestion, right? Couldn't he be suggesting things to her like having an alternate person in the process? Or suggesting childhood regression? I mean, who's to say that childhood regression is even valid as an idea? It seems pretty out there to me. The whole concept of regression seems to stem from stuff Freud came out with, and basically everything he's done has been discredited.

 

It's also easy to get people to fall into traps of believing shit that isn't real, see Satanic Ritual Abuse which more or less was just asking leading questions.

 

I also don't think that the CIA using drugs, hypnosis, whatever is really that novel an idea. The public would've at least had conspiracy theories about it (huh, funny that the dude was a conspiracy theorist) before the CIA came out and confirmed it.

 

In short, yeah, I doubt it's true that this lady seriously was an actual secret agent or whatever. Sure, maybe she had a tulpa or something like it, but even that's disputable in my eyes.

[sushi]

Well, I do consider myself a bit of an authority on hypnosis, and I agree with you about some of that. The reason hypnosis is not legal evidence in court is because of how easy it is to give someone false memories -- even by accident. It doesn't sound at all unlikely that Long John Nebel, the conspiracy show host, accidentally created memories of a conspiracy.

 

But yeah, hypnosis is totally real, and the CIA totally did experiment with it from the late 40s to the early 70s. One of their experiments involved hypnotizing a girl to shoot another girl (unknown to her, the gun was not loaded) and afterward to have no memory of having done so, and another involved hypnotizing a girl to rob a sleeping man of his wallet and set a (fake) bomb, and having no memory of it. If you don't believe that, you can get this information directly from the CIA by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request and asking for the documents with IDs 190527 and 190691. The request should be free of charge. (Or you can just read the transcripts here.) But I think you're right that Nebel had probably heard rumors about this stuff before it became public knowledge.

 

You're right about the connection to Freud, but you have the order reversed. Freud studied under Jean-Martin Charcot, who was one of the influential early hypnotists. Granted, hypnotism was pretty crackpot back then -- Charcot had this idea that only hysterics could be hypnotized, meaning that only women could be hypnotized, because the people of the time believed in a disease called "female hysteria", which was probably created by hypnotists who didn't know what they were doing to begin with. It was a big mess, and hypnotism didn't really become scientific until around the 1950s.

 

The real puzzler for me is why the CIA would care about pre-existing imaginary friends rather than just creating a new personality. G.H. Estabrooks published Hypnotism in 1943, describing how to create a personality for a secret agent with hypnotism, so you'd think that the CIA would know about it. But the CIA definitely did study dissociative states in children, so the idea of working with a childhood imaginary friend isn't completely out there.

 

Wikipedia does list some additional evidence for this story:

Bain[2] reported that associates in Jones' modeling schools asserted that Jones indeed had some puzzling absences – supposed business trips where little or no business seemed to be conducted. Bain[2] also writes that another piece of evidence came forth when "Candy inadvertently held onto a passport of 'Arlene Grant': Candy in a dark wig and dark makeup". Jones says she had no memory of dressing up in such an outfit, or of posing for a passport in a different name.

 

Bain[2] also claimed that a tape recordedanswering machine message was left on Jones and Nebel's home telephone number on July 3, 1973:

 

"This is Japan Airlines calling on oh-three July at 4.10 p.m. ... Please have Miss Grant call 759-9100 ... she is holding a reservation on Japan Airlines Flight 5, for the sixth of July, Kennedy to Tokyo, with an option on toTaipei. This is per Cynthia that we are calling". When Jones telephoned the number and asked for Cynthia, she was told that no one of that name worked at the reservations desk.

 

Bain[2] speculates that "Cynthia" might have been a code word for "CIA".

 

Additionally, Brian Haughton notes that "There was also a letter [Jones] wrote to her attorney, William Williams, to cover herself in case she died or disappeared suddenly or under unusual circumstances; she told him she was not at liberty to reveal exactly what she was involved in. Bain wrote to Williams who corroborated this fact."[6]

However, note that most of this evidence came from Bain, a friend of Nebel's, and the man who wrote the book on Candy Jones being a secret agent. So it's a bit questionable.

 

The story does seem pretty out there, but there's nothing blatantly wrong about it. It could be true or false, and both Candy and John have since died, so it's pretty hard to find anything pointing one way or the other at this point.

[Guest Anonymous]

This reminds me of the book and movie Total Recall.

---

You know, my hostie was alive in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe, just maybe, I was a botched CIA experiment! Maybe I wasn't supposed to be quite so cutsie? They are still trying to forget "the embarrassing incident with subject 346."

[Stevie]

Man, Total Recall is in like my top five favorites movies. I wish I could nobump on this forum but I had to say it.