MEDIA PSYOP:

The 1938 War of the Worlds

Radio Broadcast
Carl James
1st Edition - Copyright © 2019 by Carl James
Cover Art – Copyright © 2019 by Carl James
Author Biography
Carl James was born and raised in Lichfield, Staffordshire. Carl has worked
for over 25 years in the healthcare profession – including 5 years as a
therapeutic activities co-ordinator for the elderly. He has also worked for
many years as a singer-songwriter and musician in the live music scene. In
1998, he co-founded (and became the lead singer of) “Who’s Renown” - a
tribute to rock legends The Who. The band spent the next 14 years
performing at some of the UK’s biggest live music venues and festivals,
simultaneously gaining a reputation as one of the country’s leading tribute
acts. Carl dedicates much of his time to alternative knowledge research and
writing. In early 2011, he launched “The Truth Seeker’s Guide” blog website
– where he has since covered subjects like 9/11, mind control, weather
modification, chemtrails, directed free energy, corruption in the
mainstream media, false flag events, subliminal messaging, social
engineering, perception management, and aspects of the ET/UFO
phenomenon. His specific areas of interest are predictive programming and
esoteric symbolism hidden within the output of the mainstream media
entertainment industry. His website can be found here:
http://thetruthseekersguide.blogspot.co.uk. In 2012, Carl gave his first
public alternative knowledge talk and has since spoken at a number of
venues across the UK on a variety of subjects. He has given several
internet, radio and television interviews on these subjects. His published
books include “Science Fiction and the Hidden Global Agenda” – Volumes
1 & 2 and “What Really Happened at the London 2012 Olympics”. Carl is
also an occasional graphic artist.

Dedication
In loving memory of my Dad, Owen James. He passed away during the
writing of this book and it was his love of science fiction that inspired my
youthful imagination and laid the groundwork for my interest in the subject
of this book. He will be deeply missed.

ii
 Table of Contents
Introduction vi
CHAPTER ONE: “SETTING THE STAGE” 1
Discovering “The War of the Worlds” 2
News-real? 5
Authenticity is Key 9
Who Deserves the Credit? 13
CHAPTER TWO: “MASS PANIC?” 15
How Did People Really React? 16
The “Meteorite” Narrative 18
Evidence of How Listeners Reacted 19
Muddling the Panic Myth 23
CHAPTER THREE: “THE RADIO RESEARCH PROJECT” 27
Rockefeller Paycheque 28
Mass Media Research 29
Studying “The War of the Worlds” 33
Psychology of Panic 37
The “Psyop” Premise 43
CHAPTER FOUR: “THE PROJECT’S PLAYERS” 45
CONNECTING TAVISTOCK TO THE RRP 46
Paul Lazarsfeld 49
Gordon Allport 51
Theodor Adorno 52
Frank Stanton 57
Hadley Cantril 64
CHAPTER FIVE: “A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ROCKEFELLERS” 73
An Elite Family Agenda 74
The “Indoctrination” Model 76
The Ludlow Massacre 78
The Modern Age of Perception Management 80
Seizing Media Control 82

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CHAPTER SIX: “THE ANNUAL REPORTS” 87
Teaching Films 88
Newspeak 89
The Tavistock Crowd 91
More Evidence from the Reports 95
CHAPTER SEVEN: “THE H.G. WELLS CONNECTION” 101
The Original Author 102
Shared Eugenics 104
Guerrilla Warfare 105
Wells & Tavistock 108
Intelligence Asset? 110
CHAPTER EIGHT: “THE REVEALING LIFE OF ORSON WELLES” 115
The March of Time 116
The Federal Theatre Project 119
The Sulzberger Effect 122
Campbell’s Soup 125
Welles & RKO 126
It’s All True 128
Our Little Experiment 131
CHAPTER NINE: “IT’S ALL ABOUT ALIENS” 135
Rockefellers & ET 136
The Durant Report 139
The Brookings Institute 140
F for Fake 142
Enter Mr Jackson 143
The CIA Factor 148
Watch The Skies… Or Not! 151
CHAPTER TEN: “TEMPLATE FOR TERROR” 159
World War II 160
The Ultimate Psyop 161
9/11 & WOTW Synchronicities 165
The Rockefellers & The WTC 167
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War of the Worlds / War on Terror 170
The New Model for the Future 171
Conclusion 173
Also available from this author: 177

v
Introduction
In late 2016, I began to put together several years’ worth of gathered
research notes on the subject of the inner workings, origins of, and
possible motivations behind the mainstream media. This research
was intended to form the basis of a book that would serve as a
“guide” to understanding the true nature of the mainstream media –
in all its forms. My hope was that, once read, the book would help
people to recognise the effect that the medium has on anybody who
pays it more than a fleeting amount of attention.

Once its true nature was revealed, the reader would become
empowered to see the medium for what it truly is and, perhaps, turn
it off once and for all. It is a realisation that has served me well in the
recent years of my life. I have also shared this knowledge with
others, who have also reassessed their relationship with the media –
to great effect. The idea of a book that contained this information
held great appeal to me, as I believed that such a work could be an
invaluable tool to potentially help many people.

The core of the aforementioned book would explore the notion that
the media continually lies to and misleads the masses. The medium
regularly engages in covert tactics – tactics that have been carefully
cultivated from a long history of elite-controlled psychological
warfare and social engineering. There are many examples of these
tactics throughout the history of the mainstream media and one
such example that I felt deserved a token nod was the infamous CBS
radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds in 1938.

Initially, I did not feel the need to write too much about this
broadcast as I had already looked at the broadcast in a lengthy
chapter of my 2016 book “Science Fiction and the Hidden Global
Agenda – Volume One”. I did not wish to reproduce huge amounts of
text from that book and settled on referring to the matter in the new
vi
book in the form of a brief and generic overview. Before I did this, I
decided to go away and spend a day or two checking to see if there
was anything new I could bring to the subject before I moved on.

Those few days turned into a few weeks and then a few months! It
appears that a wealth of new material has become available on the
subject of The War of the Worlds 1938 radio broadcast in the last
couple of years. I felt it was important to include this new material
along with my overview of the 1938 broadcast in my book about the
media. As I continued to write, I realised that the subject of the 1938
broadcast was overshadowing the rest of the content in the book. I
decided at that point that there would need to be two books. One
about the overall workings and true nature of the mainstream media
(a book I will hopefully return to in the not too distant future) and
another that would encompass The War of the Worlds media-related
material – and that the latter would need to take priority.

In truth, The War of the Worlds material is most worthy of a book in

its own right as it tells an enthralling story. Here, I will take you on a
journey through the entirety of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938
broadcast of The War of the Worlds – including Orson Welles’
formative years in broadcast radio, how he co-steered The Mercury
Theatre on the Air, and how he came to be involved with the 1938
broadcast. I will demonstrate how Orson Welles, his Mercury
Theatre peers, and the 1938 broadcast itself became intertwined
with the machinations of the elite Rockefeller family. I will also look
at how (via the Rockefeller Foundation) the 1938 broadcast was
studied for its psychological value as a tool of perception
management and social engineering, and examine the possibility that
the broadcast itself was part of a larger psychological operation
(“psyop”).

I will also examine the long-held “urban myth” that there was a
“mass panic” amongst those who listened to the 1938 broadcast.
vii
Finally, I will discuss the implications of the 1938 broadcast for the
future of the mainstream media (and its role in steering and
rewriting the history of global events in the years and decades that
followed the broadcast).

The 1938 broadcast was far more than a simple retelling of a classic
science fiction story. The “official” account of events before, during,
and after the broadcast obscure a fascinating narrative that weaves
its way through the corridors of clandestine elite-agenda obsessed
organisations and encompasses all manner of curious and shadowy
individuals. Strangely, it is a story that is rarely told. Given the
implications, it is vitally important that we continue to tell people
what really happened and, in the process, help to uproot the
carefully cultivated myths that have overgrown the truth.

Carl James.

viii
 Chapter One:
“Setting the Stage”

1
Discovering “The War of the Worlds”
On Sunday 5th November 2017, I was busily writing this book when
my Dad passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. For much of the
following two years, it became incredibly difficult for me to even
consider picking up my laptop and returning to my writing. In the
process of coming to terms with the loss of my Dad, I realised that
there was something very poignant to the subject matter of this
book – something that probably explains (although it would have
only been a subconscious realisation at the time) why it was so
difficult for me to return to writing it. As time passed, I eventually
felt ready to continue this work. By then, my subconscious
realisation about the significance of the subject of this book, in my
personal life, had passed into my conscious mind. All the dots were
connected!

My Dad and I often disagreed (in a healthy and jovial way!) on all
manner of subjects. However, there were a few interests that we
shared with a passion. One was an interest in mysteries and cover-
ups (particularly Ufology) and it is probably fair to say that I would
not have become an alternative knowledge researcher had he not
set me out on the proverbial path in the first place. My Dad’s interest
in the aforementioned subjects came about as a result of a very vivid
and bizarre UFO sighting that he and a close school friend witnessed
in the mid/late-1950s. I truly believe that the effect of that sighting
triggered another great interest in my Dad – one that we also came
to share: our love of science fiction. From a very young age, my Dad
would sit me down to watch reruns of the likes of Star Trek,
Battlestar Galactica, The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space,
Land of the Giants, The Invaders… the list goes on! Another passion
that we shared was music – both to listen to and perform. My Dad
had a huge vinyl record collection. During my youth, there was never
a day that went by when there wasn’t something being played at full

2
tilt on the turntable. My Dad’s record collection was very eclectic. In
amongst this wealth of musical treats was one album that held an
almost hypnotic grip upon me – Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical adaption
of H.G. Wells’ classic 1898 science fiction story The War of the
Worlds.

For those of you unfamiliar with the original narrative (if so, where
have you been!?), H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds tells the story
of an invasion of the Earth by aliens from the planet Mars. The story
begins very sedately in the sleepy country landscape of south
England in 1899. The “narrator”, the central character who recounts
the story, describes a visit to a local astronomical observatory to
witness explosions on the surface of the planet Mars. It turns out
that these explosions are actually projectiles being launched toward
the Earth. The narrator describes the first landing of one of these
projectiles at Horsell Common near Woking in Surrey. At the site, an
artificial cylinder is discovered. Inside, Martian creatures construct
tripod war machines for use in their invasion of the planet Earth. The
machinery is outfitted with an energy weapon - the “Heat Ray” - and
a poisonous chemical weapon - the “Black Smoke”. Eventually, the
British Army arrive and the Martians fully emerge with their
machinery and quickly overpower the human military. The Martian
tripods set out across the British countryside destroying everybody
and everything in their path. The narrator describes how more and
more Martian machines appear on the landscape and bring about
the subsequent fall of mankind. The narrator describes his efforts to
survive the destruction. Eventually, when all hope for humanity
appears lost, the Martians become overwhelmed by simple bacteria
in Earth’s atmosphere – bacteria that human life has long since
become largely accustomed to – and they die.

Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical adaption of The War of the Worlds

became something of a cultural phenomenon upon its vinyl album
release. I have a distinct memory from my youth of this album being
3
part of the record collections of virtually every household that my
family ever visited. Although our youthful memories aren’t always
completely accurate (given the passage of time), it does appear that
Wayne’s musical opus was indeed very popular – at least in Europe.
According to Wikipedia (not the most reliable source, I know, but this
data does appear to be externally verifiable), “The album itself spent
290 weeks in the UK album charts. It was in the top 10 in 22
countries and reached #1 in 11 countries.”1 In 2018, the album
celebrated forty years since its release and it still remains in the top
forty best-selling UK albums of all time – with over two and half
million sales as of 2018. I have never been entirely sure what it was
about Jeff Wayne’s musical adaption of The War of the Worlds that I
found so fascinating in my youth. Obviously, the story was
engrossing and the music was first rate - despite being somewhat
unnerving to listen to for an impressionable youngster. The same
could also be said of the book of artwork (by Peter Goodfellow, Geoff
Taylor and Michael Trim) that came with the album. It suitably
illustrated and set the tone for the story. These paintings were
hauntingly beautiful and disturbingly eerie all at once. The album
became a regular play fixture in our home and soon prompted me
search out the other variations of Wells’ original story.

If memory serves me, my next exposure to Wells’ narrative was via

the George Pal-produced 1953 movie version. I am pretty sure that it
was not long after this that I read the original Wells novel for the first
time; quickly followed by my first listen to Orson Welles’ 1938 radio
play adaption of the story for CBS - an audio cassette copy of which
was loaned to me by a school friend! Next came a viewing of the
underwhelming and short-lived television series (1988 – 1990). In the
years since, I have read or watched most of the updated adaptions
(including Steven Spielberg’s 2005 version) of the original story and
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wayne%27s_Musical_Version_of_The_War_of_the_Worlds

4
indulged in the myriad of low-budget “reimagined” and spin-off
versions. At the time of writing this, I have also learned that the UK’s
BBC channel have completed an adaption to be aired in late 2019.
Also (in November 2018), it was reported that Fox Networks Group
and Canal+ had begun development of yet another adaption of War
of the Worlds. Initial reports described the project as being set in a
contemporary time frame (as opposed to the BBC effort which is set
in Edwardian England) and that House of Cards actor Greg Kinnear
had been approached to star in a lead role. The project’s initial script
was penned by writer Howard Overman (of Merlin and Dirk Gently
fame.) For all these variations of the narrative, the versions of The
War of the Worlds that remain my favourites (at least at this point in
time) are the Jeff Wayne musical adaption and Orson Welles’ 1938
radio play.

What has always interested me about the latter is the mythology

that sprang up around the broadcast – a subject that I will examine
at length in forthcoming chapters of this book. Even the “myths”
surrounding the 1938 broadcast have received media adaptions –
such as the 1957 Westinghouse Studio One show “The Night America
Trembled” and the 1975 telefilm “The Night That Panicked America”.
The 1938 CBS broadcast was also incorporated into and quasi-
fictionalised in the likes of The War of the Worlds television series (in
the episode “Eye for an Eye”) and the movie “Buckaroo Banzai”.

News-real?
On Sunday, October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and The Mercury
Theatre on the Air (under the aegis of CBS radio) staged a live
broadcast radio adaption of The War of the Worlds. The project was
conceived under the guidance of producer John Houseman, the
infamous Hollywood legend Orson Welles and their production
company The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The job of writing the radio
adaption was given to Welles and Houseman’s collaborator Howard
5
E. Koch. There is much conflicting information about why this
particular story was chosen as a radio adaption and who (in The
Mercury Theatre) should be given credit for envisaging various
individual aspects of it. The reason for this is that The Mercury
Theatre on the Air was very much a team operation involving many
people. They would constantly bounce ideas of each other and make
continual revisions when a good idea came along. Orson Welles, in
particular, was notorious for this. It has been documented that he
would even make tweaks to the shape of the final story or script of
any given radio drama as it was being broadcast live. This would
catch out his fellow actors and players, causing them to immediately
react to keep up.

The realization of the 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds did
not begin as a desire to portray this particular story. Rather, it was
born from Orson Welles desire to create a “fake crisis” / dramatic
news broadcast – an idea he had been toying with for a while. As
documented in A. Brad Schwartz’s 2015 article “The Infamous ‘War
of the Worlds’ Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke”, Welles
once said, “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in
such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,
[...] and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear
to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere
radio play.”2

Where Welles got this idea from is widely debated. It is argued that
he was inspired by The Columbia Workshop’s presentation of
Archibald McLeish’s “Air Raid” which debuted on October 27, 1938 –
three days before The War of the Worlds. McLeish was an interesting
character with connections that fit the larger context of this book.

2 A. Brad Schwartz, "The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke", smithsonian.com,
May 6, 2015 - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-
fluke-180955180/

6
The following is taken from Wikipedia: “Archibald MacLeish also
assisted with the development of the new ‘Research and Analysis
Branch’ of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the
Central Intelligence Agency. […] During World War II MacLeish also
served as director of the War Department's Office of Facts and
Figures and as the assistant director of the Office of War
Information. These jobs were heavily involved with propaganda,
which was well-suited to MacLeish's talents; he had written quite a
bit of politically motivated work in the previous decade. He spent a
year as the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and a
further year representing the U.S. at the creation of UNESCO. After
this, he retired from public service and returned to academia.” 3

Like McLeish, Welles had a long historical affiliation with The

Columbia Workshop4 so it is entirely possible that he became aware
of McLeish’s “Air Raid” a while before its debut and took his “fake
crisis” / dramatic news broadcast inspiration from there. If true, we
must consider this time frame – given that there is evidence that
Welles idea had already been conceived before Air Raid’s debut date
of October 27, 1938. Note that “Air Raid” was broadcast only three
days prior to “The War of the Worlds” broadcast. Some researchers
have postulated that Welles “fake crisis” idea was inspired by a much
earlier radio broadcast - Father Ronald Abuthnott Knox’s
“Broadcasting the Barricades,” which aired on BBC radio at 7:40pm
on January 16, 1926. Although the evidence shows that Welles was
almost certainly not in a position to have heard this broadcast, it is
infinitely possible that he became aware of it in the intervening
twelve years between that and his 1938 War of the Worlds

3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archibald_MacLeish See also: Katz, Barry M. 1991. “German Historians in the Office of
Strategic Services.” In: An Interrupted Past: German Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States After 1933.
Pages 136-137.
4Margaret A. Blanchard, "History of the Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopaedia", Taylor & Francis Ltd /
Routledge, Dec 2013, ISBN10: 1135917426 / ISBN13: 9781135917425 (pg. 239)

7
broadcast. If Welles was inspired by McLeish’s “Air Raid”, he never
openly acknowledged it. In fact, he actually cited (as he told his long-
time friend, the film director Peter Bogdanovich) “Broadcasting the
Barricades” as a source of inspiration.5

Broadcasting the Barricades did receive some significant press

exposure. According to Raymond Snoddy’s BBC website article “Show
that sparked a riot”, “In the broadcast - itself now the subject of a
new BBC programme - the BBC interrupted an academic lecture
from Oxford to announce that rioters were gathering in Trafalgar
Square. Then in a series of progressively dramatic announcements,
complete with sound effects, the BBC reported that the transport
minister had been hanged from a lamppost, the Savoy Hotel
destroyed and Big Ben blown up. [...] It was of course all a spoof -
the first of its kind to be broadcast. [...] The BBC's broadcast had
been widely reported in the US newspapers. The New York Times
even sneered at the naïve British for being taken in by such an
obvious spoof. [...] The BBC was widely condemned for creating
such a panic by the self-interested press, obviously hostile to the
new competing medium. And there were complaints from 249
listeners. [...] When John Reith, founder of the British Broadcasting
Company, reported back to directors on reactions to the
programme he noted that 2,307 listeners had got in touch
expressing their appreciation.”6

Several sources have argued – quite convincingly – that Broadcasting

the Barricades was an early example of a media conveyed,
experiment in mass public perceptions and reactions. There is also

5A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 52-53)
6Raymond Snoddy, “Show that sparked a riot”, Monday, 13 June, 2005 -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ifs/hi/newsid_4080000/newsid_4081000/4081060.stm For more on “Broadcasting
the Barricades”, I recommend reading Paul Slade’s article “Holy terror: The first great radio hoax” -
http://www.planetslade.com/ronald-knox.html

8
some circumstantial evidence demonstrating that this particular
broadcast was assisted (to varying extents) by some of the early
pioneers of The Tavistock Clinic (later to become The Tavistock
Institute of Human Relations.) These individuals had connections
with (even in the formative years of Tavistock) the UK’s British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – a relationship which continues,
and has thrived, to this day. I note the significance of The Tavistock
Clinic / Institute of Human Relations at this point, as this organisation
will repeatedly surface in the pages of this book – in relation to the
1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds and the larger themes,
context and potential agenda surrounding it.

Authenticity is Key
Orson Welles was known to dramatize and over-embellish his life
and muses. Whatever the inspiration for his 1938 fake “news crisis”
broadcast, we can only know for certain that the concept was a
proverbial “coat-hanger” on which to drape the War of the Worlds
narrative. Before settling on this story, Welles and his colleagues in
The Mercury Theatre on the Air allegedly considered several well-
known literary sources for adaption. Two such examples were
seemingly “The Purple Cloud” by M.P. Shiel and “The Lost World” by
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In studying these examples, I believe I have
identified a possible motivation as to why The War of the Worlds
became the final narrative of choice for the 1938 broadcast. If any of
the other narratives had instead been adapted, I doubt they would
have been as effective in creating a fake/staged “news crisis”
broadcast. The stories of amorphous purple clouds, steered by omni-
present ethereal forces, that wipe out the human race (as in the
aforementioned “The Purple Cloud”), or rampaging dinosaurs and
“ape men” (as in “The Lost World”) would not have had the air of
realism and immediacy that The War of the Worlds had. The tale of
foreign invaders, mechanical fighting machines (that spew fire and

9
poison gas), and projectiles falling from the sky, was a very real
possibility in 1938 – particularly given that the global populace was
on the brink of World War II. The War of the Worlds was a very
astute story choice for staging a fake “news crisis” concept.

The choice was perhaps even more apt, given that H.G. Wells’
original story of The War of the Worlds had already capitalised on
“realism”. Wells imbued his story with real locations and routes (he
actually used British Ordnance Survey maps to plot the journey of
the Martian invaders), and referred to genuine newspaper articles
and scientific papers in the book. He also wrote the book in a
journalistic / reportage narrative format to increase the realistic
effect. The Mercury Theatre’s adaption of the story transplanted
(naturally) the narrative to an America setting, with the initial landing
of the Martian cylinder taking place in the small town of Grover’s
Mill, New Jersey – a real location that is approximately 30 miles away
(at least as the proverbial “crow flies”) from New York.

This wasn’t actually the first time that H. G. Wells’ source material
for The War of the Worlds had been relocated to the New York Area.
According Wikipedia: “Fighters from Mars consists of two
unauthorized edited versions of The War of the Worlds serial that
appeared in the Cosmopolitan Magazine between April and
December 1897. The first version appeared in the New York Evening
Journal between December 5, 1897 and January 11, 1898, and was
entitled Fighters from Mars, or The War of the Worlds. The second
version appeared in the Boston Post between January 8, 1898 and
February 1898, and was entitled Fighters from Mars, or The War of
the Worlds in and near Boston. These versions change the settings
to the local areas where the newspapers were on sale, and also
edited out most of the passages containing science, science details
pertaining to ordinary people and problematic actions by the
narrator. Even though they are considered unauthorized it does
seem that Wells may have inadvertently given the go ahead to the
10
versions, as can be seen from a letter that was published in the
magazine The Critic in March 1898.”7

The 1938 CBS radio adaption further departed from Well’s source
narrative by staging the first two-thirds of the broadcast as
seemingly realistic standard radio fare – music hall entertainment, a
weather report, breaking news bulletins, etc. – rather than an out
and out dramatic play. Only the final twenty minutes of the hour
shift (somewhat) to a ‘first person singular’ dramatic format when
the character of the Princeton University astronomer Professor
Richard Pierson (played by Orson Welles) recounts the final phase of
the Martian conquest of Earth. Even this added to the potential
confusion of the listener, as one would assume that this shift would
have taken place during the station break at the half-hour point
rather than a further ten minutes later as Welles stipulated.

Further realism was added to the early parts of the broadcast via
veteran actor Frank Readick’s portrayal of Carl Phillips, a reporter
who describes an initial attack by the Martians at Grover’s Mill. His
dramatic reaction to the fictional attack was based upon repeatedly
listening to Herbert Morrison’s “as it happened” recording of the
Hindenburg disaster. When listening to the War of the Worlds
broadcast and comparing it with Herbert Morrison’s recording you
can hear the similar use of vocal inflections, reaction and emotion. In
The War of the Worlds broadcast, an unnamed news reporter later
dies atop a building in New York as he describes the “black smoke”
pouring across the city and poisoning the fleeing masses. This scene
also utilised one of the first dramatic uses of “dead air” on radio,
when the reporter chokes to death from the black smoke. Welles
purposely conducted his fellow actors to hold the silent pause for a
full six seconds before they continued.

7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighters_from_Mars

11
There was also Kenneth Delmar's portrayal of ‘the Secretary of the
Interior,’ earlier in the broadcast which (despite being planned as a
portrayal of then US President Franklin Roosevelt – FDR - and
subsequently changed to a non-descript official when CBS lawyers
allegedly intervened) sounded just like Roosevelt. Roosevelt used the
radio regularly to make announcements and addresses to the US
people. In this regard, many people were familiar with the sound of
his voice on the radio. Yet, with Delmar’s character being almost a
spitting sound-alike of FDR, another layer of realism was added.
Another factor was the use of the character of Professor of
Astronomy Richard Pierson from the University of Princeton – a real
institution located in the New York region. This character and the
references to his “work” at the University added an air of seemingly
genuine authority to proceedings.

These dramatic portrayals of a scientific academic, a Washington

official, and accounts of devastation on the East coast of America,
compounded the perceived realism of the broadcast - thanks, in part,
to certain rules of conduct that existed in radio during the 1930s. As
A. Brad Schwartz describes it, in his excellent book “Broadcast
Hysteria – Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake
News”, “Major networks banned the use of pre-recorded content in
the 1930s. Everything listeners heard over NBC and CBS in that
decade – every concert, every dramatic program, and every comedy
show – aired live, because of preference, not technical necessity.
The networks argued that the use of recordings in news broadcasts,
even more than in musical or dramatic programming, was
particularly deceptive – a ‘sort of hoax… on the listener’ – because
audiences had been trained to regard radio shows as live events. By
this logic, truth and liveness went in hand in hand; one could not
exist without the other. A recording, even of a real event, seemed

12
less authentic to 1930s listeners than a live performance of a
fictional program.”8

Who Deserves the Credit?

Orson Welles is often credited as the “genius” who orchestrated the
overall vision of The War of the Worlds broadcast. Although Welles
initiated the staged news “crisis” concept, it appears that his
involvement was somewhat less than wholly encompassing. Welles
was seemingly preoccupied with his production of the stage play
“Dante’s Death” at the time. He did indeed come up with the “crisis”
concept and then the project was handed to Howard Koch to script-
write. Many of the cast and crew of The Mercury Theatre on the Air
added a wealth of suggestions to the script along the way.9 Despite
this, there were still a few key elements that Welles exclusively
contributed to the broadcast in the final stages – elements that
undoubtedly added to the realism and overall tone of the broadcast.

According to A. Brad Schwartz, in “Broadcast Hysteria”, “One of

Welles’s key revisions on War of the Worlds, in Houseman’s view,
involved its pacing. Welles drastically slowed down the opening
scenes by adding dialogue and drawing out the music to the point
of tedium. Houseman objected strenuously, but Welles overruled
him. He believed that listeners would only accept the unrealistic
speed of the invasion if the broadcast started slowly, then gradually
sped up. Once the interplanetary war began, the pacing became
chaotic, rudely jerking listeners from location to location, and event
to event, without giving them any time to get their bearings. […]
One of Welles’s most effective revisions came directly from his
experience on The March of Time. Koch’s first draft had included a

8A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 17)
9 Ibid. (pg. 50)

13
speech from ‘the Secretary of War,’ reassuring listeners that their
government was doing everything possible to combat the Martians.
But it had been eliminated, likely at the behest of CBS’s lawyers,
before the script was mimeographed. Welles put it back in and
reassigned it to a less inflammatory Cabinet official, ‘the Secretary
of the Interior,’ in order to appease the network. But he gave the
character a purely vocal promotion by casting Kenneth Delmar, a
March of Time actor who could do a pitch perfect impression of
Franklin Roosevelt. Impersonating the President on air, on almost
any show that was not The March of Time, was still expressly
forbidden. But Welles suggested, with a wink and a nod that
Delmar make his character sound presidential, and Delmar happily
complied.”10

With all the preparations out of the way, Welles and The Mercury
Theatre took to the airwaves on the evening of Sunday 30th October,
1938, and unveiled their opus to the listening public. There is no
doubt that The War of the Worlds 1938 broadcast is an enthralling
and fascinating piece of radio. Even listening to it today, the
unfolding narrative holds its own amongst some of the most lauded
contemporary media pieces. It really does portray a palpable sense
of tension and dread. It is no wonder that, once the show was over,
another story would unfold – one of panicked listeners running for
the proverbial hills. However, like the broadcast itself, it appears that
this too was simply another flight of fancy.

10 Ibid. (pgs. 63 - 64)

14
 Chapter Two:
“Mass Panic?”

15
How Did People Really React?
In the eighty-plus years since The War of the Worlds CBS broadcast, a
quasi-myth of seemingly gargantuan proportions has grown. The
story (still cited by many people as fact) goes that on the night of
October 30th, 1938, a huge number of radio listeners mistook The
War of the Worlds broadcast for a series of news reports and
accounts about real events. The story goes further in claiming that
listeners became so alarmed by the unfolding narrative that they
literally panicked. Stories presented in the media after the broadcast
include the likes of people hurriedly gathering up what little they
could carry and fleeing their homes, others bundling their worldly
possessions into their cars and driving off in a direction farthest from
any towns and cities, people wandering the streets alerting passers-
by to an invasion from Mars, others phoning or racing to be with
their families and loved ones to wait out the end of civilization, and
tales of country folk forming an armed posse and heading off into
the night to search the terrain for alien invaders. The trouble is that
all of the above was grossly over-exaggerated and, in many cases,
pretty much a fiction – one that was generated and perpetuated by
the press and the media. This idea of a “mass panic” is incredibly
convoluted – and has been allowed to become so as a result of the
great passage of time since the initial broadcast.

There are a number of factors (that have been folded into The War
of the Worlds “mass panic” narrative) left unquestioned and sizeably
unexamined for many years. One prevailing notion is that many
people were duped into thinking the broadcast was real because
they tuned into the show late and missed the initial announcement
that the broadcast was a dramatic radio play. One popular myth that
has endured for decades is that a slew of listeners happened upon
the broadcast when they became bored with listening to the far
more popular rival time-slot show The Chase & Sanborn Hour on

16
NBC. Many “academics” cite a flat performance by Nelson Eddy on
the show as a reason why listeners tuned out. They even cite this
performance as a rendition of the “Neapolitan Love Song” – despite
the fact that Eddy never performed this song on that particular
show. Eddy’s first musical act on the show also ended several
minutes before any of the “alarming” content of The War of the
Worlds was even heard by the public. A later survey concluded that
only 12 percent of those who listened to The War of the Worlds
retuned their dial to CBS after the early skits on The Chase & Sanborn
Hour.11

The audience that did eventually filter through to The War of the
Worlds actually tuned in gradually. For example, Boston’s CBS
affiliate did not air the broadcast - meaning that those listeners in
that area that wanted to tune in had to search their radio dials for
the broadcast on stations that were farther away and, often, static-
ridden. A Gallup poll, conducted after the broadcast, concluded that
40 percent of The War of the Worlds listeners were tuned in from the
very beginning. The poll found that a myriad of factors had delayed
listeners from tuning in from the start – such as parents putting their
children to bed, families clearing away the dishes after an evening
meal, some people were relaxing, reading, studying or listening to
music and lost track of time before they decided to tune into the
broadcast.12 There were many factors contributing to those listeners
who did not catch the announcement of the broadcast being a
dramatic play. Even some of those people that tuned in late were
aware in advance of the true and harmless nature of the broadcast
due to prior advertisements or instinctively interpreting certain
dramatic tropes of the broadcast.

11A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 68 - 69)
12 Ibid. (pg. 70)

17
There were several other seemingly innocent factors that
contributed to the fear that was somewhat stirred at the time of the
broadcast. The small town of Concrete, Washington, suffered a
power cut during the broadcast. Naturally for those people who
briefly believed that something untoward was happening or (at the
very least) became frightened by the broadcast, this would have
done nothing to help their already frayed nerves. Fortunately, the
electricity outage was short-lived and power was soon returned.

The “Meteorite” Narrative

Another oddity was the accounting of initial inquiries made by
citizens to local authorities and newspapers about a “falling
meteorite”. Over the years, the “mass panic” myth has incorporated
these innocent enquiries into the tales of the fleeing and terrified
masses. The “falling meteorite” aspect of the myth came about as a
result of the early portions of The War of the Worlds broadcast when
the character of Professor of Astronomy Richard Pierson (described
as being an alumni of the University of Princeton) and a batch of
reporters and local onlookers descend upon Grover’s Mill (a real-
world location as well as a setting in the play) to gaze upon what
they initially considered to be a harmless meteorite. Some local
authorities and press agencies believed (via nothing other than
misinformed word of mouth) that a real meteorite had actually
landed just outside the real town of Grover’s Mill.

One amusing account involved the Associated Press reporting that,

although there was no Martian invasion, there had been a genuine
meteorite crash. [Author’s Notes: Associated Press did amend this
with a news bulletin at 8:48pm, just over ten minutes before the end
of The War of the Worlds broadcast, stating that the meteorite story

18
was also a hoax.13] The initial AP release prompted The Philadelphia
Inquirer to contact the Princeton Press Club for confirmation about
the meteorite. This inquiry caught the attention of Dr. Arthur F.
Buddington – the Chair of the Geology Department at Princeton
University. Buddington grabbed his associate Professor, Dr. Harry
Hess, jumped in a car and raced down to Grover’s Mill. Excited at the
prospect of finding a freshly landed meteorite, they instead
wandered haplessly around in the dark woods. They found nothing,
although they did occasionally bump into another curious meteorite
hunter!

What is sad about this story, and typical of the way the press blew
the “mass panic” account out of all proportion, is that newspapers in
the following days did not report that these two professors had been
prompted by a misinformed newspaper inquiring about a meteorite.
Rather, these doctors from Princeton University were painted as yet
another example of “gullible” believers of The War of the Worlds
broadcast. The professors hadn’t even been listening to the radio-
play! Such examples (and there are numerous others) demonstrate
how the reaction to the broadcast was misrepresented, developed
and perpetuated by certain parties in the days, weeks, months, and
years following the broadcast - creating the myth of a “mass panic”.

Evidence of How Listeners Reacted

Fortunately, particularly in the last ten years, a few researchers
(myself included) have meticulously studied this notion of a “mass
panic” and found that there is a great deal of evidence to support the
conclusion that public reaction to the 1938 broadcast was somewhat
different to the myth that has been maintained for decades.
Although, I had already identified several key pieces of evidence to
13A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg.94)

19
support this conclusion, there are some researchers who have gone
“the whole hog” and scrutinized a huge wealth of primary evidence
that still exists to comprehensively demonstrate numerous flaws in
the “mass panic” narrative.

One such researcher is A. Brad Schwartz. Although Schwartz has

written numerous articles and studies on the subject, the
culmination of his evidence gathering can be found in his detailed
book “Broadcast Hysteria – Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and
the Art of Fake News”. Schwartz has gone back to original interviews,
documents, testimonies, newspaper articles, and such, to inform his
research. He has also studied the letters that are still known to exist,
written by those people who felt compelled to comment on the
broadcast at the time. In his aforementioned book, he writes
“Fortunately for history, many Americans who personally
experienced War of the Worlds preserved their reactions in writing.
In the wake of the broadcast, the Federal Communications
Commission received more than six hundred letters regarding it,
which are currently held in the National Archives II facility in
College Park, Maryland. These letters have received limited
attention from scholars, but they are incomplete without another,
larger collection, long thought lost, that has only recently
resurfaced. In the days following War of the Worlds, nearly
fourteen hundred people […] wrote to Orson Welles and the
Mercury Theatre about the broadcast. Their letters were donated to
the University of Michigan in 2005 […]” 14

This body of documentation allowed Schwartz to gain some real

insight into the genuine public reaction to the 1938 broadcast.
Granted, it is far from a complete knowledge of how everybody who

14A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 9 - 10)

20
heard the broadcast felt about it, but it does give us a very telling
approximation. Once he had thoroughly read each of the almost
two-thousand letters, Schwartz used the information in the letters to
break down the authors of the letters into numerous, cross-
referenced categories - in order to gauge the public reaction. Here
are his findings:

Of the 1355 letters sent to the Mercury Theatre and Orson Welles:
957 were not frightened, 32 were not frightened but saw people
who were, 6 were not frightened but saw panic, 47 momentarily
believed that the broadcast was real, 170 were frightened by the
broadcast, 14 were told by somebody else and became frightened,
15 were frightened and saw panic, 17 panicked, 5 panicked and saw
panic, 88 did not hear the broadcast and were not frightened, 4 did
not hear the broadcast but saw panic. Of the total 1355 letters: 1092
were untouched by fright or panic and 263 showed evidence of fright
or panic.15

Of the 619 letters sent to the Federal Communications Commission:

321 were not frightened, 12 were not frightened but saw people
who were, 2 were not frightened but saw panic, 10 momentarily
believed that the broadcast was real, 230 were frightened by the
broadcast, 9 were told by somebody else and became frightened, 8
were frightened and saw panic, 4 panicked, 3 panicked and saw
panic, 19 did not hear the broadcast and were not frightened, 1 did
not hear the broadcast but saw panic. Of the total 619 letters: 350
were untouched by fright or panic and 269 showed evidence of fright
or panic.16

In total, 1442 letters (almost three quarters of the total) show no

signs of fright or panic. 532 do (almost one quarter of the total.)
15 Ibid. (pg. 234)
16 Ibid. (pg. 234)

21
Studying the larger evidential data regarding the broadcast itself,
Schwartz has noted that there were actually not that many people
listening to The War of the Worlds CBS broadcast – at least relative
to the overall American radio listening audience and, for that matter,
to those listening in the New York / north-east / east coast region.
Comprehensive surveys after the broadcast concluded that roughly
six million people listened to the broadcast and that approximately
one million had been (to various degrees) alarmed or frightened by
it.17 ‘The Mercury Theatre on the Air’ did have a dedicated audience
who had been tuning in since the beginning of the season. However,
this audience was relatively small.18

According to Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, in their 2013

article “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic”, “The night the
program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000
households for its national ratings survey. “To what program are
you listening?” the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent
answered a radio “play” or “the Orson Welles program,” or
something similar indicating CBS. None said a “news broadcast,”
according to a summary published in ‘Broadcasting’. In other
words, 98 percent of those surveyed were listening to something
else, or nothing at all, on Oct. 30, 1938.”19

Regarding the “mass panic” concept that was generated after the
broadcast, it does appear that there was a palpable sense of fear and
confusion in some parts of the population of the US north-east / east
coast region (particularly the states of New York and New Jersey)
during the time of the broadcast. It also appears that there were
scattered fear-associated reactions further afield. However,
17 Ibid. (pg. 9)
18 Ibid. (pg. 66)
19Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic, OCT. 28 2013 -
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_ra
dio_broadcast_did.html

22
describing this phenomenon as a mass, nationwide panic is a
falsehood. David L. Miller, in his book “Introduction to Collective
Behaviour and Collective Action”, writes “There was a small spike in
calls of minor ‘unrest’ in New Jersey. However, there were no other
calls to the police about panic or unrest across the US. The same is
true of hospitals who accounted for no additional injuries, heart
attacks, suicide attempts or otherwise on the night in question.” 20

Overall, A. Brad Schwartz (in his book “Broadcast Hysteria”)

concludes that, “These panicked scenes of flight and near flight,
which turned War of the Worlds into the stuff of American legend,
did happen, but they were very, very rare.” 21 He continues. “It was
only later, once the ‘panic broadcast’ entered American folklore,
that stories of jammed streets and groups of farmers roaming the
Jersey countryside, shotguns ready to perforate the first spaceman
they saw, began to spring up. This does not mean that no one was
frightened. A small but significant number of people were – terribly
so. […] But saying that War of the Worlds panicked one million
people would be as inaccurate as saying that it frightened none.
One million Americans may indeed have briefly believed Earth was
under attack from the Martians that night – but almost none of
them actually panicked.”22

Muddling the Panic Myth

As a kind of “counter-myth” to the “mass panic” narrative, there are
some academics who claim that the argument against the “mass
panic” can be demonstrated by the idea that the print press were
“out to get” Orson Welles, The Mercury Theatre and CBS following
20David L. Miller, "Introduction to Collective Behaviour and Collective Action", Waveland Press; 2 edition (1 Feb. 2000)
ISBN-10: 1577661052 / ISBN-13: 978-1577661054
21A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 83)
22 Ibid. (pg. 90)

23
the broadcast. Some claim that this was prompted by radio news
continually getting the “head scoop” over the newspapers with
regard to the ongoing crisis in Czechoslovakia at the time. However,
it appears that this has become a quick and easy way of explaining
how a panic might have started and, according to researcher A. Brad
Schwartz, does not stand up to close scrutiny.23 In reality, the
newspapers did not really have a problem (as such) with radio news
reporting and broadcasting by 1938. In fact, by that point, much of
radio news reporting and broadcasting was actually done hand-in-
hand with the news print media.

In his book, “Broadcast Hysteria”, Schwartz cites historian Michael

Stamm who “has argued, the Press-Radio war was not really fought
between broadcasters and publishers. Instead, it was a conflict
between newspapers themselves, over whether radio was a benefit
or a threat. Ultimately, they decided to embrace it – provided they
had some measure of control over it. And much of the industry
came to this conclusion long before War of the Worlds.”24

Overall, both the print and radio news media did actually play an
early key role in creating the “mass panic” myth regarding The War
of the Worlds broadcast. Whether by design or by fault (and there
does appear to be evidence of both) the news coverage of reaction
to the broadcast was woefully inept – actually foreshadowing the
widespread state of mainstream media news coverage today! Facts
were not checked, information was poorly sourced, abrupt and
biased conclusions were made, it also didn’t help that Sunday 30th
October 1938 was a very quiet day news-wise and that the press
were looking for anything to quickly fill the columns of their papers
for the following day. Repetition and copy became the name of the

23A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 103)
24 Ibid. (pg. 107)

24
game as the “mass panic” narrative spread (faults and all) to the
general public. Embellishments and outright fabrications were added
for effect as the story spread further. Contrary to popular myth, the
press and radio news coverage of the story actually melted away as
quickly as it had heated up. Away from the initial “mass panic”
narrative, what remained of the press’ coverage of the story
pertained to reports of a possible FCC investigation (of the initial
broadcast), human-interest stories, and editorials. Within days (in
some areas) and weeks (for everywhere else) the story had pretty
much vanished from the media.

However, another group of individuals stepped into The War of the

Worlds myth of “mass panic” and (according to “official” accounts)
decided to document and study the listeners’ reactions.
Furthermore, there does seem to be some evidence that these
individuals solidified (possibly orchestrated) the notion of a “mass
panic”. Through their work at The Princeton Radio Research Project
(particularly, that of a man named Dr. Hadley Cantril) the myth of a
“mass panic” became set in stone.

25
26
 Chapter Three:
“The Radio Research
Project”

27
Rockefeller Paycheque
In September 1937 (almost fourteen months before the CBS War of
the Worlds broadcast), funding began for an effort that was dubbed
The Radio Research Project (RRP). The funding was supplied by The
Rockefeller Foundation. [Author’s Notes: The Rockefeller connection
will be a repeating motif in the themes and narrative of this book.] A
number of researchers continue to incorrectly state that Rockefeller
funding of the Princeton Radio Research Project began after The War
of the Worlds broadcast aired on October 30th, 1938. However, the
Rockefeller Foundation’s own documentation proves otherwise.

The 1937 Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report states: “To the

School of Public and International Affairs […] the Foundation
granted $67,000 to Princeton University for a study of the value of
radio to listeners, to be carried on by the University's School of
Public and International Affairs during the two-year period
beginning September 1, 1937. During this period, the work is to be
primarily methodological, the purpose being to discover ways in
which it is possible to arrive at an answer to the basic question,
what role is radio playing in the lives of listeners? Answering this
question evidently involves a number of secondary questions, such
as, who listens? Where and when does listening take place? What is
listened to? Why and how do people listen? What are the effects of
listening?

The radio industry, directly or indirectly, has of course carried on

extensive listener research; but most of that research has been
primarily concerned with the listener as a prospective purchaser of
products advertised by radio. In consequence, relatively little is
known of the listener as an individual with individual needs and
interests that radio does or could serve. But those needs and
interests are evidently fundamental in the use of radio for
educational or cultural purposes. Methods developed in the
28
industry's research point the way to the information that is needed.
The first task of the Princeton radio research project is to discover
how those methods are to be modified or developed to serve its
purposes. The study is being conducted by three men trained in the
techniques of social research: Professor Paul Lazarsfeld serves as
director, Professor Hadley Cantril of Princeton University and Dr.
Frank Stanton of the Market Research Division of the Columbia
Broadcasting System as associate directors. The study is one of a
number which are sponsored by the Federal Radio Education
Committee.”25

To reiterate, we have here evidential documentation of funding, the

aims of the project (study of the effect of radio on mass psychology -
or “educational or cultural purposes” as the Rockefeller report puts
it) and confirmation of the names and roles of several of the key
people involved with the study. All of this over a year before
(specifically September 1st, 1937) The War of the Worlds broadcast
took place or was even conceived.

Mass Media Research

The Radio Research Project amalgamated several existing university
research projects (that were already studying the effects of new
forms of mass media on society) into a new headquarters located at
the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University,
New Jersey. The project was overseen by the Office of Radio
Research (ORR) – which, in turn, was created by The Rockefeller
Foundation under the auspices of Princeton University.

Although it has been difficult to identify all of the broadcast

programs that were initiated or targeted for study/research by the

25The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1937 (Pg. 322 - 323) –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122132/Annual-Report-1937.pdf

29
Princeton Radio Research Project, some have been specifically
identified by genre or name. J. Michael Sproule’s 1997 work
“Propaganda and Democracy” noted “soap operas” and radio
dramas as targets of research for them.26 These examples were also
programming from multiple networks – such as CBS and NBC.

In May 1938 (a full six months before The War of the Worlds
broadcast), The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that The Princeton
Radio Research Project had been studying the popular NBC American
radio soap opera, One Man's Family. The following is taken from the
Sunday, May 15, 1938 (page 21) edition of The Cincinnati Enquirer,
Ohio. “Some puzzling things have been done in the name of
educational broadcasting. But to date the most puzzling is the test-
tube and slide-rule analysis of One Man's Family. Using a grant
from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Princeton School of Public and
International Affairs is to uncover the "popularity secret" of this top
dramatic feature. Listeners will he asked why they like it, and their
reasons solemnly tabulated. Even Carlton E. Morse probably
couldn't tell why One Man's Family is what it is, and if he could it
wouldn't help other radio dramatists to go and do likewise. With
this investigation as a precedent, some other foundation ought to
find out why people like roses, fried chicken, comfortable chairs,
good clothes, and fine tobacco.”27

One Man's Family ran on NBC from 1932 until 1959. Between 1935
and 1949 the show was “sustained” (sponsored) by J. P. Morgan's
(therefore Rockefeller-connected) Standard Brands - a company that
produced packaged goods and food. Ironically, the oft-cited rival

26 J. Michael Sproule, “Propaganda and Democracy”, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-47022-6 (pg. 64)
27The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio · Sunday, May 15, 1938 (Pg. 21) -
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/103341600/

30
broadcast show to The War of the Worlds - The Chase and Sanborn
Hour - was also sponsored by Standard Foods (Standard Brands).28

Another area of study for The Radio Research Project was nicknamed
the Little Annie Project – aka the Stanton-Lazarsfeld Program
Analyzer. “Officially”, this project involved the study of “listening
habits” – what listeners liked about programming, how it made them
feel, etc. Select listeners where given a dial to turn (“positive” or
“negative”) to indicate their thoughts or emotions at given moments
during their program listening. The study went on to have a huge
influence on the media “focus group” concept and Gallup opinion
polls.

Notably, George Gallup became close friends with Nelson

Rockefeller. They first met in late 1938 and it is believed that it was
around this time that Rockefeller Foundation money began to filter
through the work of Gallup. In September 1939, Nelson Rockefeller
employed Gallup to conduct scientific research on the viewing /
listening audience for RKO Pictures and Radio.29 More on the
RKO/CBS/Orson Welles/Rockefeller connections later. The Gallup
Poll began life at The American Institute of Public Opinion - which
was founded by George Gallup in 1935. Interestingly, the Institute
was founded in Princeton, New Jersey.30 George Gallup's son, Gallup
Jr., also worked for the organisation - joining the family business a
year after he graduated from Princeton University in 1953. 31
Crucially, The American Institute of Public Opinion/Gallup polled
listener's reactions to the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. This

28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_%26_Sanborn_Coffee_Company
29Susan Ohmer, "George Gallup in Hollywood", Kindle Edition, Columbia University Press (29 May 2012) ASIN:
B008RO62T4 (pg. 123 - 124)
30George H. Gallup, Founder | 1901-1984, Gallup.com - https://www.gallup.com/corporate/178136/george-
gallup.aspx
31 George Gallup Jr. - https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/george-gallup-obituary?pid=178721795

31
data (amongst other data) was used by The Princeton Radio
Research Project as part of their study of the broadcast. 32

On this “Princeton” theme, I should also mention (for synchronicity’s

sake!) that John D. Rockefeller, III received a BS at Princeton
University in 1929. Raymond B. Fosdick (1883-1972), who was
president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1936 until 1948, also
studied at Princeton.33 He was also trustee to the Rockefeller
Institute for Medical Research, the International Education Board,
the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation.

As a side note, I’ve always found it to be an interesting synchronicity

that the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast narrative is driven by
fictional Princeton University astronomer / Professor Richard Pierson
(played by Orson Welles) and his observations and eye witness
accounts of the Martian dispatch to, and invasion of, the Earth. The
radio play makes numerous references to Princeton University. Just
days after the broadcast, genuine Princeton University professors of
The Radio Research Project were clamouring all over the broadcast in
preparation for a major study and their attempt to document the
extent to which listeners had believed in, and been panicked by, a
fake Martian invasion of the Earth! I will leave it for you to decide
how much of a “coincidence” you think the “Princeton” connection
(between the broadcast narrative itself and the RRP) is!

The Princeton Radio Research Project involved several key

individuals – Paul Lazarsfeld, Gordon Allport, Theodor Adorno, Frank
Stanton and Hadley Cantril. Here is a brief overview of the roles
played by those involved with the Radio Research Project (RRP). The
Office of Radio Research (that oversaw the RRP) was managed by

32Peter Nardi, "Critical Thinking: Tools for Evaluating Research", University of California Press, 2017, ISBN-10:
9780520291843 / ISBN-13: 978-0520291843 (pg. 139)
33 https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Raymond_B._Fosdick

32
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. Lazarsfeld was also the overall director of the
RRP. Gordon Willard Allport was a key assistant to Lazarsfeld on the
RRP. The RRP’s Chief of the Music Division was Theodor W. Adorno.
The RRP’s principle researchers were Dr. Albert Hadley Cantril and
Frank Nicholas Stanton. These latter two men effectively initiated the
work of The Radio Research Project. I will examine all these men in
close detail in the next chapter – looking at their working lives and
the kinds of connections they had to various elite types and
institutions. For now though, I want to stay with the story of the
Radio Research Project and how the whole endeavour played out.

Studying “The War of the Worlds”

The “official” account of The Radio Research Project’s study of The
War of the Worlds broadcast goes something like this. Hadley Cantril
seemingly became fixated with the press stories about “mass panic”
amongst listeners. According to A. Brad Schwartz, in his book
“Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of
Fake News”, “Three days after the broadcast, [Cantril] threw out
whatever he had prepared for his course that term, Psychology 303,
and lectured instead on War of the Worlds.”34 Cantril allegedly
proposed that the RRP initiate a study of the broadcast and audience
reaction to it. Outlines were made for surveys, polls and interviews.
It is claimed that, on November 21st, 1938, Hadley Cantril returned
to the RRP’s generous benefactor – The Rockefeller Foundation - to
ask for further project funding to study The War of the Worlds
broadcast. His grant request outlined a “Proposed Study of Mass
Hysteria”. Clearly, Cantril already had a bias (“Mass Hysteria” being
the operative words) regarding the study. Interestingly, his proposal
to The Rockefeller Foundation emphasised how studying the

34A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 172)

33
broadcast was beneficial to propaganda. Specifically, he wanted to
identify the “psychological, educational and cultural factors” that
“made individuals vulnerable to propaganda.”35

Upon receiving this kind of request on such grounds, I imagine that

the Rockefeller Foundation’s interest was most definitely tweaked –
given that the Foundation was already heavily engaged in
“propaganda” and “psychological warfare” research by the late
1930s.

There is some contention (from source to source) on who initiated

the RRP’s “War of the Worlds” study, who sought what funding for it,
and where all the money came from. For example, James F. Tracy, in
his piece “Early 'Psychological Warfare' Research and the Rockefeller
Foundation”, states that it was Paul Lazarsfeld (as opposed to other
sources that cite Hadley Cantril) who got the wheels in motion. Tracy
writes, “Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and
immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to
what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion
in human history.”36 It has been demonstrated that CBS did indeed
take up initial funding of these studies into the broadcast –
presumably these were the ones proposed by Lazarsfeld. However,
we also know for certain (as evidentially documented in their annual
reports) that one week after Hadley Cantril’s aforementioned
proposal to the Rockefellers, The Radio Research Project was granted
$3,000 by the General Education Board (which, notably, was created,
funded and run by the Rockefeller Foundation) to fully “study” the
War of the Worlds broadcast, find out how many people had listened

35A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 182 - 185)
36James F. Tracy, "Early 'Psychological Warfare' Research and the Rockefeller Foundation", Global Research, April 29,
2012 - https://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594
See also: http://jabajabba.com/early-psychological-warfare-research-rockefeller-foundation/

34
to it, who had believed it to be real and became frightened by it, and
why.

The Radio Research Project mounted interviews with people cited in

the press who seemingly did react to the broadcast. A lady called
Hazel Gaudet was tasked with doing the “feet on the ground”
gathering of data. Overall, she talked to hundreds of people and her
findings were thoroughly documented. During the time of the study,
Frank Stanton initiated listeners’ polls and surveys for the RRP.
Stanton also initiated polls and surveys for CBS - independently of
the RRP. Stanton allowed Hadley Cantril access to the CBS surveys
and other associated data gathered by CBS. The RRP also gleaned
data from The Mercury Theatre and the FCC (in the form of the
listeners’ letters that A. Brad Schwartz has extensively studied and
cited in his book “Broadcast Hysteria”). Roughly a month and a half
after the initial broadcast, Gallup also conducted an extensive poll of
listener reactions – a poll that also seems to have been substantially
funded (as documented in Susan Ohmer’s book “George Gallup in
Hollywood”) by The Rockefeller Foundation.37 On and off, data was
gathered for over a year, although it appears that the RRP seemed to
start to come to some conclusions about listener reaction long
before the data was fully gathered. Overall, despite the sizeable
amount of statistical data gathered, The Radio Research Project
concluded that they could only arrive at a general estimate of
listener reaction (this estimate seemed to be sizeably based on the
CBS / Gallup poll data).

Oddly, despite the information that was gathered, the results that
should have come out of these surveys and studies never fully
materialised in the final findings of the Radio Research Project’s

37Susan Ohmer, "George Gallup in Hollywood", Kindle Edition, Columbia University Press (29 May 2012) ASIN:
B008RO62T4 (pg. 123 - 124)

35
research into The War of the Worlds broadcast. Even more bizarrely,
it is claimed that much of the reason why this happened had to do
with a major “falling out” between Hadley Cantril and Paul Lazarsfeld
regarding how the funding for The War of the Worlds study was
being spent. Allegedly, Lazarsfeld’s spending of the Rockefeller grant
was extreme and, seemingly, money ran out far more quickly than
was planned. I will leave you to decide how much of an influence
financing really was on the overall findings of the study. A. Brad
Schwartz gives quite a detailed account of this perspective (and the
friction between Cantril and Lazarsfeld) in his book “Broadcast
Hysteria”.38

“Stanton, in particular, loved Lazarsfeld’s energy and ideas. But

relations between Cantril and Lazarsfeld soon grew strained over
Cantril’s concerns over the project’s budget. […] He [Lazarsfeld]
often overspent what Princeton had given him. The university
blamed Cantril when this happened. […] Lazarsfeld went outside
the academic bureaucracy for research funds, turning instead to his
contacts in the radio industry. Stanton and CBS could always be
counted on to provide quick cash. […] But his close ties to
broadcasters often shaped his research along commercial, instead
of purely academic, lines. […] Cantril remained focused on radio’s
potential effects. […] He sought not just to read the American mass
mind but to change it. […] Lazarsfeld, on the other hand, was
content simply to understand how it worked. […] Stanton had a
very clear purpose in mind for the project. By learning more about
listeners’ likes and dislikes, he hoped to help CBS catch up with NBC
in the ratings. […] The Radio Project’s study of the Martian
broadcast began as time-sensitive ‘firehouse research,’ with
Lazarsfeld calling Stanton for money on the day after the show. […]

38A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 175 – 179)

36
Stanton […] rushed to CBS to compose an audience survey meant to
reveal the extent of the fright and the reason for it. He called
Lazarsfeld for help in composing the questions, then contacted an
insurance investigation firm in Atlanta that he often used for such
surveys. The next morning, they began interviewing listeners all
over the country. By the end of the week, they had talked to nearly
one thousand people. […] Since Stanton wanted a rough sense of
how many people had been frightened, his interviewers talked both
to people who had believed and to those who had not. Lazarsfeld
and the Radio Project, on the other hand, were interested mainly in
why people had been frightened, and so his team only went out in
search of listeners who had believed.”39

Psychology of Panic
It seems that Hadley Cantril had the final say on what conclusions the
Radio Research Project had drawn about listener reactions to The
War of the Worlds broadcast. Through Princeton University Press,
Cantril published a “version” of the “results” of the research in a
1940 book entitled “The Invasion of Mars: A Study in the Psychology
of Panic”. There are some contending perspectives on who funded
the publication of “The Invasion of Mars”. A Brad Schwartz, in
“Broadcast Hysteria”, writes: “Instead of publishing the War of the
Worlds study as a pamphlet through the Institute for Propaganda
Analysis, as had always been the plan, [Cantril] arranged to release
it as a book through the Princeton University Press. He was so
desperate to separate himself from the project that he agreed to
pay the costs of publication himself.”40

39A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 175 – 179)
40A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 187)

37
However, I must highlight that the book was published as one of a
series of studies sponsored by the Federal Radio Education
Committee. Crucially, The Rockefeller Foundation had influence over
and partly funded the Federal Radio Education Committee – as
documented in their own annual reports. With this in mind, we
cannot really say that the publication of Cantril’s book was truly
independent of the RRP (namely because of the overall Rockefeller
influence over and funding of both… and that both had very similar
aims and overarching interests!) or that the book’s publication was
wholly funded by Cantril (again, because of the Rockefellers financial
involvement). If nothing else, we can demonstrate (via the Federal
Radio Education Committee’s sponsorship of the book) that the
Rockefellers were indeed (at least somewhat) involved with the
publication of the book.

Although “The Invasion of Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic”

is largely credited to Hadley Cantril, there are a couple of other
names cited as being involved. Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog are
named as co-assisting with the book. Incidentally, Herzog was Paul
Lazarsfeld’s wife and RRP co-researcher. Lazarsfeld was also named
as co-author of “The Invasion of Mars: A Study in the Psychology of
Panic”. However, this seemingly wasn’t something that Lazarsfeld
was particularly pleased about. In 1975, Lazarsfeld wrote (as cited in
A Brad Schwartz’s “Broadcast Hysteria”): “My justified complaint,
was that [Cantril] forced me to make him co-author of the Invasion
from Mars while he had practically nothing to do with it.” 41 If
Lazarsfeld was being truthful, it brings up another bizarre angle to
this narrative. If Cantril didn’t really author it, then who did? Was it
Lazarsfeld who gave the book its bias slant!? If so, we are posed with
even more unfathomable questions! We have to ask - WHO really

41A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 193)

38
wrote it and imbued it with its biased findings?

That aside, let’s look at the skewed findings laid out in the book.
Bearing in mind the number of listener reactions (to The War of the
Worlds broadcast) that were studied by The Radio Research Project,
the author/authors of “The Invasion of Mars: A Study in the
Psychology of Panic” (whoever they truly were!) specifically cite only
a couple of dozen or so personal accounts from listeners. These were
taken from the accounts of a mere 135 people. The book also
sampled a large number of listeners from New Jersey – where
accounts agreed that “frightened” or “panicked” reactions were
most intense.

All of the cited individuals in the book answered a ten-page interview

questionnaire that had been prepared as part of the RRP’s research.
Importantly, over 100 of the 135 subjects were chosen because
those people had believed the 1938 broadcast of The War of the
Worlds to have been real, and were known to have been upset by it.
The accounts were clearly recounted in the book with a flair for the
dramatic in mind. The book concludes that an estimated six million
people heard the broadcast and that "at least a million of the
listeners were frightened or disturbed."42 It also states that a “tidal
wave of terror… swept the nation”43 on the night of the broadcast.

The book sums up the overall subject thusly: “The sheer dramatic
excellence of the broadcast must not be overlooked. The unusual
realism of the performance may be attributed to the fact that the
early parts of the broadcast fell within the existing standards of
judgment of the listeners...A few short weeks before this broadcast,
millions of listeners had kept their radios tuned for the latest news

42Hadley Cantril, with Assistance of Hazel Gaudet and Herta Herzog, The Invasion From Mars - A Study in Panic,
Princeton University Press, 1940, 3rd Printing 1952
43 Ibid.

39
from a Europe apparently about to go to war. They had learned to
expect that musical programs, dramas, broadcasts of all kinds
would be cut off in a serious emergency to inform or warn an eager
and anxious public. A large proportion of listeners, particularly
those in the lower income and educational brackets, have grown to
rely more on the radio than on the newspapers for news...”44

In my opinion, the findings in the book are very generic and are in
desperate need of a serious historical reassessment - given the
detailed information available to us today. I still find it very telling
that, with the specific data that the author (or authors!) of the book
had at hand (and the sheer number of people who had been polled),
only 135 listener reactions were used for the final results of the
study. We do have to ask why the book didn’t include much more of
the available data to create an accurate / averaged set of findings.
And how did the likes of Lazarsfeld and Stanton react to the findings
of the book? Well, they didn’t seem to have a great deal to say on
the matter. Despite Lazarsfeld’s aforementioned chagrin toward
Cantril, they remained (for the most part) curiously quiet.

Whatever truly happened or whoever was truly responsible for the

book and its “findings”, “official” history deemed Cantril to be the
final authority on the subject. Lazarsfeld departed the Princeton arm
of The Radio Research Project and set up shop (with Frank Stanton’s
help and support, and yet more money from The Rockefeller
Foundation45) at Columbia University. Cantril remained at Princeton
and established (also with Rockefeller funding) The Office of Public
Opinion Research. Tellingly, Cantril compiled a brief report (shortly
after publishing “The Invasion from Mars”) of the RRP’s polling data
of The War of the Worlds’ listeners and reactions and gave the report

44 Ibid.
45A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 193)

40
to a contact he had in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House
administration. Roosevelt apparently loved it and put Cantril on the
political payroll… but that’s a story for another chapter!

It is worth pointing out that, over the years since the broadcast, the
book “The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic”
(and, by extension, Hadley Cantril) has played a sizeable part in
perpetuating the myth of a “mass panic” listener reaction to The War
of the Worlds broadcast. This was further compounded by Orson
Welles himself, who spoke about Cantril's “findings” in numerous
interviews over the years. In these interviews, Welles would always
say that the book was a highly respected academic work (which, in
fact, it was for many years) and reiterated the conclusions made in
the book that over a million people panicked as a result of the
broadcast. Welles error (perhaps intentionally) was in not stating
more accurately that the book’s conclusions were biased in favour of
the “mass panic” treatise.

I have a possible theory as to why Welles became such a proponent

of the book’s conclusions and, by extension, Hadley Cantril. In a
nutshell, Welles and Cantril moved in very similar circles for a
number of years after The War of the Worlds broadcast so they may
well have had shared interests. For example, both were involved
with “Nelson Rockefeller's [...] State Department’s Coordinator of
Inter-American Affairs office, a US intelligence arm focused mainly
on psychological operations in Latin America”46 during the 1940s.
However, I don’t want to digress too much into this subject for now,
as it is something I will be looking at far more closely later in the
book.

46James F. Tracy, "Early 'Psychological Warfare' Research and the Rockefeller Foundation", Global Research, April 29,
2012 - https://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594
See also: http://jabajabba.com/early-psychological-warfare-research-rockefeller-foundation/

41
Not wanting to be totally damning toward the book, “The Invasion
from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic”, it is fair to say that
there was a kernel of truth to its conclusions. Indeed, the statistical
data used by The Princeton Radio Research Project (particularly the
findings of the Gallup poll) did indicate that 27% of those people who
listened to The War of the Worlds either believed it to be (for some
varying degree of time) a real news report and/or were (again, to
varying degrees) frightened or alarmed by it. Clearly, Cantril (or
whoever really authored the book!) interpreted this as an indication
that approximately 1.7 million people had believed the broadcast to
be true. As a result, this was also interpreted as an indication that
over a million people panicked. However, the data that was gathered
by the RRP was incredibly nuanced and subjective. Furthermore, the
conclusions were based on estimates and approximations that were
extrapolated (from the data that was gathered) to represent the
total listening audience.

It may be that several million people did actually listen to The War of
the Worlds broadcast and that a not-insubstantial number of
listeners (potentially numbering around a million people) could have
believed the broadcast to have been real or, at the very least,
frightened by it to some degree. It also appears that some people did
indeed react (in some fashion) out of fear. However, “The Invasion
from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic” purposely ignored the
nuances of these reactions - as wide and varied as they were. For
instance, the poll that Frank Stanton conducted for CBS (on the night
of the broadcast) gave a good and varied average of audience
responses to the broadcast. Yet, the author/authors of the book
seemed to “cherry-pick” their way through all this data – reducing
the scope of audience listening reactions to a “tidal wave of terror”.

The reality, which the book (and whoever truly authored it) clearly
disregarded, was quite different indeed. The conclusions of the book
were drawn to demonstrate a simple premise – that, if used
42
correctly, the mainstream media could be used very effectively to
create fear and uncertainty, create false perceptions of what is
“true” and “real”, and (most importantly) manipulate people into
any number of desired emotional reactions. Hadley Cantril’s selling
point (and we can specifically cite him here, in light of his work in the
field of perception management and psychological warfare for the
elite establishment) was that this could potentially be the
template/model for all manner of future media psychological
operations (psyops).

The “Psyop” Premise

The study of The War of the Worlds broadcast is a central component
to understanding what The Radio Research Project was truly all
about. Officially, the RRP claimed that research of the broadcast
commenced after it had aired and involved studying the alleged
“mass panic” reaction to the program. Unofficially, it does appear
that something much deeper and clandestine was taking place
regarding both The Princeton Radio Research Project and The War of
the Worlds broadcast – something which, as you will see, will
become a central theme of this book.

Put simply, there are any number of researchers and media

historians who maintain that the actual War of the Worlds broadcast
was, in fact, initiated by certain individuals involved with The
Princeton Radio Research Project (as well as various other individuals
and groups) rather than merely taking an interest in the broadcast
(as an area of study) in the hours and days after it aired. The
contention goes that the whole thing was planned (perhaps
meticulously – i.e.: the concept, themes, observation of listener
reactions, the “mass panic” hype stories in the press and media, and
so on) and that the effort was not just designed to study listeners’
interests, likes, habits and such. Nor was it wholly motivated by
commercial/business/market interests. The reality is that it does
43
appear that the whole scenario (from conception, to broadcast, and
way beyond) was part of a multi-faceted media psychological
operation designed to test the psychological boundaries and
susceptibility of mass public perceptions and beliefs. I am sure there
will be some people who will consider this to be a staggering and
unbelievable claim.

However, I encourage you to place any scepticism aside and consider

the possibility, for a moment, that The War of the Worlds broadcast
could be recognized not only as an enthralling, dramatic radio
production, but also as the first large-scale mass-broadcast-media
psychological warfare operation of its kind. To understand this claim,
we really do need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture
in order to begin to identify the evidence that supports this claim.

Whilst there has never been a definitively evidential and blatantly

obvious “smoking gun” showing that the 1938 War of the Worlds
broadcast was a media psyop from conception, a degree of proof
does exist in other more disparate forms. Whilst requiring
meticulous and patient detective work to identify, the evidence is
there – albeit scattered about history. It requires a larger context to
assemble and fully recognise. All of the dots of connection are there
if one is prepared to look for them. To begin to understand how all of
the aforementioned might actually have been possible, we need to
carefully study all of the players surrounding the 1938 War of the
Worlds broadcast – CBS, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, Orson
Welles, The Princeton Radio Research Project, and the likes of The
Rockefeller Foundation. As this chapter has been an accounting of
The Radio Research Project, it feels appropriate to continue there
and examine, more deeply, the individuals involved with the RRP.

44
 Chapter Four:
“The Project’s Players”

45
Connecting Tavistock to the RRP
Before I launch into the specific players involved with the Radio
Research Project, I just want to give a brief overview of The Tavistock
Clinic / Institute of Human Relations for the uninformed reader. The
reason for this will become apparent throughout this book. However,
at this point, I raise the subject because Tavistock connects with all
the players involved with the RRP.

The following is taken from Juliet Higdon’s highly respected book,

“Psychodynamic Theory for Therapeutic Practice”: “The Tavistock
Clinic. Influenced by the new psychology coming out of Vienna, Dr
Hugh Crichton Miller, a neurologist, developed pioneering
psychotherapeutic methods for treating shell-shocked soldiers from
the First World War. He became convinced of the need to establish
a clinic to provide similar services to civilians of limited means. The
clinic opened in 1920, at the beginning in a house in Tavistock
Square, London, with the first patient, a child. It quickly established
itself as a psychotherapy centre for traumatized and neurotic
children and adults. Training became more organized and a course
for social workers in mental health was set up. In 1930, The
Psychopathic Clinic, later called the Portman Clinic, was founded.
This was the clinical arm of an institute for studies into
delinquency.”47 According to Wikipedia, “Following its foundation
the Tavistock [Portman] Clinic developed a focus on preventive
psychiatry, expertise in group relations – including army officer
selection – social psychiatry, and action research.”48

47Juliet Higdon, "Psychodynamic Theory for Therapeutic Practice", (Introductory section: The Tavistock Clinic), Kindle
Edition, Palgrave Macmillan; 2 edition (31 Oct. 2011) ISBN: 0230242472/ASIN: B00LNBLNZQ
48See: Daniel Estulin, Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, Trine Day (US) (1 Sept. 2015) ISBN-10:
163424043X / ISBN-13: 978-1634240437. See also: M. Minnicino, The Tavistock Grin, Low Intensity Operations: The
Reesian Theory of War, The Campaigner (April 1974.)

46
In 1932, the clinic was taken over by Dr. John Rawlings Rees. Rees
was a key figure in British Army Intelligence. Over the past eighty
years, a number of dedicated works on the subject, as well as figures
in the field of psychiatry and psychology (such as the infamous Carl
Jung), have cited The Rockefeller Foundation as having heavily
funded the Tavistock Clinic, its members, and associates from as
early as 1934.49

Direct evidence of the (1934 onward) funding is documented in the

1951, number 4 issue of the Tavistock publication “Human Relations”
- in an article entitled “Some Social and Psychological Consequence of
the Longwall Method of Coal-getting” by K. W. Bamborth and Eric L.
Trist (pgs. 3 - 38) - and in John Rawlings Rees' own 1945 work “The
Shaping of Psychiatry by War” (New York, 1945, pg. 81). Rees was,
tellingly, obsessed with the study of psychology based on the model
of “War Neurosis” and subsequent disassociation as a result of
trauma.

The aforementioned funding is also documented in the Rockefeller

Foundation’s own Annual Reports from the early/mid-1930s – for
example, their 1934 Report cites donations to the likes of:
“University of Rochester, New York. School of Medicine and
Dentistry Development of the Child Guidance Clinic in the
Department of Psychiatry [,] Psychiatric Clinic, University of Zurich,
Switzerland [,] Psychiatric and Neurological Clinic of the University
of Breslau, Germany [,] Neurological Clinic, University of
Amsterdam, Netherlands [and] the departments of Psychiatry and
Paediatrics of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.” All
the aforementioned were then Tavistock Clinic-affiliated and

49https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_and_Portman_NHS_Foundation_Trust#Early_history See also: Jung, C.G.

(1935). Tavistock Lectures, in The Symbolic Life. Collected Works, vol.18. London: Routledge. pp. 1–182. ISBN 0 7100
8291 6.

47
received (in 1934 alone) Rockefeller Foundation money totalling in
the tens of thousands of dollars.50

In 1946, The Tavistock Clinic again received a huge influx of funding

from the Foundation - essentially in order to create an offspring of
the clinic called The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. The
latter was founded in 1947, “officially” as a “not-for-profit
organisation.”51 The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1946 Annual Report
(pages 109 - 111) notes “The Tavistock Clinic in London was founded
in 1920 for the study and treatment of ambulatory patients
suffering from the milder psychiatric disturbances such as anxiety
states, hysteria, morbid fears and psychosomatic illness, [...] the
Clinic's services are being substantially enlarged to assist in solving
the domestic and administrative problems now facing families,
industries and areas of settlement in Britain [...] In the sphere of
family anxieties. [...] Other fields of interest are group dynamics
and group therapy, with emphasis on occupational therapy of
neurosis; vocational selection and guidance; the maintenance of
worker morale in industry; postgraduate teaching and field work in
psychodynamic theory and psychotherapeutic practice, group
dynamics and therapy, clinical psychology and social psychology.
The Tavistock Clinic in 1946 received an appropriation from The
Rockefeller Foundation of $89,100, available over a period of three
years.”52 Note some of the key terminology here: “anxiety states”,
“hysteria”, “morbid fears”, “group dynamics”, “neurosis”, “morale”,
and “social psychology”.

50The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1934 –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122121/Annual-Report-1934.pdf
51Jean E. Neumann, "Kurt Lewin at the Tavistock Institute" -
https://archive.org/stream/SchrodersBankTAVISTOCKINSTITUTETheMcClaughrysBlog/Kurt%20Lewin%20at%20The%2
0Tavistock%20Institute%20%20JEAN%20E.%20NEUMANN-18
52The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1946 -
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122151/Annual-Report-1946.pdf

48
The reason I have noted this is because we also know that The
Rockefeller Foundation was financing The Princeton Radio Research
Project from at least 1937 onward. There are shared themes (most
notably the study and use of fear, trauma and terror as psychological
weapons) within the work of The Radio Research Project (such as via
The War of the Worlds broadcast study), the Tavistock
Clinic/Institute of Human Relations and The Rockefeller Foundation. I
will return to the subject of the direct connections between The
Rockefellers and Tavistock in a forthcoming chapter.

Paul Lazarsfeld
The head of the Office of Radio Research and overall director of the
Princeton Radio Research Project (RRP) was Austrian psychologist
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. Lazarsfeld departed the Princeton arm of the
RRP in 1941. However, it appears that (in everything but name)
Lazarsfeld continued the project’s work - gradually transferring the
work (from circa 1940 onward) to Columbia University. Contrary to
popular belief, the work continued for a long time.

According to Susan Cavin (then Professor of Sociology New York

University), in her detailed piece “Adorno, Lazarsfeld & the Princeton
Radio Project”, “Paul Lazarsfeld inherited the Princeton Radio
Project and took it with him to Columbia University in 1940. In
1944, the Office of Radio Research was renamed the Bureau of
Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University. Lazarsfeld
directed the Princeton Radio Project/Columbia University BASR
from 1937-1948. [...] When Lazarsfeld stepped down as Director in
1948, he stayed on as an Associate Director in the early fifties. [...]
Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Project-Columbia University Bureau of
Applied Social Research conducted 125 studies of radio between
1939-1954 compared to only 25 studies of newspapers and
magazines. They conducted 20 studies of television in one year,

49
1953-54, as television’s star was rising in the fifties and radio was
on the decline.”53

Lazarsfeld arrived in America in 1933 on a two-year Rockefeller

Foundation Fellowship.54 Once there, his work in the field of applied
psychology found him accepting research contracts from
government and private industry. During this time, he effectively
invented what would come to be known as “market research”. As
Director of Columbia’s BASR / Bureau of Applied Social Research
(particularly during the 1940s), Lazarsfeld became something of a
renowned figure in the field of propaganda and psychology in the
media. Lazarsfeld co-authored (with Robert Merton) two notable
books in the field - “Studies in Radio and Film Propaganda” (1943)
and “The Psychological Analysis of Propaganda” (1944).

Lazarsfeld and BASR’s WWII-era funding came from many curious

sources – including the Office of War Information (the sister
organization [to the CIA’s forerunner] the OSS and what eventually
became the propaganda outfit “Voice of America”). Judith S. Barton,
author of “The Guide to the Bureau of Applied Social Research”,
wrote that “the Office was active in governmental research,
especially on communications.”55 Lazarsfeld’s BASR acknowledged
writing five reports for Voice of America between 1948 and 1952,
and studied Northern European radio broadcasts for Voice of
America.56 Herta Herzog, Paul Lazarsfeld’s wife and RRP co-

53Susan Cavin, Ph.D.(Adjunct) Professor of Sociology New York University, “Adorno, Lazarsfeld & the Princeton Radio
Project - 1938 - 1941” - https://www.scribd.com/doc/151660755/Adorno-Lazarsfeld-The-Princeton-Radio-Project-
1938-1941
54A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pgs. 175 – 179)
55Judith S. Barton, Guide to the Bureau of Applied Social Research (New York: Clearwater Publishing Co., Publications
of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), pg. 1. See also: Paul Lazarsfeld & Patricia Kendall, Radio Listening in
America-The People Look at Radio-Again (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948).
56See: BASR Report Series B-0361-1 through B-0361-9. Also: Herta Herzog in Judith S. Barton, Guide to the Bureau of
Applied Social Research (New York: Clearwater Publishing Co., Publications of the Bureau of Applied Social Research
(BASR)

50
researcher, worked for BASR from 1941 to 1948. Her specialist areas
were minorities, women and children as radio listeners. Herzog also
worked in the arena of war propaganda for the O.W.I. (Office of War
Information) throughout the early 1940s. 57

Prior to coming to America in 1933, Lazarsfeld’s studies in Europe

allowed him to become a “fellow traveller” in the circles of the
Tavistock psychological elite.58 This particular “Tavistock” connection
is our first significant piece of circumstantial evidence regarding the
potential true nature of The War of the Worlds as a broadcast psyop.

Gordon Allport
A key assistant of Paul Lazarsfeld at The Princeton Radio Research
Project was Gordon Willard Allport. Allport was a pioneering
psychologist, instrumental in establishing the ‘values scale’ system –
a key component in the burgeoning field of public relations. Allport
went on to be The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations' leading
representative in the United States. Can you see the “Tavistock”
connection pattern forming here!? [Author’s Notes: strangely, an old
entry about The Radio Research Project on Wikipedia noted Allport’s
eventual and considerable contribution to the work of Tavistock –
with evidential source footnotes included. Wikipedia’s current page
on the subject now has no mention of this connection nor the
associated references to the source information in the footnotes. In
fact, they have removed all mention of Allport in relation to The
Radio Research Project! 59] The psychological motif seems to go much
deeper with Allport – particularly if we consider his work at Harvard

57 For example: see Herta Herzog, “The Negro and the War -- A Preliminary Test of an O.W.I. Pamphlet.”
58 Judith S. Barton, Guide to the Bureau of Applied Social Research. See also: Paul Lazarsfeld & Patricia Kendall, Radio
Listening in America-The People Look at Radio-Again (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948).
59http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Research_Project See also: Albert Hadley Cantril & Gordon Willard Allport, "The
Psychology of Radio", Harper and Brothers, (1935) ISBN 0405035748 (pg. 23) See also:
https://archive.org/details/psychologyofradi00hadl

51
Psychological Clinic. A few short years after his involvement with The
War of the Worlds research, Allport was involved with a Harvard
study to examine the mind of Adolf Hitler!60 This research was
financed by the OSS – the forerunner of the CIA – and had
connections with The Tavistock [Portman] Clinic [See: The Rockefeller
Foundation Annual Report 1946 – page 110.61] A decade or so later,
the likes of both Harvard and the CIA were involved with trauma-
based mind control research (MKUltra). I am most certainly not
jumping to any kind of defence of such a heinous man as Hitler, but
for the sake of clarity I should note that the Harvard/OSS Hitler
“profiling” was a classic historical example of propaganda and
psychological warfare. Numerous academics now concur that the
methods used (as well as the subsequent findings of the study) were
significantly flawed and leant toward biased – rather than being an
objective psychological profiling.

Theodor Adorno
The Radio Research Project’s Chief of the Music Division was
Theodor W. Adorno (aka Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund). Adorno was
a German sociologist, philosopher and musical composer. He is now
perhaps best remembered for his “critical theory” of society and
terming the phrase “The Culture Industry”. In the field of media
studies, Adorno is considered an extremely influential and noted
figure. Ziauddin Sardar’s “Introducing Media Studies: A Graphic
Guide”, talks about Adorno in the following context:

“The Marxist approach to media studies developed in parallel with

the functionalist approach, it is best characterized by the work of

60Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport, Psychology of Radio (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935. Gordon Allport, in his
presidential address to the American Psychological Assn. source: Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 1, Jan. 1940.
61The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1946 -
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122151/Annual-Report-1946.pdf

52
the Frankfurt School [which] consists of a group of loosely
connected intellectuals who took their name from the Institute for
Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923. […] when
Hitler came to power, the Institute was forced to leave Germany for
New York. In 1953, it was re-established in Frankfurt. Members […]
included T. W. Adorno. […]

Adorno and [Max] Horkheimer developed a Marxist sociological

approach to media studies at the New York-based Institute for
Social Research. They saw the media as a culture industry that
maintained power relations and served to lessen the ‘resistance
standards’ of cultural aesthetics by popularizing certain types of
culture. […] The masses are ‘dumbed’ by the banality of the media.
Their ability to function efficiently as citizens in a democratic state
is replaced by their ceaseless consumption of culture or products, or
both. […] For Adorno, individuals who enjoy these pleasures are
corrupted by immersion and are open to the domination of the
industrialized capitalist system.”62

Incidentally, Adorno’s close associate Max Horkheimer synchronises

with several aspects of this book. In 1944, Horkheimer was tasked to
head up the newly created Department of Social Research. The
department would go on to have affiliations with the likes of the
Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and the CIA. Whilst head of the
department, Horkheimer set up a project entitled “Studies in
Prejudice”. One of the money funders for this project was (surprise,
surprise!) The Rockefeller Foundation. The project continued until
1950 and produced five studies. One of these studies – “The
Authoritarian Personality” – was co-authored by Theodor Adorno.
Dr. William Morrow (who was the leading protégé of Tavistock /

62Ziauddin Sardar, "Introducing Media Studies: A Graphic Guide", Icon Books Ltd (1 July 2010) ISBN-10:
9781848311848 / ISBN-13: 978-1848311848 (pgs. 33 – 34)

53
Frankfurt School stalwart Dr. Kurt Lewin) was a research director of
“The Authoritarian Personality” project.63

It should perhaps come as no surprise, given the aforementioned

connections, when I tell you that Adorno was also an associate of
The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Adorno’s name tends to
come up quite a bit in alternative knowledge research given that he
was specifically cited by Dr John Coleman, in his widely-read book
“Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300”, as
working with The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to modify a
12-atonal musical notation system consisting of heavy repetitive
sounds (taken from the music of the cult of Dionysus and the Baal
priesthood) and used to steer the “youth culture” explosion
(specifically in relation to the pop music scene) of the late
1950s/early 1960s onward.

Synchronicities abound here, if we look at the first successful

implementation of the change in the standard tuning pitch frequency
(from A = 432 hz [a natural and positively charged harmonic
frequency] to A = 440 hz [a disturbing and dissonant frequency
known to upset both human physiology and psychology]) by the
International Organization for Standardization in 1955. A previous
attempt to do this was made at an international conference in
London in 1939 – a conference spearheaded by several Tavistock
luminaries, including Theodor Adorno!64 The BBC Orchestra actually
supported this proposal at the time. A much earlier attempt
(seemingly the first – although unsuccessful) was made to change
the tuning frequency in 1917 at the behest of… yes, you’ve guessed
it, The Rockefeller Foundation!65 For more on this subject, I

63 Jeffrey Steinberg, "From Cybernetics to Littleton: Techniques of Mind Control", EIR, May 5, 2000
64 Dr. John Coleman, “Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300”
65Mark Devlin, "Musical Truth: Volume 2", aSys Publishing (19 Jan. 2018), ISBN-10: 9781910757963 / ISBN-13: 978-
1910757963 (Pgs. 186 - 187)

54
recommend reading Mark Devlin’s excellent book “Musical Truth:
Volume Two”66

Whilst there is quite a degree of evidence to support the work

Adorno did for The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (or in
conjunction with it), some of the claims about Adorno (such as Dr
John Coleman’s statement that Tavistock tasked Adorno with writing
the lyrics and composing the music of the world famous band The
Beatles - as part of a specific social engineering agenda67) do not
appear to be corroborated with solid, conclusive evidence.

I must stress that I am very open to the possibility that The Beatles
and their music were (“shock horror” – for the naysayers / sceptics
and Beatles fans out there!) a part of a complex, elite-orchestrated,
social-engineering agenda. I also understand why people have
connected Adorno and The Beatles – they both moved in similar
social and business circles, there is a “Tavistockian” feel to many of
the social paradigms that surrounded The Beatles and their music,
Tavistock has extensively studied and experimented with music to
create methods of control and social engineering, Adorno (obviously)
worked with Tavistock, and he once very famously said that “music…
affected consciousness and was a means of social management and
control.”68 Yet, it still remains that the Adorno / Beatles hypothesis is
purely (albeit very heavily) circumstantial and has yet to be backed
up with hard, demonstrable evidence. Maybe there is another
unnamed individual in the history of music who was truly responsible
for the music of The Beatles but that is purely speculative and
theoretical. If nothing else, I don’t think this purely hypothetical
“individual” was Theodor Adorno. Although this particular digression

66 Ibid.
67Dr. John Coleman, “Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300”, pg.58 (Author’s notes: Coleman’s
writing is often controversial. I will leave you to decide the validity of his conclusions)
68 Tia DeNora, "After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology", Cambridge University Press, 2003

55
into The Beatles is important to highlight, I’m going a little “off topic”
here, so let’s get back on track!

In late 1937, Theodor Adorno joined The Princeton Radio Research

Project at the behest of Paul Lazarsfeld. It was “apparently” Adorno’s
first job in the United States. According to an early version of
Wikipedia’s Radio Research Project webpage, “Theodor Adorno
produced numerous reports on the effects of "atomized listening"
which radio supported and of which he was highly critical.
However, because of profound methodological disagreements with
Lazarsfeld over the use of techniques such as listener surveys and
"Little Annie" (Adorno thought both grossly simplified and ignored
the degree to which expressed tastes were the result of commercial
marketing), Adorno left the project in 1941.”69

Between 1938 and 1941, he published four studies for the RRP –
“Music in Radio”, “Plugging Study”, “On Popular Music” and “The
Radio Symphony”. The latter study appeared in Paul Lazarsfeld and
Frank Stanton's 1941 book “Radio Research”. On Adorno’s departure
from the RRP, Susan Cavin (in “Adorno, Lazarsfeld & the Princeton
Radio Project”) writes, “Adorno’s three studies for the Princeton
Radio Project were not exactly what Lazarsfeld had in mind! He was
under government pressure to produce useful information about
radio listening for the war effort. Adorno’s Marxist critique of
American radio went beyond what governmental consulting
allowed. Adorno was not invited back to do more studies for the
Office of Radio Research. Instead, he went to Hollywood, which was
even more surreal. Ironically, Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and
Marcuse, Angela Davis’ professor at Brandeis University, became
cult figures in the 1960’s, more popular with American students of

69 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Research_Project

56
the New Left than Lazarsfeld, the methodologist. But during World
War II, their positions were reversed.”70

One final point of interest: in 1947, Adorno invented a “fascist

questionnaire” – known as The California F-scale personality test – in
order to measure “the authoritarian personality”. Here are some of
the “hypothetical” questions that were posed to those answering the
questionnaire: “When a person has a problem or worry, it is best for
him not to think about it, but to keep busy with more cheerful
things”, “Obedience and respect for authority are the most
important virtues children should learn” and “If people would talk
less and work more, everybody would be better off.” The
questionnaire appears to synchronise with an almost identical survey
that was conducted by The Tavistock Clinic – one that was noted by
The Rockefeller Foundation when justifying their funding of the Clinic
in their 1946 Annual Report71 - to identify fascist tendencies in the
UK populace post-WWII.

Frank Stanton
The two pioneering figures that began (and headed up the overall
work of) The Princeton Radio Research Project (RRP) were Dr. Hadley
Cantril and Frank Stanton. Frank Nicholas Stanton’s academic
credentials were in the field of psychology. He gained a Masters in
the subject from Ohio State in 1932 and a doctorate (again from
Ohio) in 1935. At CBS, he worked almost immediately as a
psychological researcher. By 1937, he was the proverbial “right-hand
man” to William S. Paley – the man who effectively built CBS from
the ground up. By this point in time, he was also the director of

70Susan Cavin, Ph.D.(Adjunct) Professor of Sociology New York University, “Adorno, Lazarsfeld & the Princeton Radio
Project - 1938 - 1941” - https://www.scribd.com/doc/151660755/Adorno-Lazarsfeld-The-Princeton-Radio-Project-
1938-1941
71The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1946, pg. 110 -
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122151/Annual-Report-1946.pdf

57
research at CBS with a staff of over 100 people. What is often
overlooked, is that Stanton was in a position to advise and
recommend on the commissioning and creation of programming at
CBS - both during the whole Radio Research Project era, The War of
the Worlds broadcast timeframe, and beyond. This is hugely
important to the idea that The War of the Worlds broadcast was
specifically instigated as part of a media psyop. Did Stanton
therefore commission The War of the Worlds broadcast?
Unfortunately, we don’t really have any way to evidentially clarify if
he did. However, it is important to stress that he was indeed in a
position to have done so and (given how few people had the kind of
power he had at CBS radio at the time) quite probably did.
Moreover, as CBS’s head psychological researcher (and generic head
media researcher) and RRP investigator, he was in a position to
commission the broadcast as part of a larger and clandestine
psychological research agenda – the true nature of which, few
people (outside the RRP’s “inner circle” and a few trusted CBS
employees) would have realised.

As an aside, Stanton was a staunch repeater of the “official” War of

the Worlds narrative (including the “mass panic” theory) for his
entire life. In an interview for TelevisionAcademy.com, Stanton (then
an old man) spoke about the 1938 broadcast and said, “I did not
know about the program in advance. I was home listening and
heard it just as everybody else did and said to my wife, ‘I think I’d
better go into the office because I think there’s gonna be a lot of
audience reaction and I’d like to capture it from a research point of
view.’ So we drove in and got in just before the program ended…
no, the program had just ended and when I walked in the building
you could sense it. All hell had broken loose and I got on the phone
and formulated a questionnaire… I called an outfit in Atlanta, who
had a national field force that I knew I could press into operation
quickly and, erm, the next day… the morning after, we did, I think,

58
over 2000 interviews – face to face and coast to coast – on that
broadcast. So we had good information and had it fast and made a
lot of ‘copy’ with it because The Press didn’t have anything… except
the broadcast… and there were a lot of scare stories about how
people packed up and decided to get out and so forth. But, we had
a good statistical base for the answers. […] It showed a tremendous
audience, a lot of people on the Eastern part of the country
particularly… New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania had decided
they better get out. […] We got that kind of first-hand information,
which was interesting in itself and became the material for a book
that, I think, Hazel Gaudet did, erm, as part of another project I was
involved with at Princeton and, erm… what I was gonna say was…
that, erm… management – meaning Paley […] and the programme
people had some hard facts that they could talk from when they
were being hammered by the press and also by Washington. […] I
think we were all shaken up by it and if we had had any sense of
what was gonna happen, the programme would have been framed
in a way that would have put the audience on the alert. It was
there, but you had to have a magnifying glass to find it. And Welles
was a very skilful producer and did a fantastic job in making that a
realistic radio programme that taught the company and the
industry a lesson about fooling with the programmes in terms of
the trustworthiness of the broadcast.”72

In watching these interviews, I can’t help but paraphrase a quote

from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The Man doth protest too much,
methinks!”

It is interesting that Stanton credits “the book” (presumably

“Invasion from Mars”) to Hazel Gaudet and not Hadley Cantril nor

72"Executive Frank Stanton on War of the Worlds - TelevisionAcademy.com/Interviews", 2 Aug 2016 -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbycQUxdtPY

59
Paul Lazarsfeld. Even more strangely, Lazarsfeld (like Stanton) also
had some influence over CBS radio program commissioning - albeit
far less obvious than Stanton. According to Dennis W. Mazzocco, in
his book “Networks of Power: Corporate TV’s Threat to Democracy”,
Lazarsfeld “advised CBS on how to develop larger audiences for its
radio programming in the late 1930s. […] While still working with
CBS, [he] became an advisor to ABC and suggested that the
network do more programs for younger audiences.”73 His “advice”
to both CBS and ABC involved making suggestions for program
commissioning. Is it possible that Lazarsfeld as well as Stanton
(despite his protests of ignorance!) could have played a key role in
commissioning The War of the Worlds broadcast for CBS? Again,
infinitely possible. However, as with Stanton, we have no way of
evidentially knowing for sure. In a way, it is a shame that The War of
the Worlds broadcast did not take place just a couple of years later.
Then we could have known for certain that Frank Stanton did indeed
commission the broadcast of The War of the Worlds. The reason we
can know this? Well, Stanton quickly had a meteoric rise in his career
at CBS. Soon after the broadcast, he became an executive and head
of the CBS News Division. By 1942, he was Vice-President of CBS and
full President by 1946 – a role he remained in until 1971.

The potential true nature of Stanton’s work for the Radio Research
Project can be gauged if we look at some of the elite/global agenda
associated groups he was involved with at the time of the RRP and
subsequently – particularly the kind of work he was doing for them.
Stanton was a member of the elite global-agenda outfit The Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR). Significantly, CFR was co-created by The
Rockefellers in 1918 and fully realised by 1921. Stanton was a fellow
of the American Association of Applied Psychology, and member of
73 Dennis W. Mazzocco, “Networks of Power: Corporate TV’s Threat to Democracy”, South End Press, 1994 (pg. 35) See
also: Leonard H. Goldenson, "Beating the Odds", Random House Value Pub (1 Dec. 1999) ISBN-10: 0517096145 / ISBN-
13: 978-0517096147 (pgs. 148 - 149)

60
the American Psychological Association, the American Statistical
Association, and the American Marketing Association.74 He was also
chairman of the board of The RAND Corporation from 1961 until
1967. RAND has a detailed historical association with global
governance and the military Industrial complex – notably with
psychological warfare and trauma-based mind control research. A
number of Rockefellers (such as Laurance and Nicholas – who both
served on the advisory board75) have held key positions in the RAND
Corporation. During WWII, Stanton served as a consultant to the
Secretary of War, worked with the Office of War Information (as did
just about everybody else who worked alongside Stanton on The
Radio Research Project), the Office of Facts and Figures, and the
Department of the Navy. He served these roles whilst the whole time
working for CBS.76

Perhaps the most damning piece of information about Frank Stanton

was his membership of an uber-elite and highly classified think-tank
called the “Eisenhower Ten” (E10). Despite sounding like something
out of a Cold War / spy novel or film, this very real group was created
by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958, with the intention that
its members would serve as a quasi-makeshift government in the
event of a national emergency – not unlike the fictional one played
out in the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast! E10 was
seemingly discontinued (at least in that form) during the John F.
Kennedy presidential administration. Here is a section from
President Eisenhower’s personal letter invitation to Frank Stanton
(dated March 6, 1958), regarding the role he would play:

“I am delighted to know of your willingness to serve as

Administrator of the Emergency Communications Agency in the
74 http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Frank_Stanton_(executive)
75 Nicholas Rockefeller Network: Pacific Rim Function - http://www.nicholasrockefeller.net/
76 Frank Stanton’s obituary, New York Times., pg. B7

61
event that a national emergency would compel its formation, and,
accordingly, I hereby appoint you such Administrator effective upon
activation of the agency. As Administrator, you will, in the
performance of your duties, be subject to the direction, control and
coordination of the Director of the Office of Emergency Resources,
and you will receive such compensation as the President may
hereafter specify. Your tenure as Administrator-designate or as
Administrator shall be at the pleasure of the President. In the event
of an emergency, as soon as you have assured yourself, by any
means at your disposal, that an Emergency Communications
Agency has been activated, you shall immediately assume active
direction of that agency and its function. This letter will constitute
your authority.”77

The members of the “Eisenhower Ten” (E10) were:78

 Dr. George Pierce Baker (Harvard University Graduate School

of Business - E10 Role: Administrator-Designate Emergency
Transport Agency)

 Ezra Taft Benson (Secretary Of Agriculture Under The

Eisenhower Administration - E10 Role: Administrator-
Designate Emergency Food Agency)

 Harold Boeschenstein (President Owens-Corning Fiberglas

Corporation - E10 Role: Administrator-Designate Emergency
Production Agency)

 Theodore F. Koop (Vice-President Columbia Broadcasting

System - E10 Role: Administrator-Designate Emergency
Censorship Agency)

77http://www.conelrad.com/atomicsecrets/secrets.php?secrets=e09 See also: This Letter Will Constitute Your

Authority - The Eisenhower Ten, conelrad.com - http://www.conelrad.com/atomicsecrets/secrets.php?secrets=05
78 http://www.conelrad.com/atomicsecrets/secrets.php?secrets=e15

62
  William McChesney Martin, Jr. (Chairman Board Of Governors
Of The Federal Reserve System - E10 Role: Administrator-
Designate Emergency Stabilization Agency)

 James P. Mitchell (Secretary Of Labor Under The Eisenhower

Administration - E10 Role: Administrator-Designate
Emergency Manpower Agency)

 Aksel Nielsen (President Title Guaranty Company Of Denver,

Colorado - E10 Role: Administrator-Designate Emergency
Housing Agency)

 Frank Pace, Jr. (President General Dynamics Corporation - E10

Role: Administrator-Designate Emergency Transport Agency)

 Frank Stanton (President Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc.

- E10 Role: Administrator-Designate Emergency
Communications Agency)

 John Ed. Warren (Senior Vice-President First National City

Bank of New York - E10 Role: Administrator-Designate
Emergency Energy And Minerals Agency)

Astoundingly, it seems that Frank Stanton would have essentially

become one of the ten most powerful men in the United States in
the event of an emergency. Certainly, he would have controlled the
entire communications/broadcast media system. Despite knowledge
of the group being made available (and evidentially provable) in the
subsequent years since Stanton was recruited into E10, Stanton
remained tellingly quiet on the subject pretty much until his death in
2006. The author of the Conelrad website (dedicated to documenting
everything possible about E10), telephoned Stanton on January 21st
2004 - roughly two years before his passing.

The Conelrad websites notes: “Stanton, the only living member of

the E-10, indicated that if he hadn't received our request for
63
comment he probably never would have breathed a word about it,
so we'll count that as making good on the secrecy oath. When
asked if he had ever discussed his special government service with
anyone outside of the Eisenhower Ten apparatus he replied without
hesitation, "nope." The nonagenarian was planning to suggest that
we contact one of the other ten for a more comprehensive
interview, but then thought better of it and asked, "Is there anyone
left?" Stanton explained his rationale for signing on for the position
by saying "When the president asks you to do something, you do
it." Does Stanton recall ever gathering with the other members of
his shadow fraternity? "Early on the group of us met with Ike," he
said and then remarked that he only had to travel out of state once
for the "job." Finally, when asked whether he received a letter from
President Kennedy terminating his service, Stanton replied, "I don’t
recall if it was from Kennedy, but I do remember getting that kind
of letter."”79

Hadley Cantril
Moving on from Frank Stanton, the final figure of note in this analysis
of The Princeton Radio Research Project’s members is Dr. Albert
Hadley Cantril, Jr. Cantril was a renowned psychologist. He was the
product of an Ivy League (a Rockefeller institution, I might add)
education and graduated Dartmouth College with a B. S. in
psychology in 1928. I should note here that during the latter part of
his tenure at Dartmouth, Cantril was a roommate of Nelson
Rockefeller. The friendship that began between the two at
Dartmouth would pay dividends for Cantril in the decades that
followed. For a detailed accounting of the repeated associations
between Hadley Cantril and Nelson Rockefeller, I suggest reading

79This Letter Will Constitute Your Authority - The Eisenhower Ten, conelrad.com -
http://www.conelrad.com/atomicsecrets/secrets.php?secrets=05

64
James F. Tracy’s excellent piece, “Early ‘Psychological Warfare’
Research and the Rockefeller Foundation.”80 Between 1929 and
1930, Hadley Cantril studied psychology in Munich and Berlin (which,
undoubtedly, would have placed him in European Tavistock circles.)
In 1931, he received a Ph. D. in psychology from Harvard. Between
’31 and ’32, he taught Sociology at Dartmouth College. He also
taught psychology at Harvard (between ’32 and ’35) and Columbia
University (between ’35 and ’36).

Prior to his involvement with the RRP, Hadley Cantril collaborated

with (his soon-to-be fellow RRP associate) Gordon Allport on several
psychological experiments (relating to radio) that resulted in a book
entitled “The Psychology of Radio” – published in 1935. The book
describes the results of their experiments and acknowledges the
assistance of Westinghouse Studios, CBS, the Legislative Committee
of the National Association of Broadcasters, the Canadian Radio
Commission, the Bureau of Education Research (Ohio State
University), Edison Electric Illuminating Company and Harvard
Psychological Laboratory. Their insight into the psychological effect
of the mainstream media is a little obvious, but nevertheless
disturbing – most notably, in that the book highlights CBS’
involvement in these experiments before 1935!

In their book “The Psychology of Radio”, Cantril and Allport wrote:

“When a million or more people hear the same subject, the same
arguments and appeals, the same music and humour, when their
attention is held in the same way and at the same time to the same
stimuli, it is psychologically inevitable that they should acquire in
some degree common interests, common tastes, and common

80James F. Tracy, "Early 'Psychological Warfare' Research and the Rockefeller Foundation", Global Research, April 29,
2012 - https://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594
See also: http://jabajabba.com/early-psychological-warfare-research-rockefeller-foundation/

65
attitudes (...) to encourage people to think and feel alike.”81
Essentially, what they were highlighting here was how perfect mass-
reactions to radio listening could be when used in psychological /
social-engineering studies, research and operations. It is also
interesting that this media/psychological conditioning of “a million
or more people” by Cantril and Allport somewhat foreshadowed the
events of The War of the Worlds broadcast over three years later.

In 1936, Cantril’s friendship with Nelson Rockefeller paid-off when he

was approached by The Rockefeller Foundation to carry out some
“scientific polling” in connection with the ’36 US Presidential
Election. This brought Cantril into contact with George Gallup, who
offered Cantril the use of his facilities at Princeton University to carry
out research.82 The two became close friends. Cantril fully joined
Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1936 – where
(despite the various fields of work he was involved with) he
remained until his death in 1969.

Also in 1936, Cantril co-founded (alongside DeWitt Poole) a quarterly

publication called Public Opinion Quarterly. From the outset, the
publication was funded by The Rockefeller Foundation. According to
James F. Tracy’s piece “Early ‘Psychological Warfare’ Research and
the Rockefeller Foundation”, it is now known that Public Opinion
Quarterly was eventually co-funded by parties in the
military/intelligence establishment and that this money was
funnelled through The Rockefeller Foundation to those producing
the publication.83 Public Opinion Quarterly was notably associated

81Albert Hadley Cantril & Gordon Willard Allport, "The Psychology of Radio", Harper and Brothers, (1935) ISBN
0405035748 (pg. 23) See also: https://archive.org/details/psychologyofradi00hadl
82Hadley Cantril, The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research, Rutgers the State University, 1967 (pgs. 22-
25)
83James F. Tracy, "Early 'Psychological Warfare' Research and the Rockefeller Foundation", Global Research, April 29,
2012 - https://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594
See also: http://jabajabba.com/early-psychological-warfare-research-rockefeller-foundation/

66
with US government-sponsored psychological warfare strategies post
World War II.

The following is taken from the article “2X2L - Double Cross to Hell -
Council on Foreign Relations Experiment in Fear – War of the
Worlds”: “[DeWitt] Poole was a State Department expert in anti-
communist propaganda. Poole became chief of the Foreign
Nationalities Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. Poole
directed OSS efforts to recruit agents from immigrant communities.
The agents spied on their neighbours and analysed foreign
language publications.”84 [Author's Notes: Further evidence of this
can be found in Hadley Cantril’s book “The Human Dimension:
Experiences in Policy Research”, Harwood Childs’ “The First Editor
Looks Back”, and Anthony Cave Brown’s “Secret War Report of the
OSS”. Book details in footnote. 85]

The editor of The Public Opinion Quarterly was Harwood Childs.

Hadley Cantril was associate editor. The board of editors consisted of
the likes of Harold Lasswell and RRP members Paul Lazarsfeld and
Frank Stanton. From the article “2X2L - Double Cross to Hell…”:
“DeWitt Poole, would become president of the National Committee
for a Free Europe, one of the CIA's largest single propaganda
efforts. CFR member Stanton directed the Free Europe Fund, a CIA
proprietary corporation that laundered the money for Poole's
National Committee psycho-political operations.”86

84“2X2L - Double Cross to Hell - Council on Foreign Relations Experiment in Fear – War of the Worlds” -
http://www.bilderberg.org/roundtable/2x2l.html
85Hadley Cantril, The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research, Rutgers The State University, 1967 (pg. 24);
Childs, Harwood Childs, "The First Editor Looks Back," Public Opinion Quarterly, 21, no. 1 (Spring 1957) pgs. 7-13;
Anthony Cave Brown (ed.), "Secret War Report of the OSS", Berkeley, NY, 1976, Chap. 2
86“2X2L - Double Cross to Hell - Council on Foreign Relations Experiment in Fear – War of the Worlds” -
http://www.bilderberg.org/roundtable/2x2l.html See also Childs, Harwood Childs, "The First Editor Looks Back," Public
Opinion Quarterly, 21, no. 1, Spring 1957 (pg. 7); US General Accounting Office, US Government Monies Provided to
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty report no. 173239, May 25, 1972 (pg. 79)

67
Like Frank Stanton, Dr. Hadley Cantril was also a member of The
Council on Foreign Relations. In 1939 (notably, quite soon after The
War of the Worlds broadcast), he established the Office of Public
Opinion Research (OPOR) at Princeton University with an initial
funding (as noted in Cantril’s own 1967 book “The Human
Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research”) of $15,000 from The
Rockefeller Foundation. This was augmented in 1940 with an
additional $20,000.87 Cantril’s overall outfit, The School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton University, New Jersey, also
received a $25,000 grant from The Rockefeller Foundation in the
same year.88 This latter grant was given “for monitoring and
assessing European shortwave radio transmissions.”89 The
aforementioned Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR) studied
the effectiveness of certain “psycho-political operations”
(psyops/propaganda) carried out by the Office of Strategic Services
(OSS was the forerunner of the CIA.) The OSS was also co-created by
the Rockefellers and various Tavistock luminaries.

As a little side note, it is worth mentioning that both the OSS and CIA
had active operatives in CBS (as they did other broadcasting
networks) for many years. These operatives were known to the
upper echelons of CBS. As noted in Dennis W. Mazzocco’s “Networks
of Power: Corporate TV’s Threat to Democracy”, during the 1940s,
CBS Chairman William Paley “permitted CIA operatives to screen
news film, to eavesdrop on conversations between CBS news
officials and their reporters, and to masquerade as CBS news
employees. He also used his personal philanthropic foundation to

87James F. Tracy, "Early 'Psychological Warfare' Research and the Rockefeller Foundation", Global Research, April 29,
2012 - https://www.globalresearch.ca/early-psychological-warfare-research-and-the-rockefeller-foundation/30594
See also: http://jabajabba.com/early-psychological-warfare-research-rockefeller-foundation/
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.

68
hide overseas money transfers to CIA-sponsored projects abroad.”90
Furthermore, under a similar aegis, Paley also honoured requests
from Nelson Rockefeller (then State Department Under-Secretary for
Inter-American Affairs) to infiltrate South America and
assess/subvert Nazi propaganda in favour of pro-American media
output91 – such as what Paley’s CBS would then supply to the sub-
continent. Interestingly, both Hadley Cantril and Orson Welles were
involved in this endeavour at the behest of the Rockefellers… but
that’s a story I will save for later in the book!

During WWII, Hadley Cantril continued to work with The Rockefeller

Foundation and (CFR member and CBS reporter) Edward R. Murrow
to help establish the Princeton Listening Centre – for the purpose of
studying Nazi radio propaganda and how to apply such techniques to
OSS propaganda. This spawned The Foreign Broadcast Intelligence
Service (FBIS), which eventually became the US Information Agency
(USIA) – itself a propaganda arm of the National Security Council.92

Cantril was a key figure at the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in

New York. The institute was created in 1937 by Kirtley Mather,
Edward A. Filene, and Clyde R. Miller to “combat propaganda.” A
meeting held on March 29th, 1937, at the University Club in Boston
included the likes of Alfred Adler, Lyman Bryson, Edward L. Bernays
(an exceedingly dodgy figure in the field of propaganda, psyops and
social engineering), and Clyde R. Miller. By September, 1937, the
board of directors for the institute were revealed. They included:
Clyde R. Miller, Robert S. Lynd, E. Ernest Johnson, James E.
Mendenhall, and Robert K. Speer. Charles A. Beard, Hadley Cantril,
Ernest O. Melby, James T. Shotwell, and Percy S. Brown, were added

90 Dennis W. Mazzocco, “Networks of Power: Corporate TV’s Threat to Democracy”, South End Press, 1994 (pg. 38) See
also: Carl Bernstein, The CIA and the Media, Rolling Stone, 20 October, 1977, pg. 55
91 Ibid.
92 Mack White, “Television and the Hive Mind” - http://www.mackwhite.com/tv.html

69
to the board soon after.93 Remember that Cantril’s involvement with
this exceedingly suspect organisation began over a year before the
events of The War of the Worlds broadcast.

Cantril was also somewhat connected with the work of The United
States Office of War Information (OWI). According to Wikipedia, the
OWI “was a United States government agency created during
World War II to consolidate existing government information
services and deliver propaganda both at home and abroad. OWI
operated from June 1942 until September 1945. Through radio
broadcasts, newspapers, posters, photographs, films and other
forms of media, the OWI was the connection between the
battlefront and civilian communities. The office also established
several overseas branches, which launched a large-scale
information and propaganda campaign abroad. […] The Foreign
Information Service, a division of the Office of the Coordinator of
Information, became the core of the Overseas Branch of the OWI.
[…] President Roosevelt entrusted the OWI to beloved journalist
and CBS newsman Elmer Davis.”94

Wikipedia’s mention of Elmer Davis is interesting as he is a notable

figure in the context of The War of the Worlds psyop narrative. He
worked at CBS from (at least) 1938 until 1941. According to
Wikipedia, “Davis was one of the four journalists who portrayed
themselves in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still.”95 The
Day the Earth Stood Still was directed by Robert Wise – who worked
with Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air, and also
edited Welles film “The Magnificent Ambersons”. Robert Wise was
positioned by RKO studio to complete the film for Welles - something

93 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Propaganda_Analysis
94https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information See also: Allan Winkler, The Politics of
Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) [Pg. 1]
95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_Davis

70
which created a lifelong rift between Welles and Wise. I will touch on
this subject again later in this book. Elmer Davis once famously said
(as quoted in the book “Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits,
and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies”) that “The easiest
way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it
go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do
not realize that they are being propagandized.”96

If we consider all of the content of this chapter in relation to the idea

of the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast as part of a psychological
operation, the implications are staggering. The information here,
alone, should set off some proverbial alarm bells. To summarize:

 All of those people involved with The Princeton Radio

Research Project were, to a sizeable degree, involved with
the use of psychology and culture/media to carry out social
engineering experiments and research – before, during, and
for many years after the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast.

 The tone of The Princeton Radio Research Project study of

the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast followed similar
principles.

 All of the key figures involved with The Princeton Radio

Research Project worked, in some capacity, in the field of
state-sponsored psychological warfare research.

 Most had connections with The Tavistock Institute of Human

Relations.

96https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information See also: Clayton R. Koppes, Gregory D.

Black, “Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies”, University of
California Press; Reprint edition (1 July 1992) ISBN-10: 0520071611 / ISBN-13: 978-0520071612 (pg. 103)

71
  All had close connections to (and were sponsored, to varying
degrees, by) The Rockefeller Foundation.

 At least two individuals involved with The Princeton Radio

Research Project were in a position to have commissioned
the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast at CBS and, by
extension, have it potentially serve as part of a media/social-
engineering/psychological-warfare experiment.

Despite the weight of this evidence, I must stress that The Princeton
Radio Research Project and its participants are only the tip of the
proverbial iceberg in this narrative. As I have repeatedly highlighted
in this and the previous chapter, The Rockefellers were one-hundred
percent behind The Princeton Radio Research Project (and its
associated members) and it is only when we study the Rockefellers
that we begin to understand the full implications of the 1938 The
War of the Worlds broadcast as a potential psychological operation.

72
 Chapter Five:
“A Brief History of
the Rockefellers”

73
An Elite Family Agenda
The Rockefeller family has been at the forefront of a globalist elite
agenda for the last century or more. On the surface, the family’s
origins seem little more than a fortuitous tale of oil “robber barons”
who gained their power and wealth through “black gold” trading in
the latter half of the 19th Century. In brief, their story goes
something like this: In the aforementioned time period, The
Rockefellers built the company ‘Standard Oil’ into a trading
behemoth. Standard Oil was incorporated in Ohio in 1870 before
moving to New York in 1883. The family used their quickly gained
wealth and power to create an oil monopoly - one created by
intimidating smaller companies and Oil Well owners into selling up to
Standard Oil. Officially, the company was broken up - as a result of
anti-trust legislation - in 1911.

It should be noted that, despite the break-up, the Rockefellers

continued to reap huge profits from oil sales as a result of retaining
the majority share in Standard Oil. However, this was rapidly
becoming mere peanuts for the family - who had branched into all
manner of other endeavours and solidified their power base and
influence over America.

Although money and power was (and still is) their primary motivator,
they came to realise that the easiest way to maintain that money
and power was to control the masses – and to control the masses,
you needed to control their proverbial “hearts and minds”. To do
that, they needed to control the narrative of the proverbial “bigger
picture”. In other worlds, “worldview warfare”. This instigated all
manner of Rockefeller mandates - including the creation and
perpetuation of false social, political, economic and military
paradigms and issues such as “climate change” and “sustainability”,
“resource scarcity”, and “overpopulation”.

74
They pushed innumerable programs to create the mass acceptability
of the likes of vaccination programs, birth control and “family
planning”, sterilization of members of the populace, genetically
modified crops and food, livestock research, water “management”,
carbon taxes, Agenda 21, transhumanism, bio-technology, cloning,
the list goes on. Although their involvements may appear laudable
on the surface, each and every endeavour they have ever been
involved with has been motivated by pure self-interest. A careful
study of the history of the Rockefeller family shows that they do not
truly care about the mass of humanity. Primarily, it appears that the
Rockefeller’s goals have always been directly linked with a mass,
covert eugenics program. To them, the mass of humanity are little
more than cattle.

This overview of the Rockefellers may initially appear to some

readers as “alarmist” in tone. However, there is a huge wealth of
material available about the legacy and history of the Rockefeller
family if one is prepared to take the time to look. That said, one does
need to maintain a discerning eye and a penchant for “detecting”
when studying this material as there is indeed a great deal of
disinformation out there on the subject. Many authors have the likes
of political, racial and religious bias that slant their approach to the
Rockefeller subject. It is vital to sort the proverbial “wheat” from the
“chaff” in order to get down to the roots of the matter. Once that is
done (and, believe me, it takes a great deal of time to do so) an
irrefutable “core truth” about the Rockefellers can be discerned.

To give you a brief snapshot of this “core truth”, I refer you to a

statement once made by David Rockefeller. He said “Some believe
we [The Rockefeller Family] are part of a secret cabal working […]
and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more
integrated global political and economic structures – one world, if
you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”

75
The “Indoctrination” Model
In this chapter, I will cite some key examples within the recorded
history of the Rockefellers that are specific to the subject of this book
– occasions where this elite family have used information to
indoctrinate, program, psychologically manipulate and socially
engineer the thoughts, opinions, feelings, and beliefs of the mass of
humanity.

The first example is the Western system for mandatory / state-

sponsored education for the young. In America, the compulsory
education system took shape in 1903 when John D. Rockefeller
founded the General Education Board. This body began funding
schools across the country and popularized the state-controlled
public school model. Until the mid-1800s, private schools and home
schooling was the predominant education model in America. Literacy
rates were generally favourable and the population was considered
to be educated to a relatively high standard. Following the creation
of the General Education Board, many programs and changes to the
law were initiated. By 1913, it became clear that something was
amiss. Certain people began to recognise that there was indeed an
agenda behind the new model for education. Even the Rockefellers
themselves did not appear to be worried about revealing their true
intentions.

In the same year, Frederick T. Gates, Director of Charity for the

Rockefeller Foundation, wrote in a frank and ruthless manner in “The
Country School of Tomorrow, Occasional Papers Number 1”: “In our
dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves
with perfect docility to our moulding hand. The present
educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by
tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and
responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any
of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science.
76
We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men
of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters,
musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise
up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of
whom we now have ample supply.”97

In 1914, at an annual meeting in St. Paul Minnesota, the National

Education Association (NEA) began sounding the alarm bells
regarding the activities and intentions of the Carnegie and
Rockefeller Foundations: “We view with alarm the activity of the
Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations—agencies not in any way
responsible to the people—in their efforts to control the policies of
our State educational institutions, to fashion after their conception
and to standardize our courses of study, and to surround the
institutions with conditions which menace true academic freedom
and defeat the primary purpose of democracy as heretofore
preserved inviolate in our common schools, normal schools, and
universities.”98

Despite the warning, the strategy continued apace. By 1918, it

became law that every student in America was required to complete
an elementary school education under the Rockefeller model. It is
telling that the UK model for compulsory education unfolded in
pretty much the same time frame as the US model. The move away
from private education, home schooling, and such (at least for the
underprivileged masses), began in the mid-1800s in the UK –
although the enactment of law for compulsory education in the UK
came much more quickly than in the US. The UK Elementary
Education Act of 1880 enforced compulsory education for 5 to 13
year olds – although any child over the age of 10 who could produce

97Frederick T. Gates, "The Country School of Tomorrow," Occasional Papers, no.1 (New York: General Education
Board, 1913), p. 6.
98 The Origin of Compulsory Schooling - http://www.thrivemovement.com/follow-money-education

77
a certificate to show they had reached the “educational standard”
became exempt from the law at that point. The act was amended in
1893 to a minimum leaving age of 11. It was amended again in 1899
to 12 years old. The UK model realigned with the US in 1902
following the Balfour Act. The Act created Local Education
Authorities - pretty much the same concept as those that exist in the
UK today. It is strange that this happened at exactly the same time
that John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board in the
US. Coincidence, you might say? I’m afraid not. Furthermore, at
precisely the same time (1918) as compulsory elementary school
education for every student commenced in America, the UK made
the Fisher Education Act law – which made secondary education
compulsory up to the age 14 and gave responsibility for secondary
schools to the state. It appeared that a parallel model was being
rolled out across the Western world. This system allowed an elite
control system to begin moulding the thoughts of the masses from a
very young age.

The Ludlow Massacre

In 1914, The Rockefellers engaged in a full-on strategy of perception
management used to manipulate the masses of the United States. It
was the first time that the family openly revealed the kind of tactics
they were prepared to use in swaying public opinion. It also laid the
foundations for tactics that would be used regularly in the print and
broadcast media for the next century.

To tell the story behind these revelations, we have to go to Ludlow,

Colorado – also in 1914 – and to a group of coalminers, belonging to
the Union of United Mine Workers, who began striking over pay and
working conditions. In the midst of the strikes, one of the group’s
labour organisers was shot dead by men working for the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Corporation – then owned by the Rockefeller family.
The situation drew wide scale public attention – much to the disdain
78
of John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller dispatched the National Guard to
the tent colony - which housed the miners and their families – where
they shot and killed numerous colony residents. Amongst the dead
were a number of women and children.99 For more details of this
story (and the implications of Rockefeller involvement in the deaths),
I highly recommend Scott Noble’s documentary film “Psywar”.100

The public backlash against those responsible for the tragedy at the
tent colony was immense. Realizing that they were quickly losing
ground with popular public opinion, John D. Rockefeller recruited Ivy
Lee, a high-profile figure in the field of “public relations”, to repair
the public perception damages that both the Rockefellers and their
outfit, Standard Oil, had suffered as a result of The Ludlow Massacre.

Lee set to work for the Rockefellers as kind of “crisis management”

consultant. Through this crisis, the phenomenon of the “press
release” was fully realised. Lee made sure that John D. Rockefeller’s
face was everywhere – portraying a faux “friendly face” for both the
Rockefeller family and their owned assets. Lee used disinformation
campaigns via news bulletins to present a wholly different (pro-
Rockefeller) version of events at Ludlow. In this version, the deaths
at the tent colony were an “accident”. He also used the false
narrative to discredit the labour union movement. Despite the
massive effort, time and money that went into this disinformation
campaign, the public didn’t really buy it. The big “give away” was
Lee’s presence in so much of the campaign. People knew who he was
and what he did for a living – selling disinformation – so it wasn’t
hard to see what was going on. It also didn’t help that it was
common knowledge that Lee was on the Rockefeller payroll.

99Here is Wikipedia’s surprisingly close to accurate account of The Ludlow Massacre:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
100 http://metanoia-films.org/psywar/ & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXg70qJQ6O0

79
[Author’s Notes: Synchronistically, Lee was a graduate of Princeton
University. As a side note (for those people interested in the subject
matter of my books “Science Fiction and the Hidden Global Agenda –
Volumes One and Two”), Lee was, through his sister Laura, an uncle
to quasi-sci-fi novelist and CIA “sniffer” William S. Burroughs.]

The Modern Age of Perception Management

Despite the damage that The Ludlow Massacre did to the
Rockefellers’ public image, the family learned a valuable lesson
about P.R. – one that would be maintained until this day. P.R. is only
successful if those conducting the operation worked from the
shadows. Quietly (although public knowledge nowadays), The
Rockefeller Foundation created a “slush” fund of $100 million to be
used purely for public relations. Ivy Lee convinced John D.
Rockefeller to personally visit colleges, hospitals, churches and
charitable organisations to publically and visibly donate large sums of
money. These were effectively staged photo opportunities designed
to build a positive / “public friendly” face to The Rockefeller
Foundation.

The new age of public relations was born in these events.

Contemporaries of Lee, such as Edward Bernays and Walter
Lippmann, were employed by all manner of political and financial
elites to sell false perceptions of reality to the public. With the likes
of Bernays and Lippmann involved, propaganda was also introduced
into the mix. These latter two men asserted that perception
management could only succeed if the mass consciousness of the
public was attacked in a war-like strategy and “readjusted” rather
than the system itself. It was here that psychologists became the
employee of choice in the field of perception management.
Eventually, no area of research and experimentation was considered
“off limits”. The field even synched up with the burgeoning
phenomenon of state-sponsored mind control research (of which
80
both Bernays and Lippmann had varied connections to) and
programming. It was the beginning of full-spectrum psychological
manipulation and control of the masses. 101

The Rockefellers were largely very effective in their efforts at P.R.

over the subsequent decades. One most notable example occurred
in 1946 when The Rockefeller Foundation invested $139,000 to
present an “official” history of the Second World War – one that
quietly glossed over the involvement of US bankers and corporations
in building up the Nazi regime (specifically the Bush family connected
I.G. Farben, and their cartel partner Standard Oil – also owned by the
Rockefeller family.) This “official history” also ignores the fact that
The Ford Motor Company (amongst others) helped to build up the
American army whilst, at the same time, producing Germany military
vehicles for the Nazis. Ford and Opel were subsidiaries of General
Motors - controlled by J.P. Morgan – and were the two largest
producers of tanks in Hitler’s Germany. Rockefeller affiliation with
the Nazis is actually pretty easy to find in historical record – at least if
you know what to look for. Most notably (although not discussed
much in mainstream history classes and books) US President Truman
fired Nelson Rockefeller for the part he played in helping to create
Peron’s regime – which provided over 100,000 Nuremburg criminals
(safely delivered under the gazing eyes of CIA chief Allen Dulles) with
a new home, far from the repercussions of their previous life with
the Nazis.102

For all their attempts, the Rockefellers were never entirely successful
in completely hiding some of their activities and true agendas. On
occasion, the family were oddly blasé about their activities and

101For more on this subject, I recommend: Neil Sanders’ books: “Your Thoughts Are Not Your Own” - Volumes 1 & 2:
http://www.neilsandersmindcontrol.com/ Also: Vance Packard, “The Hidden Persuaders” & Wilson Bryan Key, “The
Age of Manipulation”. Adam Curtis’ “Century of Self” BBC series gives a potted, but relevant, history of Bernays and
P.R. - http://vimeo.com/61857758
102 See: Christopher Simpson, “Blowback”, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988

81
sporadically didn’t seem to care if anybody noticed. It was this
arrogance that formed the cracks in their public personae and has
allowed many researchers to more wholly expose it in recent years.
Another aspect of the visibility of their activities had less to do with
their occasional “couldn’t care less” attitude and more to do with
legal book-keeping. Despite their desires to the contrary, the
Rockefellers were legally obliged to allow some of their financial
activities to be publically visible. Although far from a complete tally
of their affairs (in fact, I would argue that what is publically viewable,
barely scratches the surface), the Rockefeller’s Annual Reports (as
you will see in this chapter and the next) give us a glimpse into the
kinds of things that The Rockefeller Foundation have been up to over
the last 100 years. Even in the very beginning, there were any
number of groups and individuals ready and willing to speak openly
about the Rockefellers and their agendas – particularly their plans for
the mainstream press and media.

Seizing Media Control

In 1917, former Democrat Congressman Oscar Callaway spoke about
an elite cabal of families (such as the Morgans, Rothschilds, and the
Rockefellers) conspiring to take control of the press and media. “In
March 1915, the JP Morgan interests, the steel ship building and
powder interests, and their subsidiary organisations got together
twelve men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to
select from the most influential papers in the United States a
sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the
daily press of the United States. These twelve men worked the
problem out by selecting 179 newspapers and then began, by an
elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose
of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the
country. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of
25 of the greatest newspapers. The 25 papers were agreed upon.

82
Emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and
international, of these papers. An agreement was reached. The
policy of the papers was brought, to be payed for by the month,
and an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise
and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness,
militarism, financial policies and other things of a national and
international nature - considered vital to the interests of the
purchasers”103

In 1927, the then-Mayor of New York, John Francis Hylan, said,

“These international bankers and Rockefeller- Standard Oil
interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in
this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into
submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do
the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the
invisible government….”104 The larger scope of this control agenda
was later thoroughly exposed by Norman Dodd - who, during the
1950s, was the Director of Research for the Reece Committee – a
group charged (by the US House of Representatives) with
investigating the activities of foundations like the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, Ford Foundation, and the
Rockefeller Foundation.105

It is also worth considering (however seriously you take it) the

alleged quote of David Rockefeller (seemingly spoken in 1991): “We
are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time
Magazine, and other great publications who directors have
attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion
103Congressman Oscar Callaway statements were included in the Congressional Record (vol. 54, February 9, 1917, p.
2947) See also: "For Press Investigation; Moore Asks Inquiry into Charges on Preparedness Campaign". The New York
Times, Page 8, February 14, 1917 -
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9504E7DA1538EE32A25757C1A9649C946696D6CF&legacy=true
104"Hylan Adds Pinchot to Presidency List; Foresees a Revolt". The New York Times. December 10, 1922 -
https://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9F07EED6153AEF33A25753C1A9649D946395D6CF
105 Norman Dodd interview, The Hidden Agenda - http://realityzone.stores.yahoo.net/hiddenagenda2.html

83
for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to
develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright
lights of publicity during those years but the world is now more
sophisticated & prepared to march towards a world government
which will never again know war but only peace and prosperity for
the whole of authority.”

The following is from Lawrence C. Soley, in the book “The News

Shapers: The Sources who Explain the News”: “At the time that
[Henry] Kissinger joined CBS, 10 of the 13 directors were members
of the Council on Foreign Relations. [...] Laurence Tisch, William
Paley, Harold Brown, Roswell Gilpatric, James Houghton, Newton
Minnow, Henry Schacht, Edson Spenser, Marietta Tree, and James
Wolfesohn were Council members.”106

This latter quote is interesting because, as you recall, CBS were

responsible for broadcasting the 1938 The War of the Worlds radio
play – although the cited Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
members were directors at CBS decades after the WOTW broadcast.
However, if we jump back in time, we see that the CFR was formed
and began meeting in 1918 – twenty years before the WOTW
broadcast. CFR became incorporated in 1921. It is widely cited that
the Rockefellers were responsible for helping to create and fund CFR
from the beginning. Evidentially, it is documented that the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations began pumping huge amounts of money
into CFR in the late 1930s – actually prior to October 1938. 107 So let’s
ask the question: Were there CFR members and affiliates working at
CBS during the WOTW broadcast and steering it as part of a potential
psyop? It is certainly a possibility.

106Lawrence C. Soley, "The News Shapers: The Sources who Explain the News", Praeger Publishers (30 April 1992)
ISBN-10: 0275940330 / ISBN-13: 978-0275940331 (pgs. 93 - 94)
107
Donald Gibson, “Communication, Power and Media”, Nova Biomedical; UK ed. edition (1 April 2004) ISBN-10:
1590339304 / ISBN-13: 978-1590339305 (pgs. 23 - 24) See also: Council on Foreign Relations, 1998

84
For example, Edward Bernays, the so-called “Father of Propaganda”
was a founding member of CFR.108 He also worked for CBS on many
PR / propaganda / social psychology project for decades - including
throughout the 1930s. 109

As a final summary for this chapter, we have established:

 The Rockefellers’ role in establishing the state-sponsored

Western education (indoctrination) system

 The Rockefellers’ ruthless tactics in muddying and covering

up their role in The Ludlow Massacre

 How the Rockefellers’ effectively used the events of the

Massacre to birth the phenomenon of PR – “public relations”

 How blatantly, the Rockefellers made their move to seize

control over the print press and broadcast media

 Also, some cursory examples of how they wanted to use the

press and media for the purpose of spreading propaganda,
social engineering, and creating a system of mass control.

108Lawrence H. Shoup & William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States
Foreign Policy. Monthly Review Press, 1977, ISBN 0-85345-393-4.
109Edward Bernays, 'Father of Public Relations' And Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103, NY Times, March 10, 1995 -
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/16/specials/bernays-obit.html

85
86
 Chapter Six:
“The Annual
Reports”

87
Teaching Films
In this chapter, I will dig more deeply into The Rockefeller
Foundation’s Annual Reports to begin to more specifically connect
up some of the many dots between The Rockefeller Foundation and
the likes of CBS, the Princeton Radio Research Project (RRP), those
involved with the RRP, and organisations like The Tavistock Clinic /
Institute of Human Relations. The information gleaned from the
reports will also expose the common theme of the Rockefeller
Foundation funding projects and studies that utilised the media for
culture creation, propaganda, social engineering and psychological
warfare.

In the 1920s, The Rockefeller Foundation began quietly funnelling

money into a company called the Teaching Film Custodians, Inc.
“According to its original by-laws, the purpose of the company was
to "advance and promote the scientific use of motion picture films
for educational purposes… by cooperating with producers of motion
pictures to further the educational value of motion picture films."
The corporation provided excerpts and short films for use within
schools and universities, mostly adaptations of novels and historical
features.”110 Beginning in 1946 and ending in 1954, The Teaching
Film Custodians (and, by extension, the Rockefeller Foundation)
began funding the Yale Motion Picture Research Project. This study
had two broad objectives: “Firstly to discover principles of effective
production and utilization of educational films, and second, to
explore the instructional potential and limitations of existing types
of films. [...] utilizing a finished film product and measured the
learning of factual information, the acquisition of skills, and the

110Abstract: Teaching Film Custodians, Inc. (TFC) -

http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/findingaids/view?doc.view=entire_text&docId=InU-Ar-VAD1725

88
modification of interest, attitudes, and opinions.”111 This project
was carried out under the direction of Mark A. May, director of Yale
University's Institute of Human Relations112 (associated with the
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.)

In 1925, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a project involving John

Grierson, an academic in social studies and mass media, to study the
influence of films on public opinion. Grierson later became a film
director and coined the term “documentary”.

In the Rockefeller Foundation’s 1933 Annual Report, the Foundation

explained the issuing of a grant to the Foreign Policy Association for
the work of its Research Department. They wrote: “The association
was established in 1921 for the purpose of studying all sides of
every important international question affecting the United States,
and of communicating the results of such study to as large a
number of the American people as possible, that there may be
public understanding of foreign problems. […] At the New York
headquarters the functions of research, publication, and radio
broadcasting are centred.”113 The Foreign Policy Association was
(and still is to this day) a social engineering / propaganda outfit that
utilised “education”, literature and the media to spread its
programming.114

Newspeak
In 1933, the Rockefeller Foundation made $235,000, available (over
the three-year period 1933-35) to the Orthological Institute in

111Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, Kindle Edition, IAP - Information Age Publishing,
Inc. (13 Mar. 2011) ASIN: B004S2CWF2 (pg. 252)
112Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, Kindle Edition, IAP - Information Age Publishing,
Inc. (13 Mar. 2011) ASIN: B004S2CWF2 (pg. 259)
113The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1933 (pg. 259) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122119/Annual-Report-1933.pdf
114 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy_Association

89
London for “various activities directed toward determining the
usefulness of Basic English in the Far East.” 115 This funding
continued into 1936. This little bit of financing is much more
disturbing, as it demonstrates one (of many) connections to the early
work of The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. This section of a
larger article written in 1997 by L. Wolfe (entitled “Tavistock's
language project: the origin of 'Newspeak'") explains:

“The Tavistock Crowd had picked up on the work of British linguist

C.K. Ogden, who had created a simplified version of the English
language using some 850 basic words. [...] called 'Basic English' or
'Basic'. [...] In the bowels of psywar directorate, the concepts
behind Basic were key to large-scale control of dangerous
"thought." A simplified English language limits the degrees of
freedom of expression, and inhibits the transmission of meaning
through metaphor. It is then easy to create a 'reality' that can be
massaged through the mass media such as radio [...] The British
Ministry of Information, which controlled all broadcasting and news
dissemination, decided to experiment with the effectiveness of
Basic. The BBC was asked to produce some newscasts in Basic,
which were broadcast in a number of foreign sections of the BBC,
including the Indian Section, which included among its operatives
1984 author George Orwell and his close friend Guy Burgess, who
was later involved in Britain's biggest post-war Soviet spy scandal.

The results were carefully monitored. Those involved quickly

discovered that, with some modifications, the language was ideal
to present a censored, edited version of the news, since it lent itself
to simple, declarative statements, it gave those statements the
character of fact, even though the information being reported was

115The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1933 (Pgs. 322 - 324) –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122119/Annual-Report-1933.pdf

90
heavily censored or even self-admitted propaganda. [...] Following
the presentation of a special report on those findings in 1943, the
Basic project was placed on 'highest priority' in the War Cabinet, at
the insistence of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The project,
now-declassified papers reveal, was to be expanded to include
work in the United States. [...] Reports from the Ministry of
Information to the special War Cabinet committee said that the
language was unwieldy, Rather than overturn the English
language, the reports argued, it were easier to simplify the latter's
usage by example of the mass media news broadcasts. Radio
newscasts, which had been made up of long descriptive
documentaries before the war, took on the shorter formats that are
featured today. The long sentences, often with literary overtones,
gave way to shorter more direct sentences and simple vocabulary.
Television news has adopted this linguistic style: simple direct
sentences, with a very, very limited vocabulary. [...] Vocabulary
analysis of newscasts reveals that, other than specialized terms,
names of places, and proper names, far less than Basic's 850-word
vocabulary is employed.”116

It is clear from my research that the Rockefellers, The Tavistock

Clinic, and both British and American intelligence and military assets
were clamouring all over the study and use of ‘Basic English.’ It is also
documented that its primary use was to be in the broadcast media.

The Tavistock Crowd

The connections between The Rockefeller Foundation and The
Tavistock Clinic / Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) are well
documented. I briefly touched on this subject in an earlier chapter.

116L. Wolfe, "The Science of Brainwashing: How the British use the media for mass psychological warfare", EIR, Volume
24, Number 4, Jan 17, 1997 - https://issuu.com/edwardbernays/docs/how_the_british_use_the_media_for_p See also
"Turn off Your Television", L. Wolfe, New Federalist, 1990-93

91
However, having discussed the involvement of The Rockefeller
Foundation in “Basic English” research and broadcasts, it feels
appropriate to look more deeply at the connections between the
Rockefellers and Tavistock.

The following is taken from Raymond B. Fosdick’s 1952 book “The

Story of The Rockefeller Foundation”: “In 1913, shortly after its
creation, the Foundation began a co-operative relationship with the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene, and for many years
supported its activities and studies of the institutional treatment of
mental diseases. It was during the early part of this period that Dr.
Thomas W. Salmon was engaged by the Foundation as its adviser in
matters relating to mental hygiene, his services being placed at the
disposal of the National Committee. Under this arrangement the
work continued to expand, with emphasis increasingly on the
problem of the individual. Out of Dr. Salmon’s recommendation
that all criminals sentenced to state prisons should first be sent to
psychiatric clinics for classification grew the clinic established at
Sing in 1916, the first of its kind in America. Dr. Salmon resigned
from the Foundation in 1921 to take the professorship of psychiatry
at Columbia University, but the Foundation’s contributions to the
general expenses of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene
and for its successor organization, the National Mental Health
Foundation, have continued up to the present time. During this
period, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial became interested
in psychiatry and in the related subjects of child psychology and
industrial psychology, both in Canada and the United States. The
most ambitious undertaking of the Memorial in this field led to the
creation of the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Over the years,
the various Rockefeller boards contributed very substantial sums to
this Institute, and while even a broad definition of psychiatry would
not cover all that was done there, the major part of the support
was for use in this field. The activities which the Foundation began

92
in 1933, however, were launched on a far more comprehensive
scale.”117

The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and The Institute of

Human Relations at Yale University were and still are infinitely
interconnected - often sharing many of the same clinical and social
psychologists.118 There is an argument amongst some researchers
that both Institutes were effectively one and the same entity.

Documented evidence of the Rockefellers espousing the Tavistock

ethos of “Human Relations” can be found as early as 1916 – when
John D. Rockefeller foreshadowed the template of the Tavistock
Institute of Human Relations in a speech at a YMCA Industrial
Conference. He repeated his ideas a year later at the Cornell
University Founder’s Day Convention.119

Daniel Estulin, in his book “Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the

Masses”, documents the “early days” connections between the
Rockefellers and Tavistock. “The 1940’s was the turning point for
the Rockefeller strategy of behaviour modification-brainwashing,
co-determination, co-participation, corporatism for the takeover of
the United States and world labour movement. […] In 1946, Rees-
Tavistock-Rockefeller was formalised in the Rockefeller
Memorandum, in which Brigadier General John Rawlings Rees
exposed the full depth of his ‘cabal and offered it to the family. The
Rockefeller Foundation, which had been heavily funding Tavistock
and Tavistock members since 1934, readily accepted, and the
Tavistock Clinic was transformed into the Tavistock Institute of
Human Relations.’ The Institute developed national and

117 Raymond B. Fosdick, "The Story of The Rockefeller Foundation”, Odhams Press Limited, 1952 (Pgs. 146 - 147)
118Profs Peter Miller & Nik Rose, "Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life", Polity; 1
edition (11 April 2008) ISBN-10: 0745641016 / ISBN-13: 978-0745641010 (Pg. 145)
119
Daniel Estulin, Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, Trine Day (US) (1 Sept. 2015) ISBN-10:
163424043X / ISBN-13: 978-1634240437 (pg.29)

93
international operations under the heading ‘operation research.’
Firstly, Rockefeller took many of the social scientists who had been
involved in the bestial-fascist war intelligence services and set them
up on campuses in Labour Institutes funded with Rockefeller
Foundation, National institute of Mental Health, Army, Navy, Air
Force and large capitalist firm money, guidance and projects. These
Labour Institutes were created at the same time as the CIA, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council as part of the
same network that Rockefeller was building to rule the world, once
the United States had replaced Britain, after the war as the world’s
strongest power.”120

Later in his book, Estulin also writes, “In the 1993 August/September
edition, the prestigious Dutch magazine ‘Exposure’ outlined
disturbing details about how the Tavistock Institute for Behavioural
Analysis, planned to control the boards of the three major and most
prestigious […] networks in the United States: NBC, CBS and ABC.
All three networks came as spin offs from the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA). These organisations and institutions that
theoretically are in ‘competition’ with each other – this is part of
the ‘independence’ that ensures Americans enjoy unbiased news –
are in fact closely interfaced and interlocked with countless
companies and banks, making it an almost impossible task to
untangle them. […] CBS founder William Paley was trained in mass
brainwashing during World War II at the Tavistock Institute in
England. The financial expansion of CBS was supervised for a long
time by Brown Brothers Harriman and its senior partner, Prescott
Bush (father and grandfather to Presidents), who was a CBS
director. The Board includes Chairman Paley, for whom Prescott
Bush personally organized the money to buy the company; Harold
120
Daniel Estulin, Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, Trine Day (US) (1 Sept. 2015) ISBN-10:
163424043X / ISBN-13: 978-1634240437 (pgs.29-30) See also: Rockefeller's Fascism with a Democratic Face, The
Campaigner, Vol 8, #1-2, November-December 1974, pg. 63

94
Brown (CFR), executive director of the Trilateral Commission, and
former Secretary of the Air Force and of Defence of the US; Roswell
Gilpatric (CFR, Bilderberg) from the Kuhn, Loeb (Rothschild) law
firm; Henry B. Schnacht, director of the Chase Manhattan Bank
(Rockefeller / Rothschild), CFR, Brookings Institute; Franklin A.
Thomas (CFR), head of the Rockefeller-controlled Ford Foundation;
Newton D. Minor (CFR), director of the RAND Corporation and,
among many others, the Ditchley Foundation, which is closely
linked with the Tavistock Institute in London and the Bilderberg
Group. The former president of CBS was Dr. Frank Stanton (CFR),
who is also trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie
Institution. So, are the Rothschild and Rockefeller families, who are
the leading groups in the tightly controlled field of communications
working closely with the Tavistock Institute in London.”121

More Evidence from the Reports

Away from The Tavistock Crowd, numerous Annual Rockefeller
Foundation reports throughout the 1930s demonstrate more areas
of Rockefeller interest in the overlap of the media and social
psychology. The following is taken from the 1934 Annual Report: “In
the field of social science aid will be given for objective studies on
selected problems of realistic importance in social control, through
the methods of direct factual study, training of personnel, and basic
research. [...] The vast general fields of the radio broadcast and the
motion picture will also receive consideration since well-organized
efforts for their greater cultural effectiveness appear to be valuable
and in need of support.”122 Further in the report, the Foundation
documents their cooperation with “the National Advisory Council on

121
Daniel Estulin, Tavistock Institute: Social Engineering the Masses, Trine Day (US) (1 Sept. 2015) ISBN-10:
163424043X / ISBN-13: 978-1634240437 (pgs. 143-145)
122The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1934 (Pgs. xiii-xiv) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122121/Annual-Report-1934.pdf

95
Radio in Education a nation-wide radio program […] organized with
speakers including Secretary Wallace, Senators Borah, Bankhead,
and Wagner, Peter Molyneaux, Matthew Woll, William Hard, M. L.
Wilson, Lionel Edie, Willard Thorp, G. N. Peek, H. T. Harriman, and
C. C. Davis.”123

The 1935 annual Rockefeller Foundation report documents a

collaboration with the propaganda organisation, The Foreign Policy
Association. “Two grants were made, in 1935 to the Foreign Policy
Association. A grant of 375,000 was given toward the support of
the Research Department of the association for an additional three-
year period, continuing Foundation assistance at the level which
has been maintained since 1933. The work of the Research
Department, which furnishes the basis for all the other work of the
association, has been described in preceding annual reports of the
Foundation. Its publications are widely used in the academic world
and have an appreciable effect upon the reporting of foreign affairs
in the newspapers of this country. [...] An additional grant of
237,500 was made to the Foreign Policy Association toward the
support of an experimental educational program to be carried on
over an eighteen-month period ending December 31, 1936. The
purpose of the experiment is to supply, to a wider audience than
was formerly reached. [...] The main channels of distribution are
welfare organizations, agencies of adult and secondary education,
and various commercial publishing agencies interested in the
distribution of popular-priced informational literature. There are
also daily or semi-weekly releases over the radio and by the
newspaper.”124

123The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1934 (Pg. 217) –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122121/Annual-Report-1934.pdf
124The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1935 (Pgs. 224-225) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122123/Annual-Report-1935.pdf

96
The 1936 report discusses the role of the media and social
psychology from the outset: “[The Rockefeller Foundation] is
working not so much on the content of humanistic studies as on the
techniques by which cultural levels are affected, i.e., radio, non-
professional drama, museums, libraries, and language
problems.”125 It continues, “If we should ask ourselves what forces
today are largely instrumental in determining aesthetic values,
surely one of the first answers would be the radio and the moving
picture. Another answer would relate to libraries, museums, and
orchestras. A third might include the development of drama as a
form of expression. [...] A modest experimental beginning has been
made by the Foundation looking toward the improvement of radio
programs. For example, in 1936, $40,000 was appropriated to the
World Wide Broadcasting Foundation for trial work in the
development of radio programs of cultural and educational value.
Similar appropriations have been made to other agencies. Through
special studies, experiments are also under way to determine
whether radio audiences are not prepared for far better programs
than they customarily receive. Moreover, with Foundation support,
an effort is being made to bring the radio industry and the
universities into closer understanding and cooperation.”126

The 1936 report also notes that more grants had been issued by the
Foundation to further study the use of “Basic English” in China.127

On page 256 of the report, the Foundation discusses the issue of

another media related grant. “$2,500 to the Federal Radio
Education Committee to provide the salary and incidental expenses

125The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1936 (Pg. 5) –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122125/Annual-Report-1936.pdf
126The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1936 (Pgs. 43 - 44) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122125/Annual-Report-1936.pdf
127The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1936 (Pg. 48) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122125/Annual-Report-1936.pdf

97
of a script writer for a series of educational broadcasts upon local
government administration to be distributed to local stations
through the Office of Education during the year beginning
November 1, 1936.”128

Another grant is discussed on page 279. “The sum of $40,000 was

appropriated to the World Wide Broadcasting Foundation to enable
it to continue its experiment in the development of radio programs
of cultural and educational value through Station W1XAL in Boston.
This grant, available for the two-year period beginning July 1, 1936,
supplements a previous one-year grant made toward this
experiment. W1XAL, a short-wave station, is heard regularly in
Europe, South Africa, South America, and in all sections of the
United States. During the year the Broadcasting Foundation used
the facilities of the station for broadcasting regularly five days each
week. Sunday programs, planned with special attention to the
interests of listeners abroad, included a weekly news review in
dramatic form, a series entitled "The American Scene" dealing with
current aspects of American life, and talks on art in everyday life
with the cooperation of representatives of a number of agencies
concerned with art education. Monday evening programs were for
listeners with a technical interest in radio. On Tuesdays and
Thursdays programs for American listeners, and on Saturdays for
listeners abroad, included musical and dramatic features, talks on
psychology, astronomy, geology, the history of science, law, poetry,
and language (with a series in Basic English). Most of these
broadcasts were given by members of the faculties of Harvard

128The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1935 (Pg. 256) –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122125/Annual-Report-1936.pdf

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University, Boston University, Tufts College, and other nearby
institutions.”129

The Foundation also explains how “The sum of $115,000 was

appropriated in 1936 by The Rockefeller Foundation and the
General Education Board for fellowships in the humanities.”
Amongst these fellowships, “One fellow studied broadcasting in the
South and Central American countries. Eight of the thirty four
fellows working through General Education Board funds studied
methods of planning and producing radio programs in New York
City. [...] A number of grants in aid were made for individual or
exploratory projects or in connection with the closing out of former
work. [...] $500 to Columbia University, New York, to enable
Professor Cabell Greet to undertake preliminary study of radio
speech.”130

The 1937 annual report of The Rockefeller Foundation documents a

second grant of $60,000 to the University of Chicago and De Paul
University’s University Broadcasting Council – which received its first
grant of $46,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1935. The
second grant was maintained until 1940. The program was “aimed at
discovering how programs of educational and cultural value can be
made most generally effective.”131

As noted in an earlier chapter, the 1937 Rockefeller Foundation

Annual Report also documents the Rockefeller’s funding of the
Princeton Radio Research Project – commencing September 1st,
1937. To tie all this back to the possibility that the 1938 War of the

129The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1936 (pgs. 297) –

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122125/Annual-Report-1936.pdf
130The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1936 (pgs. 297 - 300) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122125/Annual-Report-1936.pdf
131The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1937 (Pg. 324 - 326) –
https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122132/Annual-Report-1937.pdf

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Worlds broadcast was a social engineering / psychological warfare
experiment, let us summarize the evidence:

 The Rockefeller Foundation funded The Princeton Radio

Research Project from September 1st, 1937 – which included
additional funding immediately following the October 1938
broadcast of The War of the Worlds to be used by The
Princeton RRP to fund a study of said broadcast.

 Evidence in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Annual Reports

showing funding of film projects (from the 1920s onward) for
“educational purposes” and for “modification of interest,
attitudes, and opinions” – in other words, social engineering
via the media.

 Evidence in multiple Annual Reports throughout the 1930s

showing funding of broadcast radio projects and studies
whose aims included the likes of “social control.”

 Evidence in multiple Annual Reports throughout the 1930s

showing funding of combined media and social psychology
research projects – including a Tavistock supported project to
create a new media language (Basic English) that “limits the
degrees of freedom of expression, and inhibits the
transmission of meaning through metaphor.”

Evidence in multiple Annual Reports throughout the 1930s showing

funding of radio projects designed to conduct propaganda
broadcasts in both the US and abroad.

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 Chapter Seven:
“The H.G. Wells
Connection”

101
The Original Author
From here on out, I want to look at some of the more tangential
evidence connecting the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast to
entities like The Rockefeller Foundation and the Tavistock Institute of
Human Relations. In this chapter, I will begin by examining an oft-
overlooked player in this whole narrative – the man who authored
the original story on which the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast
was based – H. G. Wells.

Although some people may consider the involvement of H.G. Wells

in the overall narrative of this book to be inconsequential, I believe
there are enough connections between Wells and the larger scope of
the 1938 broadcast to warrant some deeper analysis.

As noted earlier in this book, H.G. Wells authored the “War of the
Worlds” story on which Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on
the Air based their 1938 radio broadcast. I have always considered
this odd – particularly given the continued connections between the
1938 broadcast and The Rockefeller Foundation.

H.G. Wells was well aware of the Rockefeller family and their
activities. He had encounters and dealings with the family on a
number of occasions and often spoke about them (in varying tones)
in his written works. In his 1906 book “The Future in America: A
Search after Realities”, he wrote “Mr J.D. Rockefeller is just another
product of the same cult. You meet these older types everywhere,
they range from fervent piety and temperance to a hearty drinking,
‘story-telling’, poker-playing type, but they have in common a
shrewd, narrow, business habit of mind that ignores the future and
the state altogether.”132

132 H.G. Wells, “The Future in America”, Chapter 10: State Blindness, Section 11 – ‘A Sample America’, 1906

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In a piece taken from his 1914 essay collection “An Englishman Looks
at the World”, he wrote “It seems to me that the educational zeal of
Mr Andrew Carnegie and the university and scientific endowments
of Mr [J.D.] Rockefeller are not merely showy benefactions; they
express a definite feeling of the present need of constructive
organisation in the social scheme. The time has come to build.
There is, I think, good reason for expecting that statesmanship of
the millionaires to become more organised and scientific and
comprehensive in the coming years. It is plausible at least to
maintain that the personal quality of the American plutocracy has
risen in the last three decades, has risen from the quality of a mere
irresponsible wealthy person towards that of a real aristocrat with
a ‘sense of the state.’ That one may reckon the first hopeful
possibility of the American outlook.”133

In what is perhaps a synchronicity with the Rockefeller’s state

education program, Wells said “Civilization is in a race between
education and catastrophe…” Although he sweetened his tone by
following up with: “Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and
wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest
weapon we have.”

Of John D. Rockefeller, Wells also once wrote, “Something in the

nature of J.D. Rockefeller had to occur in America, and it is all to the
good of the world that he was tight-lipped, consistent and
amazingly free from vulgar vanity, sensuality, and
quarrelsomeness. His cold persistence and ruthlessness may arouse
something like horror, but for all that he was a forward-moving
force, a constructive power.”134

133H.G. Wells, "An Englishman Looks at the World", Create Space Independent Publishing Platform (28 Jun. 2013)
ISBN-10: 1490563857 / ISBN-13: 978-1490563855
134 John Loeber, "Notes on John D. Rockefeller" - https://johnloeber.com/w/rockefeller.html

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Shared Eugenics
As noted in a previous chapter, one of the Rockefeller Foundation’s
overarching goals has been the implementation of a complex
eugenics program. In 1926, representatives of The Rockefeller
Foundation toured Europe. Upon their return to the U.S., the
Foundation began funding eugenics organisations and scientists in
Europe – including the likes of Herman Poll, Alfred Gorjahn, Hans
Nachtsheim and outfits such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Psychiatry and the Institute for Anthropology, eugenics and Human
Heredity. (See: Stefan Kuhl, “The Nazi Connection”)

H.G. Wells (like the Rockefellers) was an ardent pro-eugenics,

Darwinists, obsessed with the creation of a “New World Order”
paradigm. Wells’ “The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World
Revolution” (1928) and “The New World Order” (1939) alone will give
you all you need if you want to see his views on this matter. In his
youth, Wells was tutored by T. H. Huxley (grandfather of Aldous
Huxley). T. H. Huxley was the official spokesman for Darwin’s
“Theory of Evolution” (gaining the moniker “Darwin’s Bulldog”) and
was made a fellow of The Royal Society at the age of 26. H. G. Wells
went on to teach both Julian and Aldous Huxley.135 Wells also
endorsed a favourite paradigm of the Rockefellers - the “scientific
dictatorship” model - which he called a “Technocracy”.

In 1904, Wells discussed a survey paper by Francis Galton, co-

founder of eugenics, saying: (Quote in Galton’s “Eugenics: Its
Definition, Scope, And Aims”) “It is in the sterilisation of failure, and
not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of

135W. Warren Wagar, "H.G. Wells: Traversing Time (Early Classics of Science Fiction)", Wesleyan University Press (22
Sep 2004) ISBN-10: 0819567256 / ISBN-13: 978-0819567253 (pg. 10)

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an improvement of the human stock lies.”136 Wells wrote the
introduction to Margaret Sanger’s 1922 opus “The Pivot of
Civilisation”. Sanger was a staunch feminist and birth-control activist.
The Rockefeller Foundation financially (and publically) supported
Sanger’s “Planned Parenthood” movement. In a similar vein, it
should be noted that the Foundation also financed eugenics research
at Galton Laboratory at University College, London, and the Cornell
Medical School, New York, during the 1930s. One little note of
interest regarding Margaret Sanger: Daniel J. Flynn, in “Intellectual
Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas”
(2004), wrote “[Sanger] was a serial adulterer. Among the scores
who shared her bed were some of the most famous men of her
time, including novelist H.G. Wells […]”137

Guerrilla Warfare
Socialism has come in many forms – Marxism, National, Fabian, etc.
The Fabian Society, founded in England in 1884, was driven by a
desire to bring about a Socialist society via subversive means. Instead
of direct means of protest, movement and revolution, The Fabians
sought to disseminate their doctrines via literature and culture,
through universities, the press/media, government institutions and
political establishments. It was, as many academics who have studied
the history of The Fabian Society have documented, a “guerrilla
warfare” tactic of indoctrination. For more examples of this, I suggest
checking out “Fabian Essays in Socialism” – which was edited by
noted Fabian George Bernard Shaw.

Fabians were actually dead against the likes of the Rockefellers as

their stance as capitalists was diametrically opposed to the doctrines

136
Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, And Aims”, The American Journal Of Sociology, Volume X; July,
1904; Number 1 - http://galton.org/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-journ-soc-eugenics-scope-aims.htm
137 Daniel J. Flynn, “Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas” (2004)

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of Fabian socialism. This is most notable in H.G. Wilshire’s 1891
writings in the preface of the American edition of “Fabian Essays in
Socialism” – where he cited “Four men, viz.: Gould, Astor, Vanderbilt
and Rockefeller, practically control, and what is more important,
are rapidly absorbing the wealth of this 50,000 […] If no structural
change in society takes place, these four men will be the sole
owners of the United States. […] the only possible chance of
retarding the approach of Socialism, is to stop the tendency of
capital to congeal in a few hands. Some plan must be devised to
prevent Gould and Vanderbilt […] and to check Rockefellers’
insatiable and omnivorous appetite […]”138

Nevertheless, socialist organisations and The Rockefeller Foundation

shared a common method of implementing their goals – specifically
in terms of their “guerrilla warfare” tactic of indoctrination via the
likes of the aforementioned entities and paradigms (culture,
education, press/media, government, etc.) H.G. Wells seemed to be
acutely aware of this – hardly something of a surprise given that he
was a founding member of The Fabian Society. [Author’s Notes: It
must be pointed out that Wells seemingly distanced himself from The
Fabian Society after a time.139] Wells’ The War of the Worlds first
appeared in a serialised form in 1897 in the Pearsons Magazine. It
was published as a novel a year later. Pearsons was a socialist
periodical – geared toward the likes of Fabianist doctrines. The
magazine espoused world views that elite types (such as the
Rockefellers) also aligned themselves with. We have to ask the
question: if entities like The Fabian Society railed against the likes of
the Rockefellers (inherently views through the lens of history as

138 H.G. Wilshire, “Fabian Essays in Socialism”, 1891

139Richard Lung, “World peace thru democracy: H G Wells' neglected third phase” -
http://www.voting.ukscientists.com/welsdemo.html

106
“capitalists”), why did both seem to share many common views and
goals?

The answer may lie in this section from Kerry R. Bolton’s 2010 work
“Socialism, Revolution and Capitalist Dialectics” (and a reference to
H. G. Wells): “In this dialectical capitalism, the synthesis that is
supposed to emerge is a ‘Brave New World’ centralized world
economy controlled not by commissars and a politburo but by
technocrats and boards of directors. A strategy of dialectics means
backing movements in the short term to achieve quite different,
even opposite goals, in the long term. Hence the rationale behind
capitalists supporting socialist and even communist movements,
[…] H.G. wells opined – approvingly – at the time of the Bolshevik
Revolution that Big Business and communism are both paths to the
same end – ‘collectivism’. The ‘socialistic’ orientation of certain
capitalists at the apex of the world economy is exemplified by a
statement by the late Nelson Rockefeller of the famous capitalist
dynasty: ‘I’m a great believer in planning. Economic, Social,
Political, Military, total world planning.’” 140

H. G. Wells was also a member of “The Coefficients” - formed by

several early Fabians. “The Coefficients” eventually formed into “The
Round Table” think-tank (of which Wells was also a founding
member) – a group that gave birth to the Royal Institute for
International Affairs (RIIA - which ultimately spawned The Tavistock
Institute) and its American cousin, the Council on Foreign Relations
(another reminder of Rockefeller influence.)

To further illuminate the seriousness of these connections, here is a

section from Lyndon LaRouche’s “The Secrets Known Only to the
Inner Elite”: “the articulation of policies and strategies agreeable to

140 Kerry R. Bolton, “Socialism, Revolution and Capitalist Dialectics”, 2010, Asia Pacific Essays

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that tradition is accomplished through the aid of various 'think'
tanks.' Oxford, Cambridge, and Sussex universities include
privileged domains which are the core of such arrangements. These
are the institutions which coordinate the British Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS or MI-6), MI-5, and the London Tavistock Institute.
Other British institutions controlling British Policy, including its
intelligence services' policies, include the Round Table, the Royal
Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), and the International
Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). The British intelligence services
operate branches of IISS in many nations, including a part of the
New York Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Institute in
the United States. The Trilateral Commission is predominantly an
arm of British intelligence services. The London Tavistock Institute
controls the United Nations Organization's World Federation of
Mental Health...”

Wells & Tavistock

To add a layer of synchronicity to this subject, I should note that H.G.
Wells (who authored the original The War of the Worlds) loved the
idea of ‘Basic English’ and used it in his 1933 novel The Shape of
Things to Come as a common language for “a new elite that after a
prolonged struggle succeeds in uniting the world and establishing a
totalitarian world government. In the future world of Wells' vision,
virtually all members of humanity know this language.” 141 ‘Basic
English’, as demonstrated in an earlier chapter, was an endeavour
financed by The Rockefeller Foundation (and implemented by the
likes of The Tavistock Institute) and yet another classic example of
their aforementioned “guerrilla warfare” tactic of indoctrination.

141 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English#Literary_references

108
It is mere coincidence that the Rockefellers’ funding of research into
Basic English began in 1933 just as Wells’ “The Shape of Things to
Come” was released!? Is it also coincidence that Wells just happened
to have a significant role in The Tavistock Clinic!? I think not. The
following is taken from Juliet Higdon’s book, “Psychodynamic Theory
for Therapeutic Practice”: “The Tavistock Clinic […] opened in 1920.
[…] In 1930, The Psychopathic Clinic, later called the Portman Clinic,
was founded. This was the clinical arm of an institute for studies
into delinquency. Freud and H. G. Wells were the early Vice
Presidents.”142

The Tavistock and Portman Clinics are documented further on a

dedicated Wikipedia page. Although some of the information is
purposely withheld (such as Wells’ vice-presidency of the Portman
arm of the Clinic), there are further quantifiable links to Wells
documented there (which include footnote links to evidential
sources): “Following its foundation the Tavistock Clinic developed a
focus on preventive psychiatry, expertise in group relations –
including army officer selection – social psychiatry, and action
research. There was an openness to different streams of research
and thought as for instance the famous series of lectures given by
the Swiss psychiatrist and one time collaborator of Sigmund Freud,
Dr. Carl Jung and attended by doctors, churchmen and members of
the public, who included, H. G. Wells and Samuel Beckett.”143

Further indications of Wells’ involvement with, and role at, Tavistock

have been repeatedly documented in several editions (most notably,

142Juliet Higdon, "Psychodynamic Theory for Therapeutic Practice", (Introductory section: The Tavistock Clinic), Kindle
Edition, Palgrave Macmillan; 2 edition (31 Oct. 2011) ISBN: 0230242472/ASIN: B00LNBLNZQ
143https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tavistock_and_Portman_NHS_Foundation_Trust#Early_history See also: Jung, C.G.
(1935). Tavistock Lectures, in The Symbolic Life. Collected Works, vol.18. London: Routledge. pp. 1–182. ISBN 0 7100
8291 6.

109
but not exclusively, during the 1950s) of the Tavistock publication
“Human Relations.”144

This information about Wells has been discussed for a number of

years. Researcher Iona Miller has repeatedly connected Wells with
Tavistock - but failed to give documentary sources that connect with
primary evidence. For example, in the article “Tavistock Agenda
Revealed - The Uninvited States of America”, Miller writes,
“Tavistock became a nonlocal community of practice -- a dark
"invisible college," the Castaglia of the cryptocracy. Tavistock's
grandmother is the drug empire of the British East India Company
and Theosophical esoterics. Its grandfather is "The Open
Conspiracy" of Utopian H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Cecil Rhodes
and Fabian socialists.”145

Miller’s material has also been requoted in numerous alternative

knowledge articles and books (again, without sources). Thanks to the
aforementioned material and links I have provided, we now have
quantifiable evidence to point to - rather than regurgitated
references to articles and books that have made the claim for years
but, oddly, have left the claim unsourced and lacking evidence.

Intelligence Asset?
There is one final aspect about H. G. Wells that must be considered.
This comes from a claim made (about Wells) by researcher Jim Keith
in his book “Mind Control, World Control”: "Amazingly enough, the
battle plan of the New World Order controllers can be clearly read
in the works of a science fiction writer, a man who came up from
humble beginnings in Britain to hobnob in his adult life with the
144One example appears in the 2008 Human Relations article “Managerialism, the therapeutic habitus and the self in
contemporary organizing", by Bogdan Costea, Norman Crump and Kostas Amiridis (pg. 684) -
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/630b/ac13b7585bd0c03e590d053f37191ef4c71d.pdf
145 Iona Miller's TAVISTOCK AGENDA REVEALED - The Uninvited States of America - http://tavistockagenda.iwarp.com/

110
movers and shakers of the elite. Herbert George Wells, more than
just the latter day Jules Verne that he is presented as in the history
books, was head of British Intelligence during World War I, and his
mistress was Maura Benchendorff, a woman who has been called
'perhaps the Soviet Union's most effective agent-of-influence ever
to appear on London's political and intellectual stage'. H.G. Wells
knew whereof he spoke when extolling the plans of the New World
Order."146

To reiterate, the claim here is that Wells was head of British

Intelligence during World War I. Despite Keith’s assertions (echoed
by a number of alternative knowledge researchers), the verifiable
evidence to prove this claim is very elusive. However, Wells did have
any number of affiliations with people associated with, or who
worked in, the Intelligence establishment. It has also been
demonstrated that Wells did indeed have a relationship with (double
agent) Maura Benchendorff - actually known as Maria Ignatievna
Budberg.

According to Wikipedia (which can also be externally verified in

Charles Burris’ “Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal: An Annotated
Bibliographic Guide” 147), Benchendorff “worked for the British
Intelligence Service during a plot to assassinate Lenin in 1918 and
the OGPU (working directly for the Genrikh Yagoda, who was the
chief of the Soviet secret service in the 1930s, at the beginning of
the "Great Purge".)”148 “In 1920 she met historian and science
fiction writer H. G. Wells and became his mistress. A close

146 Jim Keith, “Mind Control, World Control” (pg. 12)

147
Charles Burris (2007-08-01) Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal: An Annotated Bibliographic Guide,
LewRockwell.com
148 Maria Ignatievna Budberg - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moura_Budberg

111
relationship with Wells continued until his death; Wells asked her
to marry him, but Budberg firmly rejected this proposal.”149

To summarise, here are a few key points about Wells that may give
us cause for concern:

 Wells (like the Rockefellers) was an ardent proponent of

eugenics, technocracy and a “one world government.”
 He was an ardent socialist.
 He was, to some extent, a proponent of the goals and aims of
the likes of The Rockefeller Foundation.
 He was involved with (and was an early Vice President of) The
Tavistock Clinic.
 He may (emphasis on that word) have been head of British
Intelligence during World War I and an intelligence asset
thereafter.

In conclusion, let’s consider the following: Throughout the 1930s,

Wells’ written material regularly advocated world government –
specifically a system of global control over, information, knowledge
and education by a scientific elite. As the 1938 War of the Worlds
broadcast was being aired, Wells was finishing up his globalist opus
“The New World Order”. Less than a year later, social scientists were
busily studying The War of the Worlds broadcast, Wells’ book was
published and World War II began. Very soon after, all those social
scientists who had studied The War of the Worlds broadcast were
gainfully employed by various military and intelligence outfits to
engage in wartime propaganda and psychological warfare
operations. Is all this just coincidental timing? Furthermore, did

149 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moura_Budberg#H._G._Wells

112
Orson Welles know something more when he dipped into the pages
of H.G. Wells to inspire this fake “news crisis” broadcast?

113
114
 Chapter Eight:
“The Revealing Life
of Orson Welles”

115
The March of Time
Jumping from Wells to Welles offers this book any number of
synchronicities to choose from. I don’t want to go into too many of
these here, as I want to try and stick with more quantifiable
evidence. However, there is one question that I have always
wondered about. Why Orson Welles chose H. G. Wells’ The War of
the Worlds narrative on which to hang the 1938 fake news-crisis
broadcast? It may be nothing more than the fact that Orson Welles
was a big fan of H.G. Wells. However, more deeply, Welles shared a
number of perspectives on the world with the author. Most notable
were his political views. Like H.G. Wells, Orson Welles was a devout
socialist.

According to Simon Callow, in his book “Orson Welles: Volume Two -

Hello Americans”, “Like many of his colleagues at Mercury Theatre,
New York, in the mid- to late-1930s, Welles was radical in
inclination, strongly left-wing and pro-union. This was partly a
matter of family background - his mother had been a leading
radical and reformist in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he grew up -
and partly a matter of the circles in which he moved. His
collaborators, the playwright and poet Archibald MacLeish and the
composer Marc Blitzstein, had taught him to think politically and to
progress from mere mainstream party allegiances. He had a
famous falling-out with the Roosevelt administration when he
attempted to stage Blitzstein's anti-capital musical The Cradle Will
Rock under the aegis of the Federal Theatre Project, defying the
FTP's order to cancel the show despite being barred from the
theatre. Leading his actors heroically down Broadway, they found
an empty theatre for hire and did the show right there: no sets, no
light, no staging. It became one of the great theatre events of the

116
late-1930s, and the sparseness of the performance only confirmed
the frankly Marxist message of the piece.” 150

Callow also notes that Welles’ views and activities were scrutinized
by the FBI (for a number of years) from 1937 onward. These FBI
records (stored in the FBI’s online vault and free for anybody to read
or download151) run to almost 200 pages and, for the most part,
seem to document an investigation into the claims that Welles was a
communist. The investigation ultimately came to nought as there
appeared to be no definitive evidence to support the claim.

To return to the aforementioned quote by Simon Callow, there is a

claim that Welles staging of “The Cradle Will Rock” brought Welles
and his troupe into conflict with the play’s sponsors – The Federal
Theatre Project. This is curious as the FTP brings us back, front and
centre, to the overall subject matter of this book. As I noted in the
previous chapter, some historians fixate on a seeming conflict of
interests between socialist/far-left political ideologies and the
“capitalist” façade of the Rockefellers. Bizarrely, in fact, The Federal
Theatre Project was funded by The Rockefeller Foundation – a
subject I will go into more detail about shortly. These seemingly
contradictory allegiances between Orson Welles ideals and the
deeper mandates of The Rockefeller Foundation were a continuing
motif throughout Welles formative years in theatre, radio and film.

Welles big break in radio was on the serial “The March of Time” in
March 1935. The show (not to be confused with the film shorts of
the same name) was produced by CBS radio, began in 1931, and ran
until 1945. For the latter half of the 1930s, Welles was a very

150Simon Callow, “Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans: v. 2 (Orson Welles Biographies)”, Vintage (3 May 2007),
ISBN-10: 0099462613 / ISBN-13: 978-0099462613 See also: Simon Callow, “This Greater Drama”, The Guardian.com,
20 May 2006 - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/may/20/biography.film
151 https://vault.fbi.gov/george-orson-welles/george-orson-welles-part-01-of-01/view

117
prominent member of the voice cast. In fact, he became so
prominent that his celebrity was eventually used to advertise the
series. The main sponsor of the series was Time Inc. – making the
series a glorified advert for the content of Time Magazine. As you will
recall, there were many money trails between Time/Life and the
Rockefellers. Time magazine executive Roy E. Larsen was a co-
creator of “The March of Time”. A key producer on the series was
Henry R. Luce – co-founder of Time Inc. Luce was a close associate of
Laurence S. Rockefeller. Both Rockefeller and Luce were present to
commemorate the laying of the cornerstone of the Time and Life
Building in New York in 1958. The Time & Life Building overlooked
Rockefeller Centre – making The Rockefeller Group essentially the
“landlords” of the Time & Life Building.152

Let’s jump back to Henry Luce for a second and quote from chapter
five of Gary Allen’s “The Rockefeller File”: “[Luce] started his rise to
publishing glory with loans from CFR Establishmentarians Thomas
Lamont and Dwight Morrow (like Lamont, a J. P. Morgan partner),
Harvey Firestone, E. Roland Harriman, and various members of the
Harkness family (Standard Oil fortune). Their influence became
especially apparent when he started his business magazine,
Fortune, in the middle of the depression. As John Kobler writes in
The First Tycoon: "It is a bemusing paradox that Fortune, the
magazine of business, questioned the efficiency of the free-
enterprise system and even took on a faint socialist tinge. Some of
its editors and contributors stood far to the left....” Apparently that
is what Luce's Rockefeller connected financial angels wanted.” 153
Note what Allen has written here: that the “Rockefeller connected

152Joe Pompeo, "I’d Rather Watch My Parents Have Sex: Inside the Final Days of Time Inc.", Vanity Fair, Jan 30, 2018 -
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/inside-the-final-days-of-time-inc
153Gary Allen, "The Rockefeller File", Chapter Five: Yes, Virginia, There is an Establishment -
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/rockefeller_file/rockefeller02.htm

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financial angels wanted […] editors and contributors [who] stood
far to the left.”

The Federal Theatre Project

Orson Welles entry in the entertainment industry was predominantly
in theatre. His work in the medium was already prominent by the
time he joined “The March of Time” radio series in 1935. In the
1930s, the US Congress-funded Works Progress Administration
(WPA) initiated a number of Federal arts projects. One of these was
the Federal Theatre Project. Its director was one Hallie Flanagan.
Many of the plays she mounted for the project were geared toward
promoting political “ideals” and social / cultural diversity. One arm of
the project was the Negro Theatre Project. The latter project
mounted classic plays that highlighted the African American culture.
One of Orson Welles closest affiliates, John Houseman (also involved
with the WOTW broadcast) was assigned by Hallie Flanagan as a
director of the Negro Theatre Project. Houseman brought in Orson
Welles to direct the very first play that was staged by the project –
“Voodoo Macbeth” (April 1936). Welles was becoming something of
a “golden boy” of dramatic radio at this point and was keen to
eventually move on from the Negro Theatre Project to bigger things.
With some cajoling from Houseman, Flanagan tempted Welles to
remain involved. Via the WPA, she helped to create a new theatrical
unit that would be run by Welles and Houseman. The unit – called
Project 891 – went on to stage numerous successful plays. These
plays were all government funded with a healthy budget to boot.

The Federal Theatre Project was heavily supported and financed by

the Rockefeller Foundation’s Humanities Division. The following is
taken from Cecelia Moore’s 2010 University of North Carolina PhD
dissertation entitled: “The Discovery of Ourselves: The Rockefeller
Foundation and Regional Drama in the 1930s”. “I spent a week at
the Rockefeller Archive Centre in October to learn more about the
119
Rockefeller Foundation‘s Humanities Division, staffed in the 1930s
by David H. Stevens and John Marshall, and its involvement with
the University of North Carolina and the Federal Theatre Project.
[…] In October 1933, Humanities program officer John Marshall
visited the University of North Carolina. He was there to look at
humanities projects that already received Rockefeller Foundation
support or might merit funding. […] Stevens and Marshall were
interested in developing the idea of American culture and
expanding its role in society. In this context, the term ―culture was
used not only to describe a community or people‘s way of life, but
also as the forms of artistic expression communicating that culture.
They explored newer forms of mass communication – radio and film
– but also the university and community-based drama movement
that spread across the country in the 1920s. […] RF […] was active
with Federal Theatre Project community drama work in the
state.”154

Cecelia Moore actually demonstrates a far earlier link between

Orson Welles and the Rockefellers in her book “The Federal Theatre
Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the
Quest for American Drama”, where she writes “In his childhood,
Welles performed and staged school plays because of people like
Frederick Henry Koch of the University of North Carolina.”155 In the
1937 Annual Report of The Rockefeller Foundation, the Foundation
notes that “A centre of work in creative drama that the Foundation
has assisted since 1933 is the department under the direction of
Professor [Frederick Henry] Koch at the University of North
Carolina. Grants totalling $39,000 made by the Foundation have

154Cecelia Moore, “The Discovery of Ourselves”: The Rockefeller Foundation and Regional Drama in the 1930s, Ph.D.
Candidate, U.S. History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010 -
http://rockarch.org/publications/resrep/moore.pdf
155
Cecelia Moore. "The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for
American Drama (New Studies in Southern History)", Lexington Books (26 Sept. 2017), ASIN: B075G2PMX5

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enabled this department to expand its activities, and to realize
more fully the values created through steady development under
his guidance. The grant of the Foundation in 1937 provided $22,000
to be expended for further expansion of the work over a period of
four years. An outstanding feature of this department's work has
been the organization of the Carolina Playmakers, a group
especially interested in the production of folk plays. These have
been written, directed, and performed by students and graduates
of the University in their courses and experimental productions;
many have been produced professionally and given commercial
publication.”156

All of the aforementioned evidentially demonstrates our first

documented connections between Orson Welles and the
Rockefellers prior to the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. It shows
that Welles, Houseman, Koch, et al, were effectively brought
together (and subsequently formed The Mercury Theatre on the Air)
by working on projects that were ultimately funded by The
Rockefeller Foundation.

As time went on Orson Welles gained acclaim for his portrayal of

Lamont Cranston in the radio adventure series The Shadow and his
involvement with CBS grew. CBS was co-founded by David Sarnoff
and William Paley – both close friends of the Rockefellers. According
to Richard James DeSocio, in his book “Clash of Dynasties”, “[...] CBS,
a company founded and long run by one of Nelson's [Rockefeller]
closest pals, William Paley. It was often alleged that CBS was
bossed by the Rockefellers as part of their media monopoly with
NBC. [...] CBS was interlocked through the Rockefeller Foundation.
Frank Stanton, president of CBS for 25 years from the post-war era

156The Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report 1937 (pg. 307) -

https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20150530122132/Annual-Report-1937.pdf

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until 1971, was a trustee of the foundation. CBS was also
interlocked, and probably more significantly so through the
Rockefeller MOMA, Paley was for more than 30 years a trustee of
the museum. In 1962, he was tapped by the then-chairman David
Rockefeller to be the museum's president.” 157 Remember also that
Frank Stanton was part of the Rockefeller-funded Princeton Radio
Research Project that studied the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast
and other CBS programming from September 1937 onward.

By 1937, despite his growing fame, Orson Welles was still staging
plays under the Federal Theatre Project. The Cradle Will Rock was a
critical hit in April 1937 – despite allegedly causing a clash between
Welles and the FTP over it. The play garnered Welles publicity and
respect from both the theatrical and radio world. With his fortunes
now truly on the rise, Welles convinced John Houseman that it was
time to move on from the Federal Theatre Project and create their
own company. By the summer of that year, they had created the
Mercury Theatre company. Although the Mercury Theatre set to
work on staging plays, it wasn’t until spring 1938 that Welles
standing with CBS allowed for a deal to be concluded that would see
the Mercury Theatre produce a nine-week radio series for CBS – one
which would ultimately include The War of the Worlds broadcast.

The Sulzberger Effect

When Welles and his entourage left the CBS building following The
War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30th 1938, the group
travelled through New York’s Time Square on their way to rehearsals
for The Mercury Company’s production of Dante’s Death. Here, their

157Richard James DeSocio, Clash of Dynasties: Why Gov. Nelson Rockefeller Killed Jfk, Rfk, and Ordered the Watergate
Break-In to End the Presidential Hopes of Ted Kennedy, Kindle Edition, AuthorHouse (18 Jun. 2017) ASIN: B072VCTYFQ

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first true awareness of the “perceived” spreading “mass panic”
reaction story, was revealed to them.

In the documentary “Orson Welles - The Untold Story behind the War
of the Worlds”158, several of the entourage are interviewed and
describe how they witnessed the Time Square Motograph News
Bulletin (the illuminated news board - aka “The Zipper”) adorned
with the words “Orson Welles invasion program scares the nation.”
What is interesting is that “The Zipper” news board in Time Square
was then owned by The New York Times newspaper.159 What is even
more curious is how quickly the tale of this national “scare” had been
publicized by the press.

According to Wikipedia: “Arthur Hays Sulzberger (September 12,

1891 – December 11, 1968) was the publisher of The New York
Times from 1935 to 1961. In 1918 he began working at the Times,
and became publisher when his father-in-law, Adolph Ochs, the
previous Times publisher, died in 1935. He also served as a trustee
of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1939 to 1957. […] Sulzberger is
also credited with the quote: "We journalists tell the public which
way the cat is jumping. The public will take care of the cat."”160

From this, we have a direct connection between The New York Times
and the Rockefellers and, potentially, “The Zipper” that informed
Welles of the impact of the broadcast on that fateful October
evening in 1938. Synchronicities abound! The Rockefeller and Ochs
Sulzberger families are infinitely intertwined in their dealings and
have had many shared interests. For example, in 1979-1980,
Congressman John Anderson's campaign for US President was

158The documentary "Orson Welles - The Untold Story behind the War of the Worlds" -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfsRfiOiWo
159 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Times_Square#Building_history
160 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hays_Sulzberger

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supported by Laurance Rockefeller (brother of Nelson, David, and
John D Rockefeller III) and Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger (of Sulzberger /
New York Times dynasty). Anderson was also supported by George
Franklin (of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission). Anderson was
financed by the likes of Rockefeller family attorney Richardson
Dilworth.161 Arthur Hays Sulzberger was a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR) – another elite establishment organisation
that was effectively set up by the Rockefellers.162 The New York
Times was one of the principle newspapers to set the proverbial ball
rolling on the War of the Worlds / “mass panic” narrative the day
after the broadcast.

Earlier in this book, I recounted how part of this narrative took the
form of a “crashed meteorite” report that was started by Associated
Press (AP). During this time period, AP were located at the
Rockefeller Centre in mid-town Manhattan. [Author’s Notes: French
Intelligence and the British MI6 also had premises at the Rockefeller
Centre.163] One notable director on the directorate of Associated
Press was, wait for it, Arthur Hays Sulzberger! 164 Many alternative
knowledge researchers maintain that the Rockefellers have exerted
incredible control over Associated Press since its creation.

The question we must ask here is this: Taking into account the
possibility that the October 30th 1938 broadcast was part of an
orchestrated media psyop, did The Rockefellers exert their huge
influence over the press to “hype” the national “scare” narrative to a
much larger audience – after the fact?
161Jeff Taylor, "Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism" (Kindle Edition), Lexington Books
(27 Sept. 2013) ASIN: B00FMZZSH8 (pg. 422)
162
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/atlantean_conspiracy/atlantean_conspiracy25.htm See also:
Gary Allen, “The Rockefeller File”, Buccaneer Books (30 Mar. 1994) ISBN-10: 1568493681 / ISBN-13: 978-1568493688
163Richard James DeSocio, Rockefellerocracy:Kennedy Assassinations, Watergate and Monopoly of the "Philanthropic"
Foundations, Kindle Edition, AuthorHouse (8 April 2013) ASIN: B00D5OYTZK (pg. 137)
164
Hans Ruesch, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ROCKEFELLER DRUG EMPIRE (Taken from the CIVIS Foundation Report
number 15, Fall-Winter 1993) - http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/rockefeller-drug-empire-story.html

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Campbell’s Soup
The Mercury Theatre on the Air series was a “sustaining show” – an
unsponsored program financed by CBS at their own expense. After
the success of The War of the Worlds broadcast, The Mercury
Theatre on the Air signed Campbell’s Soup Company as a program
sponsor.165

John Thompson Dorrance (of the wealthy Dorrance family) became

the president of Campbell Soup Company from 1914 until 1930 when
the Campbell family company was brought out by the Dorrances.
There is a huge amount of business overlap between the Dorrance
and Rockefeller families.

Evidential links to this information are included in the footnotes. 166

A key Rockefeller figure, J. George Harrar, also connects with

Campbell’s Soup Company. Harrar was involved with the Rockefeller
Foundation from 1943 until 1979. He was a trustee of the
Foundation from 1961 onward, Vice President between 1959 and
1961 and President from 1961 – ‘72. He was a member of the
governing council of The Rockefeller Archive Centre from '73 to '79.
Between 1960 and 1972, he held prominent positions on the
Rockefeller's General Education Board. He was also a member of the
Rockefeller University Council, New York (1973 - 1979). In the same
period (1962 - 1978) he held a directorship at Campbell Soup
Company.167 All sounds soup-er convenient!

165Christopher Klein, “The War of the Worlds” Broadcast, 75 Years Ago", October 30, 2013 -
http://www.history.com/news/the-war-of-the-worlds-broadcast-75-years-ago
166See: The Guaranty Trust - http://www.smokershistory.com/guaranty.htm See also: The Devex business monitoring
website shows some overlap between the Campbell’s Soup Company and The Rockefeller Foundation, but it doesn't
say in what regard or when - https://www.devex.com/organizations/campbell-soup-company-61591
167Biographical Memoirs: National Academy of Sciences (V.57 - 1987), By Office of the Home Secretary, National
Academy of Sciences, ISBN: 978-0-309-03729-7, DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/1000 (Pg. 44)

125
Welles & RKO
The biggest connection between the Rockefellers and the media
came in the mid-1930s (believed to be from 1933 onward) when the
family (and specifically Nelson Rockefeller) took over joint majority
control (alongside Floyd Odlum's Atlas Corporation) of the RKO film
studio. Rockefeller involvement with RKO was all encompassing and
lasted until the early 1940s. Suffice to say, this part of Rockefeller
history connects directly with Orson Welles and the CBS 1938
broadcast of The War of the Worlds.

The success of The War of the Worlds spring-boarded Orson Welles

into his initial movie work at RKO and his classic debut film “Citizen
Kane.” RKO was founded in October 1928 by The Radio Corporation
of America (RCA) and its chair David Sarnoff. Regarding RCA: Dr John
Coleman, in his book “The Conspirator's Hierarchy: The Committee of
300” cites “UNPUBLISHED LETTERS, Wells, H. G. Gives interesting
details of how Wells sold the rights to "WAR OF THE WORLDS" to
RCA.”168An interesting connection if true. Unfortunately, I have been
unable to corroborate it or, for that matter, accurately identify when
the various copyrights to Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” were sold
and to whom.

Notably, David Sarnoff also helped to set up CBS (Orson Welles’

previous employer before RKO) alongside William Paley – the same
Paley who employed The Princeton Radio Research Project’s Frank
Stanton at CBS and eventually gave him the CBS presidency. RKO
expanded hugely throughout the early 1930s. However, looming
debts plagued RKO and, by 1933, it had defaulted on its loans. At this
point, the Rockefeller family and Floyd Odlum's Atlas Corporation

168Dr John Coleman, The Conspirator's Hierarchy: The Committee of 300, Global Insights; 4th edition (29 Nov. 2000)
ISBN-10: 0963401947 / ISBN-13: 978-0963401946 See also: https://www.peterdavidbeter.com/docs/c300.html

126
stepped in and brought up (respectively) majority shares in the
company. The Rockefellers gained 663,500 shares of stock and a seat
on its board of directors (occupied by Nelson Rockefeller) in
exchange for RKO’s defaulted rental payments for Radio City Music
Hall. Whilst Floyd Odlum had a considerable share in RKO, the
Rockefellers controlled (only just) the majority interest. There was
much animosity between Odlum and the Rockefellers and were
constantly vying for control of decision making. According to Richard
B. Jewell, in his book “Slow Fade to Black: The Decline of RKO Radio
Pictures”, “With the backing of David Sarnoff and to the chagrin of
Floyd Odlum, [Nelson] Rockefeller brushed aside Leo Spitz and
replaced him with George J. Schaefer, the energetic head of
distribution at United Artists. Schaefer arrived in late 1938.” 169

George Schaefer and Nelson Rockefeller were great supporters of

Orson Welles at RKO. The Rockefellers approved Welles’ contract
and first Hollywood film, Citizen Kane. In the film, the central
character (played by Welles) is heard to say “don't believe
everything you hear on the radio” – a line believed to have been a
nod to the War of the Worlds broadcast. Welles was the darling of
Hollywood at this point in time and a real “golden boy” in the eyes of
the Rockefellers. In April 27th, 1941, during a telephone conversation
between Phil Reisman in New York and Reg Armour at the RKO
studio (Armour was an executive at RKO), they discussed Welles’ film
project "It's All True". Reisman said (as quoted in Richard B. Jewell’s
book “RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan is Born”), “He's a tough baby - he
[Welles] has done a magnificent job of selling himself to Nelson
Rockefeller.”170 All things said, Citizen Kane did not do too well for
RKO – despite eventually becoming a cultural classic and considered
169
Richard B. Jewell, "Slow Fade to Black: The Decline of RKO Radio Pictures", University of California Press (22 April
2016), ISBN-10: 0520289668 / ISBN-13: 978-0520289666 (pg. 213)
170
Richard B. Jewell, "RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan is Born", University of California Press (1 Jun. 2012) ISBN-10:
0520271785 / ISBN-13: 978-0520271784 (pg. 249)

127
by many to be a cinematic masterpiece. In July 1941, Welles’, signed
a new and less favourable deal at RKO, under which he directed his
second film “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942) and produced
“Journey into Fear” (1943). Welles was unable to finish “The
Magnificent Ambersons” in the manner he wanted and the project
was edited to completion by eventual Hollywood veteran Robert
Wise (a man I noted earlier in this book and who I highlighted as a
potential global elite agenda stooge in my books Science Fiction and
the Hidden Global Agenda – Volumes One and Two.) Wise’s
completion of the film created a lifelong rift between him and
Welles. Welles’ departure from the final stages of the film were
thanks, in part, to the amended deal he had signed at RKO and also
to a new cinematic assignment he had been given by the Rockefellers
- a film called “It’s All True”.

It’s All True

The film was conceived by Welles in the summer of 1941 as an
“omnibus film mixing documentary and docufiction.”171 Planned to
be shot in Brazil, Welles left for the region on February 4th 1942 and
began principle photography four days later in Rio. However, things
quickly began to go wrong for Welles. The film was blighted by
problems and never fully completed. One section of the film -
"Jangadeiros" – followed four impoverished Brazilian fishermen.
According to Wikipedia, “Filming the re-enactment of this epic
voyage cost the life of the leader of the four Jangadeiros. On May
19, 1942 (…) the raft overturned and all four men were cast into the
ocean. Only three were rescued; Jacaré disappeared while trying to
swim to shore.”172 The article “Orson Welles: Cinema's lost genius”
by The Independent writer Geoffrey MacNab elaborates: “A witch

171 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles
172 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_True_(film)

128
doctor due to take part in the film puts a curse on Welles, sticking a
red-threaded steel needle through the script after Welles tells him
the money has run out.”173 In “Sinister Forces – Book Three”, Peter
Levenda discussed Welles “aborted attempt to make a film in Brazil
about Latin American witchcraft led to his being cursed by a local
shaman, something Welles took very seriously.”174 Although not
explicitly, it appears that Levenda was referring to "Jangadeiros" in
his book.

You may be reading this thinking that “It’s All True” was some weird,
occult drenched (Welles did actually have a fascination with that
particular subject matter!), vanity project. In fact, there were far
stranger forces at work here. According to Wikipedia, “It’s All True”
was actually a propaganda / psychological warfare project. “In late
November 1941, Welles was appointed as a goodwill ambassador
to Latin America by Nelson Rockefeller, U.S. Coordinator of Inter-
American Affairs and a principal stockholder in RKO Radio Pictures.
The mission of the OCIAA was cultural diplomacy, promoting
hemispheric solidarity and countering the growing influence of the
Axis powers in Latin America. John Hay Whitney, head of the
agency's Motion Picture Division, was asked by the Brazilian
government to produce a documentary of the annual Rio Carnival
celebration taking place in early February 1942. [...] The OCIAA
sponsored cultural tours to Latin America and appointed goodwill
ambassadors including George Balanchine and the American Ballet,
Bing Crosby, Aaron Copland, Walt Disney, John Ford and Rita
Hayworth. Welles was thoroughly briefed in Washington, D.C.,
immediately before his departure for Brazil, and film scholar
Catherine L. Benamou, a specialist in Latin American affairs, finds it
173Geoffrey MacNab, “Orson Welles: Cinema's lost genius”, Friday 16 September 2005 -
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/orson-welles-cinemas-lost-genius-312881.html
174Peter Levenda, SINISTER FORCES-MANSON SECRET: 3 (Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft),
Trine Day (15 Jan. 2011) ISBN-10: 0984185836 / ISBN-13: 978-0984185832 (pg. 210)

129
"not unlikely" that he was among the goodwill ambassadors who
were asked to gather intelligence for the U.S. government in
addition to their cultural duties. She concludes that Welles's
acceptance of Whitney's request was "a logical and patently
patriotic choice".”175

If we take Catherine L. Benamou’s claim at face value (although

many scholars have reinforced this claim), we must consider the
possibility that Welles’ was (at some point and for some unknown
period of time) a quasi-operative of the US intelligence
establishment. A staggering thought…

Ultimately, “It’s All True” was largely abandoned and cannibalized

into a TV show entitled “Hello Americans”.176 The following is taken
from Simon Callow’s “Orson Welles - Volume 2: Hello Americans”:
“The best good-will propaganda is to sell South America to North
America," Welles wrote coordinator Nelson Rockefeller. Welles
could draw upon the research amassed earlier in 1942 for ‘It's All
True’, the film project he had embarked upon also at the request of
Rockefeller, who was a major RKO Pictures stockholder and Welles
admirer as well as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. It was
hoped that the dramatizations would counteract German and
Italian propaganda and build solidarity among American republics
in the hemisphere."177

Before I move on from this subject, I just want to highlight a bizarre

(if it is one) “coincidence”. Keep in mind the South American
“goodwill project” involving Welles that I have just highlighted. The
following is taken from J. Michael Sproule’s, “Propaganda and

175 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles
176 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Americans
177Ibid. See Also: Simon Callow, " Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans", New York: Viking Penguin (2006) ISBN-
10: 0670872563 / ISBN-13: 978-0670872565 (pg. 159)

130
Democracy”: “[Hadley] Cantril's small-scale program at Princeton
became more extensive in September 1940 when Nelson
Rockefeller, FDR's Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, asked the
Princeton psychologist to "set up mechanisms which would gauge
public opinion in Latin America." In cooperation with Gallup, and
with funds from the Office of Emergency Management, Cantril
established an ostensibly independent research organization,
American Social Surveys. He recruited his friend Leonard Doob, and
another researcher Lloyd Free, to analyse Nazi propaganda coming
into Latin America. Through Rockefeller's office, the results of
Cantril's program were brought to the attention of FDR. The
president asked Cantril to monitor public sentiment on avoiding
war verses aiding Britain. Cantril duly kept tabs on views about
aiding England and on the public's willingness to change U.S.
neutrality laws in favour of Britain.”178

In short, Hadley Cantril and Orson Welles both worked on the same
South American propaganda project – both at the behest of the
Rockefellers – at almost the same time (Welles was recruited into
the project one year after Cantril was) and, respectively, no more
than two/three years after the broadcast of The War of the Worlds…

Our Little Experiment

Like the claims made about Stanley Kubrick, there are some
researchers who argue that Orson Welles’ first unprecedented
Hollywood movie contract (and the “artistic freedom” it initially gave
him) was a “reward” for a “job” carried out for the elite controllers.
There doesn’t appear to be any definitive evidence to support this
notion beyond the circumstantial aspects. Unlike Kubrick, Welles
“artistic freedom” with RKO lasted only a few short years. His film

178 J. Michael Sproule, “Propaganda and Democracy”, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-47022-6 (pg. 64)

131
projects with them weren’t the initial critical and commercial
successes that we see them as today. The proverbial “death knell” to
his initial RKO film career appeared to be what happened with “It’s
All True”. Plagued with financial, practical and, strangely, esoteric
production problems, the film brought Welles jaunt as the “golden
boy” of RKO to an unspectacular conclusion. By the end of 1942,
Welles monumental deal with RKO was pretty much over. However,
the synchronicities and timing of Welles’ deal with the Rockefellers
and RKO (coming as it did off the back of War of the Worlds) are
interesting and continue to evidentially demonstrate Orson Welles’
connections with the Rockefeller family.

Another point of note: One of Orson Welles’ lifelong friends was the
film director, writer, actor, producer, critic and film historian Peter
Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich was a film programmer at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City during the early 1960s. From the very
beginning, The Museum of Modern Art was developed, financed and
sustained by the Rockefellers. Oddly, there has also been a historical
and bizarre, quasi-occult, connection between The Museum of
Modern Art and the US intelligence establishment. Members of the
Rockefeller family still sit on the board of trustees of The Museum of
Modern Art to this day.179

I want to conclude this chapter with a final quote from Orson Welles
for your consideration. The video of this 1955 interview with Welles,
originally shot for BBC television, still exists and is easy to find on the
internet should you wish to watch it (a link to this video is included in
the footnotes.) In the interview, Welles discusses the 1938 War of
the Worlds radio broadcast (and the subsequent public “reaction” to
it) and says “I still meet people, all over the place, everywhere in the
world… who’ve had experiences, bitter or otherwise, as a result of

179 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Modern_Art

132
our little experiment in broadcasting. […] I suppose we had it
coming to us because we weren’t as innocent as we were meant to
be when we did the Martian broadcast. We were fed up with the
way in which everything that came over this new magic box, the
radio, was being swallowed. People, you know, do suspect what
they read in the newspapers and what people tell them, but when
the radio came, and I suppose now television, anything that came
through that new machine was believed. So in a way, our broadcast
was an assault on the credibility of that machine. We wanted
people to understand that they shouldn’t take any opinion pre-
digested, and they shouldn’t swallow everything that came through
the tap whether it was radio or not. But, as I say, it was only a
partial experiment. We had no idea the extent of the thing…”180

I find this interview very revealing. Despite Welles waxing lyrical (as
he often did) about people who “panicked” as a result of the
broadcast (heard in the larger interview, not quoted above), he also
talks about radio being used to trick and fool the mass audience. He
says that those involved “weren’t as innocent as we were meant to
be” with the broadcast. Finally, he specifically calls the broadcast an
experiment on at least two occasions. To begin with, he calls it “our
little experiment in broadcasting” and implies that there was
specific intent with the broadcast to “experiment” on the audience.
However, soon after, he appears to slightly backtrack on this
statement by calling the broadcast only “a partial experiment” and
that those involved “had no idea the extent of the thing.” So which
was it Orson? You can’t have it both ways!

Granted, Welles was legendary for embellishing and overdramatising

events and experiences from his life, yet I believe we must give more

180You can watch this section of the interview (almost complete bar the last line) here: “Orson Welles on War of the
Worlds”, Christopher Case (YouTube Channel), published 9th August 2010 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfNsCcOHsNI

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serious consideration to his brief remark about “our little
experiment in broadcasting” and the potential it had for influencing
public perceptions as part of a larger media experiment – especially
given the connections I have laid out in this chapter.

134
 Chapter Nine:
“It’s All about
Aliens”

135
Rockefellers & ET
In this book, I have addressed the possibility that the 1938 War of
the Worlds broadcast was part of a complex psychological warfare
operation to affect and study human behaviour and responses to the
output of the media. Naturally, there would be a deeper agenda
explaining the potential reasons for carrying out such an operation –
particularly if we consider the involvement of career psychologists on
government payrolls, intelligence operatives, military objectives, and
so on.

Yet, for some people, there is a much more complex reason that
such a psyop may exist. For the last couple of decades, a number of
alternative knowledge researchers have made a startling claim that
the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast was an elite-orchestrated
psychological operation to steer and affect mass perceptions of the
ET/UFO phenomenon. Central to this argument, is their claim that
one Charles Douglas (C.D.) Jackson was the key player in said psyop.
Although, the wording of these types of claims vary slightly from
source to source (with variations of different individuals and
motivations cited in each), C.D. Jackson always seems to remain in
the mix.

Here is one of the more concise summations of the claim that I could
find. It is clipped from the 1996 documentary “The Money Masters –
How International Bankers Gained Control of America” (produced by
Bill Still and Patrick S. J. Carmack.): “After what has been a closely
guarded secret for nearly fifty years, Orson Welles original
broadcast turns out to be no mere show-business stunt, but,
instead, was a complex psychological warfare test conducted by C.
D. Jackson for the Rockefeller Foundation. When the results were
compiled nearly two years later, they are released to an elite whose
names most people will not speak of over a whisper. Among them,

136
groups like The Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, CFR and the
Federal Reserve.”181

Many contemporary sources on this subject still cite this quote from
the documentary. Although the piece reiterates the War of the
Worlds psyop notion verbatim, it unfortunately gives no evidentiary
sources. Actually, there are any number of inaccuracies in the
documentary – such as when it references the speech given by John
Hylan about the control of the press by the likes of the Rockefellers.
Although the quote is correct (and true with regard to the
Rockefellers), the inaccuracies lie with the producers falsely
accrediting the speech to Theodore Roosevelt and not, more
accurately, John Hylan.182 When watching documentaries like this
(and reading similar themed articles), I continually ask the question:
why has C.D. Jackson been tied the 1938 broadcast of The War of the
Worlds? There seems to be no direct connection or evidence that he
was a part of it. At least none that was readily apparent.

In order to attempt to make sense of the claims made about C. D.

Jackson, I needed to see if any direct evidence actually existed. And if
the evidence wasn’t forthcoming, I needed to find out why so many
researchers continued to throw his name in the proverbial hat.
Before I do that though, let’s look at the possible connections
between the ET/UFO paradigm and some of the numerous players I
have addressed so far in this book – starting with (yet again!) The
Rockefellers.

There are myriad examples of various Rockefeller family members

involving themselves (and huge amounts of their money) in the field
of ET/UFO study. Laurance S. Rockefeller (1910-2004), for example,

181 The War of the Worlds Broadcast - Rockefeller Connection - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOrfl1moTQE

182 The Money Masters Full Documentary 1996 - https://youtu.be/gFj_cqNBaZY?t=2h23m27s

137
expressed a deep interest in the study of the “ET / UFO” subject 183
and various “New Age” paradigms. He helped to fund Engineering
Anomalies Research program (PEAR) at Princeton (there’s that place
again!) University184, gave $250,000 a year (allegedly over a four year
period) to The Centre for Psychology and Social Change (co-founded
by alien abduction researcher John Edward Mack, and Robert Jay
Lifton), gave $194,000 to PEER (Program for Extraordinary
Experience Research) - along with various other donations185,
established the UFO Disclosure Initiative to the Clinton White
House186, and gave financial support to Dr. Steven Greer’s ET / UFO
“Disclosure Project”.187

I must stress that Rockefeller efforts in this field have more often
than not served to muddle and steer discussion and study of the
subject rather than clarify it. Some of their endeavours have actually
ended up creating co-opted “limited hangouts” of ET / UFO research
and disclosure. That said, I have no doubt that there were a few
“core truths” at the centre of some of the aforementioned
endeavours. [Author’s Notes: the Disclosure Project conference is a
good example of this – where titbits of truth were delivered
(oftentimes) with the best of intentions.] However, in all cases, these
“studies”, “projects” and “initiatives” were plastered (to varying
degrees) with disinformation, false-leads, misdirection, and, in some
cases, outright fabrications. In all cases, you can feel the hand of the
military / intelligence / industrial complex doing everything it can to
183
An interesting article documenting some of his activities can be found here: Antonio Huneeus, The famous
Rockefeller UFO Briefing Document, September 3, 2010 - http://www.openminds.tv/rockefeller-ufo-211/5252
184 http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/press-statement.html
185http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_cointelpro01i.html For further claims about the work of John Mack, see:
Gregory M. Kanon, “The Great UFO Hoax” (Lakeville, Minnesota: Galde Press, 1997)
186 Grant Cameron, Extraterrestrial Politics in the Clinton White House (1993-2001) and the Laurance Rockefeller
Initiative - Records from the Clinton OSTP Related to UFOs, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Laurance Rockefeller
Initiative - http://www.x-ppac.org/OSTP.html
187The link to the Disclosure Project webpage that listed this connection -
http://www.disclosureproject.org/PressReleaseNov132007.htm - is now defunct. The website has been reconstituted
as “Sirius Disclosure” - http://www.siriusdisclosure.com/PressReleaseNov132007.htm

138
hide something and probably not something you might automatically
assume is being covered-up either. If I were pushed, I would say
“energy” and “exotic technologies” are probably the big secrets here.
But that’s a story for another time!

The Durant Report

In 1953, a group known as The Robertson Panel was convened by the
CIA (although, at the time, this fact was not public knowledge). Their
gathering took place between January 14th and 17th, 1953, and
involved discussion of the “problem of widespread reports of UFO
sightings” and their place within the context of “national security”.
In reality, their meeting was a CIA exercise in debunking “UFO
sightings”. Those involved included H. Marshall Chadwell (CIA
Director of Scientific Intelligence), H. P. Robertson, a noted physicist
(and expert in “weapons systems”) from the California Institute of
Technology, Dr. Samuel Goudsmit (Brookhaven National
Laboratories), Dr. Thornton Page (Office of Research Operations,
Johns Hopkins University) and Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner (Associated
Universities, Inc.). The Robertson Panel produced a document round-
up of the Panel’s finding – known now as The Durant Report. The
report concluded that “the national security agencies take
immediate steps to strip the UFOs of the special status they have
been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately
acquired.” This included a program aimed at debunking ET/UFO
reports and instituting a policy of “education to reassure the public”
of the “lack of evidence” behind UFOs.

In the report, they actually cited The Princeton Radio Research

Project’s Hadley Cantril (and the “mish-mash” final “report” / book
“Invasion from Mars”). Cantril is noted as someone whose work in
the field of perception management could greatly benefit this
proposed “education”: "The 'debunking' aim would result in
reduction in public interest in "flying saucers" which today evokes a
139
strong psychological reaction. This education could be
accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures,
and popular articles. [...] Members of the Panel had various
suggestions related to the planning of such an educational
program. It was felt strongly that psychologists familiar with mass
psychology should advise on the nature and extent of the program.
In this connection, Dr. Hadley Cantril (Princeton University) was
suggested. Cantril authored "Invasion from Mars", (a study in the
psychology of panic, written about the famous Orson Welles radio
broadcast in 1938) and has since performed advanced laboratory
studies in the field of perception. [...] the educational program of
"training and debunking" outlined above might be required for a
minimum of one and one-half to two years. At the end of this time,
the dangers related to "flying saucers" should have been greatly
reduced if not eliminated. Cooperation from other military services
and agencies concerned would be a necessity." 188

The Brookings Institute

Another organisation with myriad connections to the Rockefellers
also connects to The War of the Worlds. In April 18th, 1961, The
Brookings Institute submitted a report (known as “Proposed Studies
on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs”)
to the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the United States
House of Representatives. Bizarrely, this report also cites Hadley
Cantril, The Radio Research Project and “Invasion from Mars”: “Such
studies would include historical reactions to hoaxes, psychic
manifestations, unidentified flying objects, etc. Hadley Cantril's
study, Invasion from Mars (Princeton University Press, 1940), would

188Report of Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects Convened by Office of Scientific Intelligence, CIA,
January 14-18, 1953 (pgs. 20-22) - https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-
rdp79b00752a000300100010-4

140
provide a useful if limited guide in this area. Fruitful understanding
might be gained from a comparative study of factors affecting the
responses of primitive societies to exposure to technologically
advanced societies. Some thrived, some endured, and some
died.”189

The 1961 Brookings Institute Report includes a section entitled

“Implications of a discovery of extra-terrestrial life” – which many
proponents of the ET / UFO paradigm hold up as possible proof of an
elite “admission” to the existence of extra-terrestrial life. The section
proposes possible scenarios for the potential discovery of “extra-
terrestrial life” and the larger social implications that would result
from the potential discovery. The report also questions how
leadership should handle such information and under what
circumstances leaders might or might not find it advisable to
withhold such information from the public. The report makes no real
mention of the role that the entertainment media might play in such
a scenario, but it does make reference (on page 226 - note 37) to
Hadley Cantril’s study of The War of the Worlds as a “useful” guide in
dealing with the social implications.

With at least two references to Hadley Cantril (and his “work” with
the War of the Worlds broadcast) in key reports pertaining to the
possibility of extra-terrestrial life, it may be that we have stumbled
upon a significant reason why numerous researchers equate The War
of the Worlds broadcast with an ET/UFO cover-up/psyop.

Back in the 1990s, renowned alternative knowledge researcher

William Cooper talked extensively about The War of the Worlds 1938
broadcast being a psyop – yet he always tied the subject to the
“extra-terrestrial” paradigm and, specifically, a “false-flag” (i.e.: stage
189Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs, page 105, n.37 -
http://www.nicap.org/papers/brookings.pdf

141
managed or faked) “extra-terrestrial” event or scenario. In his
“Majesty Twelve” document, Cooper wrote, “The plan to create an
artificial extra-terrestrial threat to the Earth […] was tested for
credibility with the CBS presentation of "The War Of The Worlds" by
Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on October 30, 1938. The
public believed it was real thus setting the stage for the
implementation of an alien threat scenario... the only problem was
that the state of the art of technology at that time did not allow for
a believable presentation.”190 Unfortunately, having read and
listened to each occasion that Cooper referred to the broadcast as an
ET/UFO psyop, I have yet to find any reference to quantifiable
evidence or research sources relating the 1938 broadcast to an
“extra-terrestrial” psyop. Despite his credibility in many other
regards, Cooper’s specific view of the War of the Worlds broadcast is
based on circumstantial factors only. That said, he would often quote
the references to Hadley Cantril in both the Durant and Brookings
Institute Reports!

F for Fake
Another factor to consider here, involves one of the earliest
documented quasi-references to The War of the Worlds broadcast
being an “extra-terrestrial” psyop – a claim that actually came from
Orson Welles himself in a 1976, nine minute, then-unaired trailer for
his bizarre “mockumentary” film “F for Fake”. In the trailer, Welles
shamelessly claims: “Ladies and gentlemen, suppose I come right
out with it and admit to you now that my old Martian hoax on the
radio was... well, not exactly a hoax... That there were secret
sponsors of that broadcast, who in fact were some rather
influential beings from outer space. You smile. I think they're

190 William Cooper, “Majesty Twelve” http://www.sherryshriner.com/cooper/majestic_12.htm

142
smiling [...] and I'd just like to remind them that it is since that
broadcast that there have been in this country alone authenticated
sightings. You still think it's a joke? Good. That's the way we want
you to feel about it... for now.”191

As I have noted, Welles was known for dramatic over-embellishment

and outright false accounts of themes and events relating to his life
and career. Also, remember that “F for Fake” was a treatise on the
concepts of fakery and illusion. Large sections of the film – such as
the narrative of the “word renowned art forger, Elmyr de Hory” –
are complete fabrications portrayed as real. The film contains only
tiny slivers of truth and half-truth that are blended almost-
seamlessly into total fabrications.

Many alternative knowledge researchers are convinced that, like

Stanley Kubrick’s allusions to NASA / Apollo fakery in his films (most
notably “The Shining”), Welles was making a vague admission
regarding something much more convoluted and hidden about the
reality of The War of the Worlds. Welles’ references (to “real” extra-
terrestrials in the trailer for “F for Fake”) aside, the remaining two
words that continue to raise eyebrows amongst researchers are his
reference to “secret sponsors.” Make of this what you will.

Enter Mr Jackson
I have a strong belief that the C. D. Jackson connection to The War of
the Worlds paradigm came about as a result of what I called the
“copy and paste” internet. Most articles that cite the two in the same
piece are usually a variant of the same article lazily rehashed. So
what or where is the original source? Good luck finding that one!! I
have found variations of these articles (including the words “C. D.

191 "F for Fake" original trailer by Orson Welles - 1976 [at 8:21] - https://youtu.be/TMkZWWLHGXU?t=8m21s

143
Jackson”, “The War of the Worlds”, and “psyop”) that date back to
the earliest days of the mainstream internet - thanks to search
engines like the Wayback Machine Internet Archive. However, I have
never truly been able to find the original source that ties C. D.
Jackson into the War of the Worlds paradigm.

What I do find telling, is that the name almost always crops up in

relation to researchers and authors who have or had an interest in
the ET / UFO subject – this ranges from those who are devout
believers in the phenomenon (as truly alien “extra-terrestrials”) right
through to those who think the whole phenomenon is a military-
industrial-intelligence-complex psyop with manmade craft, military
abductions, and such. As a result of repetition without fact checking,
there are now numerous individuals who absolutely believe that
Charles Douglas Jackson played a role in an ET/UFO cover-up / psyop
utilising the 1938 The War of the Worlds broadcast…

There actually is a significance to C. D. Jackson’s name cropping up in

relation to The War of the Worlds – but not necessarily for the
reasons that the aforementioned articles and individuals would have
you believe.

Peter Levenda, in his excellent book “Sinister Forces – Book One: The
Nine”, discussed his investigation of Charles Douglas (C.D.) Jackson.
“In the effort to learn more […] the author found himself going
through a list of contents of the C.D. Jackson files of the Dwight D.
Eisenhower Library. Jackson was a vice-president of Time Inc. from
1931 to 1964 (the year of his death), but he was much more than
that. He was also Special Assistant to the US Ambassador to Turkey,
1942-43; President of the Free Europe Committee (which ran Radio
Free Europe), 1951-52; speechwriter for Eisenhower in 1952; Special
Assistant to the President for International Affairs, 1953-54; US
Delegate to the United Nations Ninth General Assembly in 1954;
speechwriter and consultant to Eisenhower during the Lebanon
144
Crisis of 1958; and ‘unofficial consultant to the President on other
occasions.’ He was also Deputy Chief, Psychological Warfare Branch
(PWB) at Allied Forces Headquarters in 1943 and continued in that
role, slightly modified, for the Psychological Warfare Division
(PWD) at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces
(SHAEF) for the remainder of the war. His files, collected at the
Eisenhower Library, contain […] another entire box on that
notorious bugaboo of conspiracy theorists, the Bilderbergers.
Jackson had files on the Bilderbergers from 1955 to 1964. These
files include agendas, minutes of meetings, lists of participants at
the Bilderberger meetings, even a history of Bilderberger meetings.
[…] It was former CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith who asked
Jackson to help him recruit members for that mysterious
organization.”192

I must interject at this point to add a little more detail about

Bilderberg – for the uninitiated. The purpose of the Bilderberg
meetings was to gather various elite types (royalty, prime ministers,
presidents and such) alongside representatives of numerous
establishments and entities (corporate, political, media, military,
etc.) to strategize about globalism, plan various “globalist-inclined”
agendas, and decide the general direction that said agendas would
take over the coming year. The first conference for The Bilderberg
Group took place in Oosterbeek, Netherlands, from 29th to 31st May,
1954. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was a member of the
Bilderberg Group and fully supported the ’54 conference in
Oosterbeek. The conference was initiated by Józef Retinger (a pro-
western European / pro-American politician-in-exile). Retinger
encouraged Bernhard to contact the then-head of the CIA, Walter

192Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces - The Nine: Volume 1: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces: A
Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft), Trine Day (1 Feb. 2011) ISBN-10: 098418581X / ISBN-13: 978-0984185818
(pgs. 123 – 124)

145
Bedell Smith, for help in organising the whole affair. Bedell Smith
placed responsibility for this on President Eisenhower’s then advisor
C.D. Jackson. Jackson helped to draw up the invitation list – 50
delegates from 11 Western European countries and 11 American
delegates.193 David Rockefeller was amongst those 11 Americans. 194

Let’s return now to more of Peter Levenda’s revelations about C.D.

Jackson: “It was also C.D. Jackson who arranged for the [Time] Life
magazine purchase of the famous Abraham Zapruder film of the
Kennedy Assassination, thereby keeping it away from the public
view for five years, until the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans. […]
Christopher Simpson in his excellent and enlightening Science of
Coercion: Communications Research & Psychological Warfare 1945-
1960 […] discusses the role Jackson (and fellow Bilderberger Nelson
Rockefeller) played in charge of policy oversight of combined CIA-
USIA (US Information Agency) and US military country plans during
the Huk insurrections in the Philippines in the mid-1950s. […]”195

Here, we have multiple connections with the larger subjects of this

book. For example, in 1975, the CIA were “investigated” under a
President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States.
This Commission was set up by Nelson Rockefeller. Naturally, the
true nature of the CIA’s affairs was white-washed and the agency
were essentially let off the proverbial hook by the Rockefellers. As a
1975 front-page article in the New York Times, by Howard Zinn, put
it: “Rockefeller Inquiry Clears CIA of Major Violations.”196 However,

193Hatch, Alden (1962). "The Hôtel de Bilderberg". HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands: An authorized biography.
London: Harrap. See also: Aubourg, Valerie (June 2003). "Organizing Atlanticism: the Bilderberg Group and the Atlantic
Institute 1952–63". Intelligence & National Security. 18 (2): 92–105.
194 Rockefeller, David (2002). Memoirs. New York: Random House. p. 412. ISBN 978-0679405887.
195Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces - The Nine: Volume 1: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces: A
Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft), Trine Day (1 Feb. 2011) ISBN-10: 098418581X / ISBN-13: 978-0984185818
(pgs. 123 – 124)
196Howard Zinn, "The CIA, Rockefeller, and the Boys in the Club", 1975 -
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Rockefeller_BoysClub.html

146
there were a few revelations that came out of the Commission –
most notably, much of what we now know of the CIA’s MKUltra mind
control research would not be so readily in the public domain today
if not for the Commission.

Another matter addressed by the commission was the assassination

of John F. Kennedy. Small portions and stills from the infamous
Zapruder film were allowed to be used during the commission
hearings – although this had the result of steering the findings on
this subject into disinformation territory. Regarding the Zapruder
film: although “official” historical accounts tell us that C.D. Jackson
arranged the purchase of the film197, it was [Time] Life who were the
“official” buyers. Remember again that [Time] Life was riddled with
Rockefeller money and influence. One of many examples is David
Rockefeller’s affiliations with Time’s board chairman, Andrew
Heiskell.198

C.D. Jackson’s connections with the media were extensive. According

to archival documents in The Eisenhower Presidential Library,
Jackson graduated Princeton University (that old institution again!) in
1924 and immediately found work in the media/press industry. 199 It
was in 1931 that he went to work for Henry Luce at [Time] Life
Magazine. Jackson was also a publisher of Fortune Magazine – which
gives us yet another connection to the Rockefellers. 200 [Time] Life not
only connects with the Rockefellers, but also CBS, Orson Welles… the
list goes on and on. The threads of this story seem to keep constantly
weaving back together no matter how much we try to untangle
them! Perhaps this is one of the reason why so many people

197 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Douglas_Jackson#Life_and_career
198 http://new.euro-med.dk/20151210-rockefellers-time-magazin-merkel-the-obedient-puppet-of-the-year.php
199 C D Jackson Library, Box 69, "Princeton University Misc [1936 - 1957]", Eisenhower Library
200Charles Douglas Jackson -
https://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Charles%20Douglas%20Jackson&item_type=topic

147
fervently maintain that C.D. Jackson was, in some way, connected
with the 1938 War of the Worlds paradigm.

The CIA Factor

But the connections don’t end there… not if we factor in the likes of
the CIA. C.D. Jackson was involved with all manner of secretive
organisations and establishments. His work with the Eisenhower
Administration placed him in a position that was effectively
equivalent to the head of the National Security Council. Jackson was
the President for the Council of Democracy. From 1943 to 1945, he
served with the OSS201 (the precursor to the CIA). He was involved
with the Office of War Information, the Office of Strategic Services
and The British Warfare Executive.202 As noted earlier in this chapter,
(by researcher and author Christopher Simpson) Jackson played a key
role “in charge of policy oversight of combined CIA-USIA (US
Information Agency) and US military country plans during the Huk
insurrections in the Philippines in the mid-1950s.”203

According to Jackson’s own papers, donated by his widow to the

Eisenhower Library on Dec 15th, 1971, Jackson (by his own
admission) worked as an agent for the CIA from 1948. From 1948,
Jackson was also involved with Operation Mockingbird204 – the CIA
project to insert agency operatives and moles in the newsprint,
television and movie media. The following is taken from the
“Spartacus Educational” website article “The Assassination of JFK - C.
D. Jackson”: “Jackson also took an active role in Operation

201"Know Your Owners: C.D. Jackson Part 1", Just My Stupid Opinion - Streamed live on 17 Sep 2018 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoZbWOA2rZY
202 Ibid.
203Peter Levenda, Sinister Forces - The Nine: Volume 1: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft (Sinister Forces: A
Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft), Trine Day (1 Feb. 2011) ISBN-10: 098418581X / ISBN-13: 978-0984185818
(pgs. 123 – 124)
204"Know Your Owners: C.D. Jackson Part 1", Just My Stupid Opinion - Streamed live on 17 Sep 2018 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoZbWOA2rZY

148
Mockingbird. Documents released after his death show that
Jackson was in contact with a CIA agent in Hollywood's Paramount
Studios. This agent was involved in trying to influence the content
of the films the company was making. […] Hugh Wilford argues in
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008) that it
was a senior executive at Paramount, Lugi G. Laraschi, the most
important CIA figure at the studio. Laraschi was the head of foreign
and domestic censorship at the studio. […] In a private letter to
Sherman Adams, Jackson claims the role of these CIA placements
was "to insert in their scripts and in their action the right ideas with
the proper subtlety". […] According to Carl Bernstein, Jackson was
"Henry Luce's personal emissary to the CIA". He also claimed that in
the 1950s Jackson had arranged for CIA employees to travel with
Time-Life credentials as cover.”205

[Author’s Notes: Carl Bernstein also asserted that, during the 1950s,
C.D. Jackson arranged for CIA employees to travel with “Time-Life
credentials as cover.”206]

The aforementioned is further endorsed in Kenneth Osgood’s 2017

New York Times article “The CIA’s Fake News Campaign”: “The
C.I.A.’s freewheeling spymaster, Frank Wisner, created a well-
heeled and well-connected front group, the National Committee for
a Free Europe. […] Every president from Harry Truman to Richard
Nixon endorsed the campaign. […] The Hollywood producers Darryl
Zanuck and Cecil B. DeMille amplified those messages, as did
powerful media figures like Bill Paley, the president of CBS; C. D.

205 "The Assassination of JFK - C. D. Jackson" - https://spartacus-educational.com/USAjacksonCD.htm

206 Ibid.

149
Jackson, the publisher of Fortune; and the media mogul Henry
Luce.”207

[Author’s Notes: All of the aforementioned information about Jackson

is readily available in the Eisenhower Presidential Library and on the
CIA’s own website – if you are prepared to take the time to look
through it all.]

Then there is C. D. Jackson’s involvement with The Congress for

Cultural Freedom to consider. This anti-communist advocacy group
was founded in June, 1950, in West Berlin. It was formed from an
overlap of Wall Street / media social networks and was a joint British
/ American project. The group included Jackson, Kermit Roosevelt,
Tracy Barnes, Richard Helms (of soon-to-be-head-CIA fame), and
Royall Tyler – all heavily associated with Henry Luce’s [Time] Life and
Rockefeller / Morgan Wall Street financial assets. Jackson approved
all of the group’s core projects, actively promoted their work, and
served on its board. The head of the group’s music section was
Theodor Adorno – of Tavistock and The Radio Research Project
infamy. In April 1966, The New York Times ran a series of five articles
on the purposes and methods of the CIA. In the third part of this
series, the author revealed documentation demonstrating that The
Congress for Cultural Freedom was basically being run by the CIA –
by detailing false-front organizations and the secret transfer of CIA
funds. This article marked a series of press exposes that fully
revealed the CIA’s involvement – forcing them to (at least “officially”)
remove their money and involvement with the group.208
Interestingly, the group continued for decades after. From 1967

207"Kenneth Osgood, "The CIA's Fake News Campaign", The New York Times, Friday, October 13, 2017, p. A19 -
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/opinion/cia-fake-news-russia.html
208Coleman, Peter, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of
Postwar Europe, New York: Free Press, Collier Macmillan, 1989. (pg. 232)

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onwards, the group was funded by The Ford Foundation – another
quasi-connection with the Rockefellers.

[Author’s Notes: The records of the International Association for

Cultural Freedom and its predecessor the Congress for Cultural
Freedom are today stored at the Library of the University of Chicago
in its Special Collections Research Center.]

The CIA does seem to be the key recurring motif through all of this
and it brings us nicely back to the UFO subject, C.D. Jackson and, by
extension, the whole War of the Worlds paradigm. The CIA’s
involvement in debunking and disinformation about the ET/UFO
subject has been extensively documented. Admiral Roscoe Henry
Hillenkoetter - the first head of the CIA – wrote to the U.S. congress
seemingly pushing for disclosure. The letter was quoted in a
February 28, 1960 article in The New York Times – entitled “Air Force
Order on 'Saucers' Cited”. Hillenkoetter maintained: "Through
official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the
unknown flying objects are nonsense... to hide the facts.”209

Watch The Skies… Or Not!

C.D. Jackson was a member of the National Investigations Committee
on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).210 NICAP was founded in 1956 and
was active, largely in North America, until 1980. The organisation
continues today, although (since 1980) it now pretty much serves as
a repository of information on UFO phenomenon – as opposed to an
active investigative group. NICAP investigated one of North

209“CIA Chief Roscoe Hillenkoetter on UFO Cover-up in NY Times”, NY Times, Feb. 28, 1960 -
http://www.wanttoknow.info/600228nytimes &
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A12F9345D1A728DDDA10A94DA405B808AF1D3
210"On November 25, 1961, NICAP members C. D. Jackson and Robert E. Hohnmann..." See: Donald R. Prothero &
Timothy D. Callahan, "UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says", Indiana University Press (2 Aug. 2017), ASIN:
B074C4SPQY (pg. 176)

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America’s first widely-publicized “alien abduction” accounts – that of
Barney and Betty Hill.

The Hills claimed to have been abducted by extra-terrestrials whilst

driving through a rural part of the state (south of Indian Head) of
New Hampshire from September 19th to September 20th, 1961.
Varying reports give the initial time of the abduction as around
10.30pm on the 19th. The couple witnessed a large structured craft
above and in front of their car. The couple stopped to investigate
more closely. Upon encountering the inhabitants of the craft, the
couple panicked and sped off in their car, being pursued by the craft.
A strange phenomenon of buzzing and static enveloped the couple
(and their car) which affected their consciousness. The next thing
they knew, they were driving their vehicle 35 miles away from their
previous location.

On 21st September, Betty telephoned Pease Air Force Base regarding

their strange experience – to little effect. A couple of days later,
Betty loaned a book about UFO’s from her local library and came
across the name Donald E. Keyhoe. Keyhoe was the head of NICAP at
the time. On September 26th, Betty wrote to Kehoe and told him
about the Hill’s experience the week before. On October 21st, The
Hills met with NICAP investigator Walter N. Webb and conducted a
six-hour-long interview.211 Throughout November 1961, Betty began
to have vivid dreams where she started recalling aspects of their
experience during the 35 mile “gap” in their “journey”. This
prompted another encounter with NICAP on November 25th, 1961.
This time, the investigators were Robert E. Hohmann and… C.D.
Jackson! It was during this interview that Jackson highlighted the fact
that the couple’s journey had taken seven hours instead of the usual

211
Walter Webb, "A Dramatic UFO Encounter in the White Mountains, NH". Confidential report to NICAP. October 26,
1961 (Pg. 3)

152
four hours. Jackson attributed this to “missing time” and the subject
of hypnosis was raised.212

According to Philip Coppins, in his piece “The Pied Pipers of the CIA”,
“It was Jackson who drew the Hills' attention to their missing time
period; until he did so, the couple had not realised that their
memories of that fateful night were incomplete. It was Jackson who
suggested hypnotic regression as a means of unlocking it. It was
Jackson who then arranged for one of the Army's top psychiatric
experts to undertake the regression (as if a civilian expert was not
available?), under which the full story of the joint abduction
“emerged”. However, as many researchers have since
demonstrated, a careful review of the timings actually shows that
there was no missing time at all. It seems that Betty and Barney Hill
were at the centre of a web that involved USAF Intelligence and top
military experts in psychological warfare. The evidence suggests
that the Hills were the subjects – victims – of a psychological
experiment.”213

There are a couple of phrases and words that I want you to really
take note of in Coppins’ pieces: They are: “hypnotic regression”,
“Army's top psychiatric experts”, “USAF Intelligence”, “military
experts in psychological warfare”, and “psychological experiment.”
In other words, Coppins is saying that (in this case) we really need to
look at the psychological warfare and social engineering experiments
of the military / intelligence / industrial complex here.

Make of the Hill's accounts what you will. I personally do feel

strongly that Betty and Barney Hill did have a very strange and very
real experience that defied conventional explanation. My instincts
lead me to feel (although, I must stress, this is only my personal
212 Philip Coppens, "The Pied Pipers of the CIA" - http://philipcoppens.com/ufo_ciapipers.html
213 Jerome Clark, "The UFO Book: Encyclopaedia of the Extraterrestrial", Visible Ink, 1998 (pg. 282)

153
feeling) that the Hills did have an encounter that was possibly
“other-worldly”. That said, I also feel that aspects of the military
establishment also played a part in muddling up The Hill’s
experiences, their recall of the events, and (perhaps) even the actual
abduction itself. Interestingly, many credible ET/UFO researchers
have noted that the Betty and Barney Hill incidents marked the
beginnings of an era when the military became embroiled in the
“abduction” phenomenon and the start of overt “Milab” (military
abductions) scenario. It also marked a shift from abduction accounts
centring largely on benevolent “space brothers” type encounters and
the start of more overt abductions with sinister overtones… and the
increase in accounts of encounters with the “greys” type entities.

Putting the whole UFO/ET angle to one side. Let’s concentrate on the
involvement of C.D. Jackson here. It seems clear that Jackson played
a part in confusing and steering aspects of Betty and Barney Hill’s
experience. It was from here, also, that NICAP helped to turn The
Hill’s experience into a world renowned story that exploded the
whole “alien abduction” phenomenon into the public consciousness.
Again, in this regard, I cannot ignore the sheer number of times that
Jackson was involved with psychological warfare research and
experiments – particularly for intelligence outfits like the OSS and
CIA.

It should also be clearly noted that NICAP was substantially

populated by former and serving CIA operatives. For example,
former CIA Briefing Officer Karl Pflock was chairman of NICAP's
Washington D.C. subcommittee during the late 1960s and early
1970s. Another, with substantial connections to NICAP, was Colonel
(USAF Ret.) Joseph Bryan, III - the founder and first chief of the CIA's

154
Psychological Warfare Staff (1947 - 1953).214 Documented CIA studies
of NICAP can be found on the CIA’s own website (see the link in this
page’s footnotes for the web address of these documents.215) Some
researchers have downplayed the significance of those involved with
NICAP, who had past/present CIA affiliations, saying that their
“genuine interest” in the ET / UFO subject was their priority when
involved with NICAP. I believe this to be a very naive perspective
given that there is a library-worth of documented evidence showing
CIA involvement in the study, muddling and cover-up of the ET / UFO
phenomenon from the very start of the agency. Yes, many CIA
affiliated members probably did have an interest in the ET/UFO
phenomenon. However, years of research into these kinds of
subjects has taught me a general rule of thumb – those who once
worked for the intelligence community always work for the
intelligence community! It never goes away. Official secrets, NDAs,
national security, these are all mantras that reaffirm (at least in
99.9% of cases) a blind “patriotism” to “duty” and “country” that
always comes first above anything else.

With the CIA’s clear history of spreading disinformation about the

ET/UFO subject - through multiple, elaborate psyops – we may have
the answer to why people continue to connect C.D. Jackson to The
War of the Worlds “news crisis” / “mass panic” phenomenon. It adds
further credence if The War of the Worlds broadcast and audience
study does somehow fit into the larger scope of the ET / UFO
disinformation program.

One final nugget that may have been claimed as “proof” of a

connection between C.D. Jackson and The War of the Worlds, comes
in the form of The Psychological Strategy Board. This group formed
214Raymond E. Fowler, "UFO Testament: Anatomy of an Abductee", iUniverse (15 Oct. 2002) ISBN-10: 0595241301 /
ISBN-13: 978-0595241309 (pg. 255)
215 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp81r00560r000100010001-0

155
on April 4, 1951, during the Truman administration. It was an
outgrowth of The National Psychological Strategy Board – formed in
August, 1950, by the Department of State. The group’s entire
mandate was psychological warfare. The Psychological Strategy
Board ran for two short years – coming to an “official” end in 1953.
During it’s time, it had some interesting members. They included:
Paul Lazarsfeld, Hadley Cantril, Frank Stanton, Harold Lasswell,
William Paley, George Gallup, Elmo Roper, DeWitt Poole, and C.D.
Jackson. All but the last person had documented direct or indirect
involvement with the Princeton Radio Research Project and half
studied The War of the Worlds 1938 broadcast under the auspices of
the RRP! All rather curious! [Author’s Notes: Full documentation of
this group and its members can be found in The Truman Library
Archive.216]

As the Rockefellers play a huge role in this whole story, let’s bring
them back again to the fore. If we consider how the history of the
CIA is full of disinformation campaigns and psyops, then think about
this. There is massive and complex overlap between the CIA, its
forerunner the OSS, and the Rockefellers. The OSS was quietly being
set up throughout the latter part of the 1930s, under the auspices of
the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Special Operations
Executive (SOE). One key player in shaping the origins of the OSS was
the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere,
William Stephenson. Although it had several years to establish itself
beforehand, it wasn't until July 1941 that the OSS (at this point,
labelled the Office of the Coordinator of Information) became more
well-known. The “official” announcement of the OSS came on June
13, 1942. Until several months after Pearl Harbor (although it may

216Harry S. Truman Papers Staff Member and Office Files: Psychological Strategy Board Files - Dates: 1951-1953,
Truman Library Archive - https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/truman-papers/harry-s-truman-papers-staff-
member-and-office-files-psychological-strategy See also: Sandra Braman, “Communication Researchers and Policy
Making”, MIT Press Source Books, Sept, 2003 (pgs. 262 – 263)

156
have been far later), the bulk of OSS intelligence came from the
UK.217 Because of the timing and involvement of British Intelligence,
we can safely say that a number of those people working for The
Tavistock Clinic would have been involved with the formation of the
OSS. In fact, many of those trained in British Intelligence were
programmed in Tavistock affiliated schools in the UK and Europe. In
1925, the Rockefeller Foundation gave (as noted in Paul Weindling’s
“The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Sciences, 1920-
1940: Educational Philanthropy to International Science Policy”) a
$2.5 million grant to the Psychiatric Institute in Munich.218 This was
but one example of many during this period where the Foundation
funded the study of psychiatry and social psychology. Many of those
people who studied at the Munich Psychiatric Institute became
gainfully appropriated by the Tavistock Clinic and Institute of Human
Relations in a few short years.

As for more direct connections between the Rockefellers and the

intelligence establishment of the time, there are examples aplenty.
For instance: a valued, early-twentieth century employee of John D.
Rockefeller’s brother, William, was one Claude Dansey. Dansey was
responsible for reorganising all US military intelligence in line with
British Intelligence during WWI.219

It appears conclusive that “psychological warfare” has always been a

proverbial “shorthand” for the Rockefellers.

So where does all of this leave C. D. Jackson? Where does he fit into
the larger themes of this book? We do know for certain that Jackson

217 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services
218Paul Weindling, “The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Sciences, 1920-1940: Educational
Philanthropy to International Science Policy”, "Science, Politics and the Public Good: Essays in Honour of Margaret
Gowing", London, Macmillan Press, 1988.
219Anton Chaitkin, "British psychiatry - from eugenics to assassination", Executive Intelligence Review, V21 #40, [30
July 2002] - http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/247.html

157
was affiliated with most of the groups and individuals (whom I have
cited throughout this book) who had a connection to the larger War
of the Worlds paradigm. Some of these affiliations took place before
the 1938 broadcast timeframe and some after. He also had a long
and intricate career in both psychological warfare and the media.
However, despite all the connections, I cannot evidentially quantify
whether or not Jackson had anything to do with the actual War of
the Worlds broadcast or the Princeton Radio Research Project. If we
were going on evidence alone, I would say that Jackson just
happened to move in all the same circles as the aforementioned.
Was he actually involved in a psyop involving the 1938 War of the
Worlds broadcast?

I really don’t know! My gut instinct tells me that he has been “tacked
onto” the psyop concept in order to expand it into the “ET / UFO”
cover-up / disclosure realm. Despite being a fascinating angle to the
“psyop” narrative, I haven’t found any concrete evidence that the
1938 CBS broadcast was in any way connected with the ET / UFO
paradigm. However, I do accept that the study and template of the
1938 broadcast probably inspired and even influenced the work
done by those elite agenda players who were muddling and
managing the ET / UFO phenomenon. Certainly, this would appear to
be the case if we look at the recommendations made (and the
specific references to Hadley Cantril) in likes of the Brookings
Institute and Durant Reports. Given the scope of this field of research
(as a psychological warfare weapon/tactic), I do not rule out the
possibility that other agendas may have been at work though…
however, I am purely musing out loud on that last point!

For now, let’s return to the notion of The War of the Worlds as
psychological warfare in more earthly terms.

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 Chapter Ten:
“Template for
Terror”

159
World War II
As Orson Welles maintained, at the centre of The War of the Worlds
broadcast was the concept of a “fake news” crisis. It is a testament to
the effectiveness of this concept in media psychological warfare that
very soon after the 1938 broadcast, the idea would be adopted and,
even, somewhat paid homage to in an event that could conceivably
be interpreted as helping to bring about the start of World War Two.
On November 8th, 1938, just over a week after the CBS broadcast,
Adolf Hitler referenced the broadcast in a speech in Munich. He said,
“I have to do everything – and will do everything – to keep
Germany so well armed and equipped that her peace can never
again be threatened […] That does not mean that I will start a war
scare in the world, a panic, perhaps, about an impending invasion
of Martians.”220

It seems that Hitler had been watching the fallout from the
broadcast very closely. Nine months later, on the evening of August
31, 1939, a secret SS unit staged a mock attack on a radio station in
Gleiwitz, Germany, just across the border from Poland. The unit wore
Polish military uniforms, burst into the station – laying siege to it –
and began broadcasting in Polish that they were the vanguard of a
Polish invasion of Germany. The men fired their guns into the air and
left behind a dying concentration camp inmate, dressed in bullet-
ridden civilian clothing. It has since been claimed that this “mock
attack” had been staged earlier in August by Heinrich Himmler and
the Gestapo to convince the world that Poland had carried out an
unprovoked attack on Germany. The broadcast was then used to
partly justify Germany’s invasion of Poland. Bizarrely, the broadcast
received some initial coverage by American newspapers who

220
A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 161)

160
reported the mock “attack” as real. The next day, Hitler stood before
the Reichstag and claimed that the broadcast was real. By the end of
the day, Germany had invaded Poland. By the 3rd September, Britain
and France had declared war against Germany. How many history
books have you read where it describes how World War Two was
started, to a sizeable degree, by a fake news broadcast? Not many I
imagine.

Bizarrely, wartime influence from The War of the Worlds broadcast

was picked up on both sides of the Atlantic. According to A Brad
Schwartz, “The [WOTW] broadcast, noted General Hugh S. Johnson,
had given ‘unintended assistance to the President’s great defence
program.’ Army strategists took note of the panic and reconsidered
how radio might be used in a future war, either as a tool to keep
the public informed or as a psychological weapon. Variety reported
that some in the federal government believed War of the Worlds
‘has inadvertently done a lot for national defence.’” 221

However, the influence of The War of the Worlds model was not just
confined to the 1930s and 1940s.

The Ultimate Psyop

Jump forward almost 63 years and we have the mother of all media-
associated fake-news / psyops: 9/11. The events of 9/11 are
somewhat different from the previously cited staged radio broadcast
that triggered World War Two - in that the carnage and loss of life
reported in New York on September 11th 2001 did indeed take place.
However, the official narrative, the “explanations” for and “causes”
of the events, and the various individuals cited as “responsible for”
orchestrating 9/11 were nothing but a media perpetuated cover

221
A Brad Schwartz, "Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News", Hill & Wang;
Reprint edition (17 May 2016) ISBN-10: 0809031647 / ISBN-13: 978-0809031641 (pg. 163)

161
story. Within minutes (quite literally, if you go back and watch the
media coverage as 9/11 happened), the media were telling us who
had done what, when, why, and how. These points were then
repeated endlessly moment after moment for months after 9/11.
Although, the media could not realistically sustain this repetition of
the narrative (human psychology being what it is, we would have
eventually just tuned it all out en masse), this strategy shifted away
from an emphasis on the specifics of what happened on the day and
onto those who had been blamed for 9/11 – the [keep in mind that
this is the “official” narrative of 9/11] “19 Islamic extremists who
had hijacked planes and flown them into the World Trade Centre
Twin Towers.”

I don’t really want to spend too much time explaining the ins and
outs of 9/11 here – the onus should be on people to go away and
learn about the reality of 9/11 for themselves. However, for the sake
of context, here is a list of factors about 9/11, compiled by
researcher Andrew Johnson, that should give you pause for
consideration with regard to the truth of what happened that day.

 The Twin Towers were destroyed faster than physics can

explain by a free fall speed “collapse.”

 They underwent mid-air pulverization and were turned to

dust before they hit the ground.

 The protective bathtub, in which the WTC complex was

constructed, was not significantly damaged by the
destruction of the Twin Towers. (More damage was done to
the bathtub by earth-moving equipment during the clean-up
process than from the destruction of more than a million tons
of buildings above it.)

 The seismic impact was minimal, far too small based on a

comparison with the Seattle Kingdome controlled demolition.
162
 The Twin Towers were destroyed from the top down, not
bottom up.

 The destruction of WTC7 was a whisper quiet and the seismic

signal was not significantly greater than background noise.

 The upper 80 percent, approximately, of each tower was

turned into fine dust and did not crash to the earth.

 The upper 90 percent, approximately, of the inside of WTC7

was turned into fine dust and did not crash to the earth.

 One file cabinet with folder dividers survived out of tens of

thousands.

 No toilets survived or even recognizable portions of one.

 Evidence that the dust continued to break down and become

finer and finer.

 Evidence of molecular dissociation and transmutation, as

demonstrated by the near-instant rusting of affected steel.

 Weird fires. The appearance of fire, but without evidence of

heating.

 Lack of high heat. Witnesses reported that the initial dust

cloud felt cooler than ambient temperatures. No evidence of
burned bodies.

 Columns were curled around the vertical axis, where

overloaded buckled beams should be bent around the
horizontal axis.

 Office paper was densely spread throughout lower

Manhattan, unburned, often alongside cars that appeared to
be burning.

163
  Vertical round holes were cut into buildings 4, 5 and 6, and
into Liberty Street in front of Bankers Trust, and into Vesey
Street in front of WTC6, plus a cylindrical arc was cut into
Bankers Trust.

 Approximately 1400 vehicles had to be towed away because

they ware ‘toasted’ in strange ways during the destruction of
the Twin Towers.

 The north wing of WTC 4 was left standing, neatly sliced from
the main body which virtually disappeared.

 For more than seven years, regions in the ground under

where the main body of WTC4 stood continued to fume.

 The WTC1 and WTC2 rubble pile was far too small to account
for the total mass of the buildings.

 The WTC7 rubble pile was too small for the total mass of the
building and consisted of a lot of mud.

 Eyewitness testimony of Scott-pak (personal air tank)

explosions in fire trucks and fire trucks exploding that were
parked near the WTC.

 There were many flipped cars in the neighbourhood of the

WTC complex near trees with full foliage remaining.

 Magnetometer readings in Alaska recorded abrupt shifts in

the earth’s magnetic field with each of the events at the WTC
on 9/11.

For the most comprehensive gathering of all the quantifiable

evidence available on 9/11, I highly recommend checking out Dr.
Judy Wood’s book “Where did the Towers Go: Evidence of Directed

164
Free-Energy Technology on 9/11” , along with Andrew Johnson’s
books “9/11 – Finding The Truth” and “9/11 – Holding The Truth”.

9/11 & WOTW Synchronicities

Oddly, Dr Judy Wood’s book brings me back to Orson Welles’ The
War of the Worlds, thanks to a reference she makes to the broadcast
in “Where did the Towers Go: Evidence of Directed Free-Energy
Technology on 9/11” : “My introduction to the day’s events was
from a radio playing in the background while I was working at
home. Before heading in to campus, I turned on the television and
was amazed to find the same view of the event on every channel.
My first thought was of another Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’
type of scenario, except with TV this time instead of radio.” 222 How
right she was!

On 9/11, I quickly became aware of the similarities between the

events of that day and the narrative of The War of the Worlds
broadcast. However, it wasn’t until I thoroughly studied the 1938
broadcast for this book that I was struck by the sheer number of
synchronicities between the two. The War of the Worlds (WOTW)
1938 broadcast led us from place to place recounting disparate (yet
seemingly linked) events as part of the whole narrative. 9/11 was
identical in this regard. The hole in the ground outside Grover’s Mill
is evoked in the “Shanksville plane crash” narrative that was spouted
on 9/11. In the WOTW broadcast, the military were powerless to do
anything to protect the civilian population from the Martian attack. A
common theme that was repeatedly reiterated in the 9/11 media
coverage was “where are the military while all this is going on!?” Of
course, George W. Bush’s speech to the nation (following the My Pet

222Dr. Judy Wood, “Where Did the Towers Go? Evidence of Directed Free-energy Technology on 9/11”, The New
Investigation (2010) ISBN-13: 978-0615412566 (pg. 2) See also: http://www.drjudywood.co.uk/ &
http://wheredidthetowersgo.com/

165
Goat story-time farce) echoed Kenneth Delmar's portrayal of ‘the
Secretary of the Interior’ in the WOTW broadcast.

Then we have the chaos created across the streets and surrounding
buildings of New York on 9/11 when the Twin Towers turned to dust
in mid-air. The resulting dust cloud is uncannily evocative of the
black smoke cloud that drifts across the city in the wake of the
Martian tripods at the mid-point of the 1938 WOTW broadcast. Here
is the dialogue of the unnamed announcer who reports on these
scenes in the broadcast:

“I'm speaking from the roof of Broadcasting Building, New York

City. The bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate
the city as the Martians approach. […] North Hutchison River
Parkway still kept open for motor traffic. Avoid bridges to Long
Island --hopelessly jammed. […] Now I look down the harbour. All
manner of boats overloaded with fleeing population, pulling out
from docks. […] Wait a minute -- Enemy now in sight above the
Palisades. Five great machines. […] Now they're lifting their metal
hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out -- black smoke,
drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They're
running towards the East River -- thousands of them, dropping in
like rats. Now the smokes spreading faster. It's reached Times
Square. People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They're
falling like flies. Now the smokes crossing Sixth Avenue -- Fifth
Avenue -- 100 yards away -- it's 50 feet –“223

The reaction of this reporter from the roof of a New York building
was mirrored on 9/11 by the way in which media pundits described
the resulting dust cloud from the destruction of the Twin Towers as it
moved through the streets of New York – engulfing many of the

223Orson Welles - War Of The Worlds - Radio Broadcast 1938 - Complete Broadcast -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g

166
fleeing pedestrians and onlookers. It was also mirrored in the scenes
of ferries and boats overloaded with passengers that quickly
departed into open water to escape the carnage at World Trade
Centre plaza. No wonder Dr Judy Wood recognised the similarities.
They are numerous and, in many cases, uncanny.

Then there is the role of the media as the “false narrator” in each
scenario. On October 30th 1938, the radio tried to convince the
masses that Martians were attacking New York. It turned out that it
was all a lie. On September 11th 2001, the TV tried to convince the
masses that terrorists were attacking New York. Based on the
evidence now available to us, we can deduce that this too was all a
lie.

The Rockefellers & The WTC

In an interview with researcher Andrew Johnson, recorded in late
2017, he and I discussed “The War of the Worlds” phenomenon and
many of the subjects in this book. We also discussed my views on the
parallels between 9/11 and the 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of
the Worlds”. In this discussion, I mused out loud that “people might
look at (the connections) and think that's a bit of a stretch.” 224

Sometime after this interview, I was made aware of an excellent and

highly detailed documentary about 9/11 by Chris Hampton (from
Wolf Clan Media) entitled “9/11 Alchemy – Facing Reality”. Chris
incorporated sections of my aforementioned interview with Andrew
Johnson into his documentary (which I am hugely grateful to him for
doing, by the way) and included my musing about these parallels
being “a bit of a stretch” for some people to accept.

224 The 1938 War of the Worlds Psyop, TheTSGuide, 21 Nov 2017 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656kMTDA0Gk

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In his documentary, Chris responded to my musing by saying “I
personally don't think this is a stretch at all especially when you
consider who it was that was making sure that the port authority
got these towers built.”225 Amazingly, in that moment, Chris
revealed something that, although I knew it and had it stored in the
deepest corners of my memory, I had not connected the dots with.
As Chris demonstrated (using footage from a piece broadcast a
number of years ago on the Discovery Channel) that the two people
responsible for facilitating and financing the construction of the WTC
Twin Towers were none other than David and Nelson Rockefeller.

It then occurred to me that I should have recognised this connection

after having recently re-watched an interview with Hollywood film
producer Aaron Russo – conducted several years back. Russo was a
highly respected figure in the movie industry, whose work included
the films “Wise Guys” (1986), “Teachers” (1984), and one of my all-
time favourite comedy films “Trading Places” (1982). “Trading
Places” placed great emphasis on the Twin Towers of the World
Trade Complex in New York (as well as the financial activities that
used to go on there) during the final part of the movie.

In the aforementioned interview, Aaron Russo talked about his

career in Hollywood and how he came to befriend one Nicholas
Rockefeller. The name of this particular member of the Rockefeller
clan does not readily appear in material regarding the elite family
and there actually was a time when I questioned if this particular
person was even a real member of the family. However, some
research did eventually uncover the man’s credentials as a bona fide,
albeit low-key, Rockefeller.

225Section starts at 2:51:50 - Chris Hampton, "9/11 Alchemy – Facing Reality", Wolf Clan Media, 21 Jul 2018 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zz04_-f0GE

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From his own website and details on the official websites for The
Rockefeller Family Fund and The RAND Corporation, I have been able
to discern the following:

“Nicholas Rockefeller is vice chairman and chief legal officer of the

RockVest Group of Investors and is involved in various banking and
commercial projects in China and worldwide. He is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute of Strategic
Studies, the Advisory Board of RAND, the Corporate Advisory Board
of the Pacific Council on International Relations, the Board of the
Western Justice Center Foundation, and the Central China
Development Council and has served as a participant in the World
Economic Forum and the Aspen Institute. He also serves as a
director of the Pacific Rim Cultural Foundation, and is a member of
the boards of visitors of the law schools of the University of Oregon
and of Pepperdine University. Nicholas’ China practice includes
transactions with China’s largest banks, energy companies,
communications entities and real estate enterprises as well as with
China’s principal cities and leading provinces. He was chosen as a
board member of the Central China Construction and Development
Commission and as a director of the Xiwai International School of
Shanghai International University. He has appeared numerous
times on CCTV and other China media. Nicholas is a graduate of
Yale University and of Yale Law School.”226

In the aforementioned interview, Russo claims he became friends

with Nicholas Rockefeller and that on one particular drink-laden
evening, Nicholas spilled a few proverbial beans about the activities
of the Rockefellers and even loosely described the events to come on
9/11. According to Russo, this was some time before 9/11 happened.

226http://www.nicholasrockefeller.net/ See also: http://www.nicholasrockefeller.net/rand_dinner/ &

http://www.planetlive.org/ & https://www.rffund.org/

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I will leave you to decide what you make of this claim. If you wish to
check out the full interview with Russo, I have left the link to the
video in the footnotes.227 Be warned though, the interview was
conducted by Alex Jones – an individual now known to occupy a
“gate-keeping” position of controlled opposition / “limited-hangout”
in the proverbial “conspiratorial” research community.

War of the Worlds / War on Terror

The mainstream media coverage of the repercussions of 9/11 also
connects with The War of the Worlds narrative. One of the principle
consequences of the events of 9/11 was the Western-led proverbial
“War on Terror” – itself another media contrived and perpetuated
example of fantasy narratives, fakery and obfuscation. In concocting
these narratives, I have no doubt at all that psychological warfare via
the media came into play.

As if to tie all these synchronicities together, Hollywood director

Steven Spielberg released a contemporary cinematic version of the
“War of the Worlds” story in 2005 – at the height of the “War on
Terror” psyop. These things always seem to be so perfectly timed! I
summed this phenomenon up in the 2016 Edition of my book
“Science Fiction and the Hidden Global Agenda – Volume One”.

“It seems strange that whenever a new shift in the agenda of global
governance has occurred over the last hundred or so years (e.g.:
just before WWII, the early days of the Cold War, and just after
9/11), “The War of the Worlds” story re-emergences in some new
form. Film historians have detailed how the Cold War climate
inspired Byron Haskin’s 1953 big screen version of the story -
although few historians have commented on how it in turn aided

227 Reflections & Warnings - An Interview with Aaron Russo (FULL) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSGZ4Hkdyg4

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and abetted the Cold War hype. In 1953, the film rights for “The
War of the Worlds” were owned by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille had
substantial agenda connections. In the early 50s, he was recruited
into the anti-communist National Committee for a Free Europe (the
public face of the Radio Free Europe) by good friends and CIA
notables Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. He was fiercely loyal to the
US military (he designed the cadet uniforms for the then-newly
established United States Air Force Academy in 1954.) […] After
9/11, Steven Spielberg was inspired by the then-changed worldview
landscape and yet again “re-imagined” the Wells narrative for a
new climate. These cinematic adaptions of “The War of the Worlds”
appear to dovetail into the perception-managed “fear culture”
programming of each respective era. […] Yet, there is no escaping
the fact that Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” was complicit in
perpetuating the post-9/11, media-hyped, “War on Terror”,
psyop.”228

As I pointed out in that book, Spielberg made some strange

observations when he was interviewed for a short documentary
(“Revisiting the Invasion - War of the Worlds”) about the film. He
said: “Now, in the shadow of 9/11, it felt that War of the Worlds
had a special significance (…) We’re in a whole different mind-set,
so for the most part, I think I made this picture because I thought
this story’s time had come again.” He also added (note the historical
irony!) “It is being played for the hyper-reality.”229

The New Model for the Future

I have seen the template for what happened on October 30 th, 1938,
so many times throughout the years. I have to believe that if the

228 Carl James, “Science Fiction and the Hidden Global Agenda – Volume One”, 2016 Edition (pgs. 43-44)
229 Revisiting The Invasion - War Of The Worlds (2 Disc Special Edition) [2005] [DVD] ASIN: B0007TFINS

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model for inducing fear wasn’t so studied, so tried and tested, it
wouldn’t be employed so often. It isn’t just a template for a
proverbial “experiment in terror”, it is also an experiment in how
effectively the media can trick or fool as many people as possible. In
the two volumes of my work “Science Fiction and the Hidden Global
Agenda”, I looked at other examples of occasions where the media
has used the War of the Worlds model to great effect – such as the
1977, UK Anglia Television broadcast of “Alternative 3”.230

An even more obscure example would be the UK BBC1 airing of

“Ghostwatch” on 31st October 1992 (the date being another semi-
synch with WOTW.) The “mockudrama” presented an “as real”
paranormal investigation into a poltergeist-haunted suburban
housing estate (one house in particular.) The show created an air of
realism by basing the narrative on the supposedly real Enfield
Poltergeist haunting. The show received a huge backlash from the
viewing audience with numerous complaints being made after the
broadcast. The effect of the broadcast was allegedly so severe that
one young man (18 year old factory worker Martin Denham, who
suffered from learning difficulties and had a mental age of 13)
committed suicide five days later as a direct result of the broadcast.
His case prompted an investigation wherein The Broadcasting
Standards Commission concluded that the BBC had created “a
deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of menace.” 231

Like the Radio Research Project (in the case of The War of the
Worlds), medical academia also studied Ghostwatch for its
psychological value. According to Wikipedia: “Simons and Silveira
published a report in the British Medical Journal in February 1994,
describing two cases of Ghostwatch-induced post-traumatic stress

230 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075664/ See Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmNFzBVKqyE

231 Frean, Alexandra (29 June 1995). "Watchdog condemns BBC ghost drama". The Times. p. 12.

172
disorder in children, both ten-year-old boys. They stated that these
were the first reported cases of PTSD caused by a television
programme. Responses to the article described a further four cases
in children aged between 11 and 14, as well as one case in an 8-
year-old that stemmed from watching the pre-watershed hospital
soap Casualty. The respondents also noted the potential for similar
reactions in elderly people.” 232

I have included links to two of the concluding reports on this

research into the Ghostwatch broadcast in the footnotes 233

Of course, in 2019, we now have daily call-backs to The War of the

Worlds broadcast in the nightly news – where pretty much
everything that is conveyed is done so in such a way as to misinform,
confuse, unnerve, disorientate, and frighten the viewer. It is a
textbook example of “worldview warfare”. This, in itself, is a media
psyop involving continual psychological warfare.

Conclusion
In this book, I have attempted to provide as much evidence as
possible (for you, the reader) to present a case for the claim that The
War of the Worlds broadcast (and the subsequent study of the
reaction to the broadcast) was an exercise in psychological warfare
using the media. I believe there is enough evidence here to conclude
that the subsequent study of the broadcast (The Radio Research
Project) was absolutely part of a larger agenda. There is evidence of
Rockefeller funding of social engineering experiments via the media,
evidence of psychologists studying the media as part of these

232 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch
233Simons, D; Silveira, W R (5 February 1994). "Post-traumatic stress disorder in children after television programmes".
British Medical Journal. 308 (6925): 389–390. doi:10.1136/bmj.308.6925.389. PMC 2539494. PMID 8124147. & Forbes,
F; McClure, I (12 March 1994). "The terror of television. Made worse by family stress". British Medical Journal. 308
(6930): 714. doi:10.1016/S0378-7206(96)01068-3. PMC 2539415.

173
experiments, evidence of psychologists on intelligence, military and
government payrolls whilst working on these experiments, the list
goes on and on. We also have strong indications that the media
(probably under a degree of financial influence by the likes of The
Rockefellers) helped to spin the idea of a “mass panic” of the
American populace as a result of the broadcast – something that,
after years of “myth muddling”, we can now evidentially refute.
Additionally, this air of “mass panic” created fertile ground for those
social psychologists who wanted to prove that the media could
indeed be used to influence the thoughts and feelings of the masses
and subsequently incorporate that notion into a larger mandate of
state-sponsored psychological warfare and research.

However, there is one lingering question: is there enough evidence

to demonstrate that the October 30th, 1938, broadcast itself was also
part of this orchestrated psyop? There is a huge amount of
circumstantial evidence presented in this book that may go a long
way to supporting that conclusion. But is this enough to be
considered direct, irrefutable, and quantifiable – the proverbial
evidential “smoking gun”? I believe there is certainly evidence of
something untoward. Evidence speaks to us and we have to listen to
it - even if we are not truly sure of what it is trying to tell us. When
discussing this subject with researcher Andrew Johnson, back in
November 2017, he observed, “The impression that I've built up just
from what you've told me today, you know, the Rockefellers had
this project to see how they could influence people's behaviour and
opinions and perceptions, and that project was in the control of
people like Orson Welles [although] they may have not known fully
what the Rockefellers were trying to get from it.”234 This is certainly
a perspective I have considered. Orson Welles had all the right

234Andrew Johnson, “The 1938 War of the Worlds Psyop”, TheTSGuide, 21 Nov 2017 -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656kMTDA0Gk

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credentials and connections and certainly benefitted from The War
of the Worlds furore. Did he know what was really going on?

There is also another factor to contemplate and, to some degree, it is

actually a confession of evidence to support the aforementioned. In
listening to Orson Welles’ multiple takes on the broadcast of The
War of the Worlds, he has repeatedly admitted that the play was a
“fake news crisis” and that it was indeed a “little experiment”. In
revealing this, he has somewhat shown his hand. Whilst it does not
prove conclusively if the broadcast was orchestrated as part of a
larger, Rockefeller-funded psyop, it does prove that the intention of
the broadcast (at least on the part of Welles and The Mercury
Theatre on the Air) was to use the media to trick and manipulate
mass human (i.e.: the listeners) emotions.

Whatever else you make of the possible agendas, motives and

reasons behind The War of the Worlds broadcast, its role as a
psychological manipulator (simply on a superficial level) cannot be
disputed. Think of it this way: all media output is a psychological
operation. Comedy is an experiment to try and make an audience
laugh. Love stories are an experiment to see if the audience will feel
sad or even cry. Documentaries are an experiment to “inform” (I use
that term very loosely with the media) and indoctrinate the
audience. Thrillers are an experiment to see if you can create tension
in the audience. Horror is an experiment to try and frighten the
audience. Science fiction and fantasy is an experiment to see if the
audience will suspend their disbelief. The list goes on. The War of the
Worlds broadcast was an experiment on its audience to see if they
would accept a fake news crisis as quasi-real by suspending their
disbelief for an hour. Even the most ardently sceptical person, who
might dispute all the data that I have presented in this book, can, at
the very least, acknowledge that much.

175
If it is true that there was some kind of orchestrated psyop involving
the actual 1938 broadcast, how can we simply disregard the events
and all those involved? In such a case, we must hold people and
institutions to account and we must present an amended and
reconsidered description of the past. If we don’t, then we allow
those world manipulators who operate in the shadows to repeatedly
(as H. G. Wells wrote in “War of the Worlds”) “slowly and surely
draw their plans against us.” Fear is merely a state of mind. But it is
a state of mind that those in positions of power are infinitely capable
and willing to take advantage of. We cannot afford to be ignorant
anymore. If we stop reacting, stop investigating, stop asking
questions, and keep allowing such things to continually happen, then
we will have learned nothing from the machinations of history. We
have to stop being so dismissive and sceptical and naive and start
paying attention to all the clues that are staring us in the face.

In my humble opinion, that is the true lesson we can learn from the
1938 War of the Worlds broadcast.

176
Also available from this author:
“Science Fiction and the Hidden Global Agenda –
Omnibus Edition – The Complete Volumes One & Two”

In this book, alternative knowledge researcher Carl James

studies the science fiction genre and its myriad connections
to the global power elite. The research exposes all manner
of social engineering paradigms, predictive programming,
embedded occult and arcane symbolism and themes, secret
military and intelligence experiments, cover-ups and
conspiracies of silence, and a larger global elite agenda
mechanism.

Was Aldous Huxley helping to implement a mass social

engineering agenda? Was the 1938 War of the Worlds
radio broadcast a psychological operation orchestrated by
The Rockefeller family and The Tavistock Institute? Did
Stanley Kubrick help to fake NASA's Apollo missions? Why
was Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry working for a
group heavily supported by SRI, the U.S. military, NASA and
the CIA? Why did Hollywood director Ridley Scott produce
P.R. films for the social engineering organisation "Common
Purpose"? Did George Lucas embed subliminal psychic
messages in the raw film of Star Wars: A New Hope? Did
the Back to the Future film trilogy foreshadow the events of
9/11? Is contemporary science fiction a mass conduit for
the principles of "Saturn Worship"?

These questions, and many more, are examined in "Science

Fiction and the Hidden Global Agenda.

177
“What Really Happened at the London 2012 Olympics?”

The 30th Olympiad of the modern era. On July 6th, 2005,

London was announced as the host city for the 2012
Olympic and Paralympic Games. The following day, London
was rocked by a series of explosions. For the next seven
years, politicians and the media hyped up the fear factor
with sustained suggestions of a possible "terrorist attack"
at the 2012 Olympic Games.

Speculation about an "event" at The Games was rife and

generated all kinds of discussions and theories. When The
Games came and went, it was assumed that nothing had
happened. Yet something had clearly been overlooked. Via
the four ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Games,
the world had been subjected to a ritualistic assault on
mass human consciousness.

In this book, alternative knowledge researcher, Carl James,

charts the real story of the London 2012 Olympic and
Paralympic Games. From announcement to completion,
London 2012 is a bizarre and disturbing story of elite global
agendas, state sponsored terrorism, social engineering,
arcane symbolism, and occult practices... even the
suggestion of rampaging zombies and visiting extra-
terrestrials!

What really happened at the London 2012 Olympics!?

178