Targeted Individuals (TIs), Reality, and the World Hum

There are some people working to soften the boundaries between hallucination and agreed-upon tests for determining what’s real. Once in a while I’m presented with the argument that goes: if the Hum is a self-reported phenomenon and should be taken seriously, why should we not take seriously the reports from the many thousands of people who report that they are Targeted Individuals (TIs)? The New York Times broached this subject recently, and explored the sense of community that is now available on the internet to people who claim to be TIs or have been labelled with paranoia or delusional disorder. I cringed when I read that there may be some therapeutic value in being told, “You’re not crazy”. What a setback for those who aren’t paranoid or delusional in any way, but nevertheless experience something that others do not. Time and again I return to tinnitus (which I do not suffer from); if we believe people who self-report tinnitus, who do we not believe, and why?

Reality has a democratic element to it. For example, if a Schizophrenic person tells us that large purple rats are climbing the walls, we would vote “No” – that’s not real. If a person diagnosed with tinnitus tells us that he hears a loud high pitched squealing noise that nobody else is hearing, we would likely vote “Yes” – I believe that it’s real. Where do Targeted Individuals fall on this spectrum?

Let’s set aside the documented targeting of individuals by the American government, of which there are many examples. For example, during the COINTEL program, which was a gross violation of civil liberties and personal privacy, many individuals were identified – on Nixon’s “enemies list” for example – and were the subject of surveillance, harassment, and in a few cases, extreme violence. But that’s not the type of thing TIs are talking about.

TIs are claiming the existence of technologies that are not discussed anywhere in serious science. There certainly is evidence that some demented experiments were conducted in the early 1960s by the American neuroscientist Alan Frey in his notorious “microwave hearing” experiments,  in which he tried to beam speech directly into the human brain. The failure of this experiment was documented in declassified military literature (widely available), and I can’t find any evidence of any replications of those studies, even in the hugely embarrassing and detailed Wikileaks documents or the Snowden revelations.

But even if those experiments succeeded – which I don’t think they did – it makes no difference anyway. Ironically, a single layer of metal foil will indeed block and reflect microwave frequencies (there’s a reason you were taught from a young age not to put metal in the microwave oven). Therefore, simple metal shielding of any kind would block any such efforts to control people with microwave or higher frequencies. This includes smart meter and cell phone frequencies as well. Note that these are therefore also excluded for the same reason as sources of the Hum.

Many TIs claim that they are being targeted because some authority has labelled them as “cranks”, or trouble makers, or potential whistle blowers. This makes no sense at all. There are so many easier and cheaper ways of disrupting people. More cogently, no government program of any size has gone on for long at all without being identified and discussed. This ranges from the Manhattan Project to the Stealth Bomber to the NSA. Speaking of the NSA, its vast infrastructure operated 24/7 for decades with countless employees and a massive array of supercomputers and transmitters before its very existence was officially acknowledged. But the thing is, everybody knew about it and what type of work they did and what types of tools they used for doing it. It was only the scale of operations that caused widespread surprise. The TIs are claiming an even more massive, more intrusive infrastructure located who knows where, wielding unknown technological powers, all for the purpose of harassing people who complain about corruption at city hall.

Finally, to the Worldwide Hum. Few Hum hearers want attention. The attention I have received so far has had a neutral or negative impact on my professional and personal life. Five or six quite serious scientists (two retired), several physicians, a dentist, a few psychologists, and so on who can hear the Hum correspond with me on the condition that I not name them. That’s because they are serious people who value their professional reputations yet want to support the research that has already been done. I can’t really blame people who don’t want to pay the social price for being on the fringe of any movement.

Unlike in cases of mass hysteria, Hum hearers almost always discover the Hum through independent research, rather than hearing about it first through other people. So therefore I believe the tens of thousands of people who all hear the same thing under the same conditions, and have reported to the Hum Map and Database.

And so it’s time to find out what it causing it. By August I will have settled in to my new house and property in the forest, and I’ll be able to finally complete the Deming Box experiments in a way that I and others find convincing.

Glen