A Terrible Mistake Indeed...

Late last year I finally made it to Brave New Books, a bookstore I'd been hearing about for some time.  The variety was pretty surprising, and actually more far out in some of its selections than my tastes tend to run.  But one book caught my eyes, a new release on Frank Olson's death.  This was a subject that was still fresh in my mind after reading Jon Ronson's Men Who Stare at Goats, which devotes a chapter to the subject.

The book was H.P. "Hank" Albarelli's A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiements.   This is a relatively massive tome at 900 pages that I'm still working on due to my habit of reading multiple books at the same time.  I've been wanting to review it here for some time but felt that compulsion to finish it first, largely due to the tremendous amount of material it encompasses.  This book is not one of the best  books on the subject of the MK ULTRA LSD connections, but a hell of a good read as well, especially considering the depth and complexity of the subject covered.

But the book is now making bigger waves in the mediasphere than has been seen since the Church Committee's hearings in the mid-70s, and not only in the US.  One of Albarelli's contentions is that the CIA was involved in a mass exposure of the small French town of Pont St. Esprit to LSD to test its biological warfare potential.

Ah, now this was something I knew about, having assiduously read John Fuller's account of the affair, published in 1968 as The Day of St Anthony's fire.

This "suspenseful, true account of a medieval plague in modern times, and of the scientific detective work that traced it to a surprisign cause" now seems to have a new epilogue.  Albarelli, fitting together the bits of pieces of FOIA releases on the subject (large amounts of which have been redacted from the original government documents), puts together a plausible argument that not only was the CIA involved in causing the incident in which 5 died,, but that Frank Olson was there to follow up.  (Albert Hoffman, the 'father of LSD', was also on the ground shortly after the event.)

His death, Albarelli argues, was due to his beginning to speak to others about the matter, though it is unclear rather his cryptic reference to "a terrible mistake" prior to his death refers to the Pont St. Esprit event or his mention of it to others outside of the security framework it was enmeshed in.


Excerpt from John Fuller's The Day of St Anthony's Fire

French Government Queries USA re 1950s Secret LSD Experiment, from Infos independantes d'Anne Nony

A more skeptical approach from The Atlantic Wire, Did the CIA Really Dose a French Village With LSD?

Reason.com's Hit &Run skeptical take, CIA Doses French Bread With LSD?, which has some humorous comments and others which clearly reflect a lack of reviewing Albarelli's documentary trail, though raising other relevant objections

Another sketical take from GlobalDashboard.org, The Telegraph on acid - France, the CIA, and a touch of plagiary, with a nice little movie from 2004 entitled LSD a GO GO

A French news story from France24.com, Did the CIA poison a French town with LSD?



LSD a GoGo, produced in 2004 with assistance from Albarelli, is an interest primer on the subject of Frank Olson's death.

Peruvian earthquake lights and one possible explanation

Here is a nice collection of earthquake light videos followed by an attempt to explain them in spanish, based (as far as I can tell) on energy release causing an ionization effect and subsequent plasma discharge phenomena. I haven't been able to connect to the web page they allude to.

Earthquake lights from 2007 Peru earthquake

This is getting interesting!

The more one looks, the more videos of earthquake lights there are on YouTube, and their veracity seems to lie in the sheer amateurishness of some.  They also get much more televised press down in South America, no doubt having to do with the fact that so many people, including the media see them and have a much more vested interest.

This a screen grab of a much longer news segment from an August 15, 2007 earthquake in Peru. 

More Chilean earthquake lights

Another video of the earthquake lights in Chile from the 2/27/2010 quake.  There are several different versions of this one out there, but this repeats the illumination of a large apartment building to give a sense of the magnitude of energy that must has been released.

Earthquake lights in Chile!

Earthquake lights have long been talked about, offering some seeming confirmation of tectonic forces under stress inducing piezoelectric phenomena in the lithic substructure and manifesting as lights in the sky.  

The possibility of earthquake lights in the area first came to my attention during the early hours of coverage when I overheard Cecilia Lagos on a CNN broadcast describing the incredible lights in the sky she saw in Santiago on the morning of the quake. What with the ground shaking underneath one's feet and the skies lighting up in the middle of the night, it must have felt like the world was coming to an end, and this is how many did describe it.
There is now video from the Februrary 27 2010 earthquake in Chile which seems to have captured this phenoma in a rather spectacular fashion. Check out this segment!

 The more one looks the more you can come across.  It seems like everyone with a video camera at hand was capturing footage and a surprising amount of earthquake light phenomena was captured.  This is one of the best (and most reposted) videos I've seen over hours of looking for relevant material, with a wide variety of color and sense of the overall scope of the lights playing over the sky.  It does resemble a very short lived aurora borealis sort of light.

It is often difficult to tell what's going on, lots of black space, but with a little bit of patience there is often quite a bit well worth watching!

I've tried to enclose local source material as much as possible, though a lot of it is coming out in English versions trying to pin the blame for the earthquake on HAARP and chemtrails.  I just wish I could translate some of the material a little better to understand the original material and further refine searchs.




Some comments on the posted video are trying to play down the phenomena as well.  In places I've seen it posted that this whole series of lights are little more than transformers blowing out.  This last video with the incredibly localized ground level (?) lights makes me wonder a little too, but they are much larger than expected.  Some of the other films show transformers blowing and they bear no resemblence to the over all size and otherworldly intensity of the lights that are actually playing out in the sky.