American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [41]
There’s one other weird aspect we need to consider. While temporarily in Los Angeles early in 1968, Ray got into practicing self-hypnosis. Besides seeing a “psychologist-hypnotist,” he visited “seven other psychiatrists, hypnotists, or scientologists.”24 One of these was “head of the International Society of Hypnosis,” who later said that Ray was “impressed with the degree of mind concentration which one can obtain.”25 This was a German-born fellow named Xavier von Koss, who recommended several books on hypnosis that Ray was carrying when he got arrested in London. Von Koss seems to have also been involved in intelligence work.26 According to one of Ray’s brothers: “When Jimmy left Los Angeles he knew he was going to do it.”27 Meaning, be involved in the plot to assassinate Dr. King.
A recent book by Ray’s brother, John Larry Ray, alleges that when Ray was in the army in the late 1940s, he did some moonlighting for the new CIA and the FBI—and was part of the Agency’s early attempts to control human behavior that later became known as MK-ULTRA. Brother John recalls Ray telling him “that he thought the feds were messing with his mind.... My brother was a changed man when he returned from Germany [in 1948] . To be frank, he seemed drugged, even though I never saw him take anything. My dad and other family members commented that ‘he must be on goof balls.’ Also, he seemed easily persuaded to do things he never would have done before.”28
In 1970, when Congressman Mendel Rivers tried to get Ray’s entire army file, he received a response from Major General Kenneth Wickham that this would not be possible: “This is particularly true since there are medical aspects that cannot be disassociated from any discussion of Mr. Ray’s military background.”29
Ray’s brother also describes an encounter in Montreal with a CIA asset who had ties to the Klan, Jules Ron “Ricco” Kimble, an identities specialist who got Ray his alias as “Eric S. Galt.” Kimble said that “an older man came out from McGill University’s Allen Memorial Institute to hypnotize” both Ray and him. Verification for this, as far as Kimble, came from Royal Canadian Mounted Police files. At that time, there wasn’t any public knowledge about Dr. Ewen Cameron’s mind-control experiments being conducted at McGill under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA Sub-project 68.30
Early in 1968, Ray “began writing certain phrases over and over on paper. These are included in the FBI file on the assassination. [Robert Kennedy’s assassin] Sirhan did the same thing. One of the phrases James wrote was, ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.’”31
Was that somebody’s idea of a bad joke? I never believed The Manchurian Candidate was more than fiction until I got into doing this book. But there are records that prove MK-ULTRA did exist, it’s undeniable. Then when you start looking at these different assassinations and how the assassins acted and reacted, you start to wonder. During the course of filming the TV show on conspiracies, we brought in an innocent person who had volunteered and put him under hypnosis with an expert. We went through a whole scenario where the guy comes out the door, starts walking and talking with me about baseball, then gets a call on his cell phone. All he needed to hear was a particular word, and that would cause a subconscious reaction to where he’d start limping, although he’d deny he was doing it. In his mind, he’s not limping because he’s been told that he’s not.
Then we put him back in the room, and the hypnotist asked us, “Do you want him to remember this or not?” We chose that he not remember, because we wanted to see what would happen. When he came out of the hypnotic state, he swore to us that he’d only been in the room for a couple of minutes, when it was really nearly an hour and a half. When we told him the various things