Long Black Cape

When I first arrived in Hamilton, late in November 1973,I was wearing a long black cape that made me look like a witch. A friend had given it to me as a going-away present, and now that I think of it, he had received it himself as a present from a woman who I believe was a practicing Wiccan. My friend said it would help keep me warm – it was made with heavy black wool and had a roomy peaked hood. In Montreal, a cape like that would have passed as just another fashion statement. But Hamilton was not Montreal. As I explored the downtown streets of my new, temporary home, I attracted considerable attention. More than once, someone in the street would come to a full halt, stare me in the eye, and one even asked, “Who are you?”

I would sometimes chat with these friendly people, whom I took to be an informal greeting committee, albeit some struck me as a bit strange, even by my standards. Then, usually deciding we had little in common other than a superficial interest in the colour black, I would continue on my way, my costume drawing more looks from other passersby.

Nor did I know that Hamilton is the Masonic capital of Canada. Even if someone had told me all this, it would have meant nothing to me, a young woman of 23 with a B.A. in History and English, and very few marketable skills, one of which was writing.

It was on York Street that my strange adventure began. York Street was originally an Indian trail, and later a military road built along a portion of Hamilton harbour. It was lined with old, Victorian-style mansions which offered cheap rent and access to a neighbourhood where hippies had gathered, a few years earlier. Not much was left of that scene: a natural food store, a coffee house offering folk music, one or two book or record shops. And a few community organizations, like the newly opened Hamilton Women’s Centre, which was the first place I went to look for work in early January of 1974. A bad choice as it turned out, but a logical one since I was qualified for the job of coordinator. I arrived for my first interview, in my long black cape, and before I knew it I was on the short list, and then hired. I was advised, as a welcoming gesture, to pay a visit to one of the Centre’s founding directors, a woman named Nairn Galvin. I wondered why, and was told “You would have a lot in common with her.” So, out of politeness but also curiosity, I phoned her number and was invited over for dinner. As it turned out, Nairn Galvin was a witch, a role she played to the hilt, living with 14 cats in a candlelit apartment filled with rare knickknacks, Indian tapestries, and the like. She served me wine in a silver goblet, and told me about her decision, at age 30, to become a witch – up to then, she’d been a Catholic nun. Then she read my Tarot cards. It was all very interesting – no more than that. I thanked her and went home. That night, she appeared to me in a dream in which she seemed to be trying to take possession of my soul. I managed to fend her off and never saw her again.

My job as women’s centre coordinator began in a blaze of light, but ended in dishonour. First, the Hamilton Spectator sent a reporter to interview us for a feature. She quickly took a deep dislike to my two co-workers, and focused on me. When the article came out, quoting me liberally, while describing the other two in disparaging terms, there was hell to pay.Intensely bored with feminist politics, I decided to quit.

I found another job, a few doors away, writing a booklet on the history of York Street for a citizen’s group that was protesting the demolition and redevelopment of the neighbourhood. That kept me employed until mid summer.

I was riding my bicycle down York Street in the direction of downtown, having just dropped off the finished manuscript of York Street: a People’s History. I’d also collected my final pay cheque. I was suddenly, once again, unemployed, but that hardly mattered, just then. The sun was slanting through the trees, glinting off the windows of old abandoned buildings as I pedalled east in rush hour traffic. I passed the natural foods store, where I had worked for a few days earlier that spring.When I stopped at a traffic light another cyclist came up on my left. He looked to be a boy of about 19, small and scrawny, with lank black hair tied down with an Indian headband to reveal one pointed ear, like that of an elf.

"So, where you goin'?"

The light changed and I took off, ignoring him.

"Aw come on, " he persisted, cycling alongside. We exchanged a few brief sentences. Somewhere downtown, where we parted ways, he expressed his wish that we meet again sometime.

The next day was a Saturday and I was parking my bike at the market, when he showed up again on his bicycle. "Why’d you take off so fast? " he asked. We chatted the length of time it took for me to lock up and get away. He reminded me of some grinning, undernourished street kid, the kind that attaches himself to you in a foreign country and begs to show you the sights. I found him unthreatening since I towered over him in height. I didn't need anyone to guide me around Hamilton. I was already familiar with its constricted social life. All the well-off people lived up the hill, overlooking the downtown where the rest of us went about our lives. Hamilton had a light and dark side. It seemed you were either a practicing, fundamentalist Christian – one of the saved – or you were like this boy. One of the damned.

At the time, I had made friends with a woman my own age, a devout Christian running an agency called “Adopt a Grandparent.” From an old, Anglican, Hamilton family, Margi was one of the few people I had met, so far, with whom I could actually talk.

The following afternoon, a Sunday, Margi and I decided to cycle over to the Botanical Gardens and around Hamilton escarpment. We were crossing the Queen E. bridge, where we had a view of a park called Cootes’ Paradise. Midway across the bridge, I caught sight of a familiar figure cycling toward us in the opposite lane.

He screeched to a halt an did a U turn. " "Three times in three days,” he said. “Must be a reason!" He was wearing a little cap, this time, and carrying a beat-up knapsack. By now, I almost felt I knew him.

There was no dissuading him. He came along with us on our ride and kept up a stream of conversation, first with me, then with Margi, who had a softer disposition and bigger breasts. We came to a densely wooded area, and as we passed a cemetery, our friend threw down his bike and told us to wait while he crossed the highway and headed for one of the grave stones. He stood by the grave for several minutes. From where we waited by the roadside, we could see his lips moving as if in prayer.

Jumping on his bike again, he told us he'd been talking to his grandfather, who had passed away some years earlier but often still appeared to him in dreams. A little farther on, he stopped again, pulled a hunting knife out of his backpack, and disappeared into the woods. We wondered if we should wait this time, or keep going, but after a minute or two he came crashing through the brush and was back on his bike. "Got a trap in there I was checking," he explained. "And now I have something I want to show you girls. It's a lookout at the top of the escarpment, where you can see for miles. A fantastic view of Lake Ontario and a 500-foot drop to the ground below."

We said, No thank you. We needed to be getting home now. We'd skip the view, and the 500-foot drop, this time around. We turned around and an hour later we were back downtown, but still he clung to us. He said he was suddenly feeling very sick, and needed us to come home with him, now. We offered to take him to the hospital. He rode off in a huff.

At her front door, Margi wondered why I’d befriended him in the first place. I said I’d never befriended him. He’d attached himself. He’d turned up three times in three different places in three days. “Maybe he’s following you,” she suggested. Given the locations of our encounters, especially the last one, in the middle of a long bridge over a ravine that divided Hamilton into two separate halves, I didn’t think so.

“Well, you attracted him,” she concluded.

I braced myself for the prospect of running into him every day for the next few months, but I never saw him again, the rest of that summer, fall and winter. In September, I found a new apartment on East Avenue, not far from downtown. In November, my father died, and my mother came to stay with Margi and me. I was working a split shift as a proofreader at the Spectator, correcting wire service copy and front page stories which were often about gangsters and terrorists in Quebec, stories that painted a bizarre picture of Montreal as a violent, crime-ridden place – although I remembered it as a place where art and culture flourished.

Then came spring, when my mother and I decided to move back there. I had packed up my belongings, and was arranging the final details. Margi would take over the apartment at 72 East Avenue North, # 2.

A few days before we were to leave, a misdirected letter arrived in our mailbox. It was an official looking letter, from National Steel Car and was addressed to a James Brewster, 72 East Avenue. Apartment 2. I had never received any of James Brewster’s mail before, but I assumed he must live at 72 East Avenue South, a few blocks away across Main Street. I pencilled in “South” but forgot to mail the letter. It stayed on the table in our hallway until the day before we were to leave, when I dropped it in a mailbox on my way to the laundromat.

When I walked in with my bags of dirty laundry, sitting in a chair near the door was my little pointy-eared friend. He looked surprised, as well as pleased, that our paths had crossed again. I avoided his eyes as I loaded up the machine, added detergent, shoved in three quarters. “Want to go for coffee?” he asked. I declined, and hurried out the door. Then I made sure to stay away for at least two hours, so he would be gone by the time I went back to use the dryer.

I half expected my clothes to be gone, too, by then, but instead, on my machine I found note in ballpoint pen and round, childish handwriting:

“Come on over to my place and have a beer with me.”

It was signed:
“James Brewster, 72 east Avenue South. Apt. 2.”

I reread the note several times, not quite believing it. I wished to God I had not mailed that letter! Otherwise, I would have shown it to Margi along with the note, and got her reaction.

In a city of 500,000 people, what were the chances that any individual you randomly met on the street even once would turn out to be living at the mirror image of your own address? One in 500,000… I guessed. And the chances that person would show up three times on three successive days, and attach himself to you for no apparent reason, and that this person would also be someone who speaks to the dead, carries a knife, and tries to lure you to his apartment, not once, but twice. And that he would resurface a few days after you received a letter for him in your mailbox, and 48 hours before you were to leave town for good –

The odds of all that happening, by the normal laws of probability, were infinitesimal.

Even if I had wanted to go over to James Brewster’s for a beer, there was no time – we were leaving. And even had there been time, I would not have answered this invitation. I had read Jung, and thought of myself as a connoisseur of strange coincidences. But this one set me on edge.

I couldn’t even prove it had actually happened. No one but me had touched, or seen, the letter addressed to him that had arrived at our house. Other than me, no one but Margi had met James Brewster – and she had only met him once, eight months earlier, not three days in a row, as I had.

Had we gone home with him that day, last summer, when he told us he was sick and needed our company, we would have found out where he lived. But that did not change the fact that, a few weeks later, we would move into our new place, at almost exactly the same address.

It was not just the improbability of such a series of coincidences occurring in the order that they did. It was my sense, even back then, that they were not coincidences, but something else, for which I had no proper name and no explanation, except one that whispered that there were “forces” out there, capable of arranging such a series of events. That it was up to me, the single witness, to figure it out.
And most important: it was up to me NOT to get involved in asking How or Why. Because at the bottom of it all, lay a powerful Joker who might not be joking. One does not pop over for a friendly beer with such a joker, or his representative.

Not that, of course, James Brewster would have known the answers. I suspected, rather, that he was someone who dabbled in strangeness. That he liked to flow with the dark currents that ran through town. In the 18 months I'd lived there, I had heard enough. People had told me about the covens that met at the University or on the escarpment where a friend’s daughter and her friends had stumbled on animal bones from a recent sacrifice. Another friend’s upstairs neighbour had been writing a sociology paper on one of these covens, when she was warned to abandon her project. She didn’t, and soon after she fell three storeys, and was now a vegetable.

And there was Nairn Galvin, and her silver chalices, and those chronically angry women at the Women’s Centre. And the people who took my black cape as a sign that I was one of them. And the lost-looking creature I sometimes saw, when I worked the night shift, prowling the downtown streets in sequins and platform shoes and David Bowie hair. There was spooky Dundurn Castle and the Masonic Lodge, and the Pentecostal Church, and the cloud of depression that hung over Hamilton, a city that seemed to exist on the dividing line between heaven and hell. All of it was strange. All of it suggested a world of secrets and closed doors guarded by powerful entities – some of this world, others not.

I closed the door on all that on the day we left for Montreal. Every now and then, on a very few occasions, I told this story to someone, always drawing the same blank stare. “What do you think it means?” I would ask.

No one had a thing to say. Except Leonard Cohen, who nodded. “It’s good you told me that story, because I’m one of the few people around who might understand it.” He never elaborated, however.

John Lilly, the neuroscientist who liked to spend time in flotation tanks on LSD and Ketamine, at around the same time Leonard was in similar experiments at McGill, came up with a theory that there are entities in the universe who arrange these mind-bending coincidences that can change our lives. You can read about them here.

I know nothing of those entities. I do think there are dimensions we can enter, however, in which the laws of cause-and-effect are scrambled.

Another just happened to me when I published this blog.

I was looking for an image to represent "Hamilton" and found several depicting the Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant. That's how I learned that good old James Brewster bore an uncanny resemblance to one of Hamilton's legendary personalities.

Brant was a peculiar figure, with traits that normally don't coincide: he was both Mohawk and Mason, as well as a United Empire Loyalist. Originally from Ohio, he fought with the British against the American revolutionaries who were making raids on the Canadian border, and in the area around Hamilton on Lake Ontario. He would have been very familiar that old Indian trail that eventually became a military road and later, York Street.

The resemblance is so outstanding that in the first seconds when the image of Brant came up, all I could see was the face of James Brewster grinning out at me.

I wonder where he is now... and why it has taken me all these years to write this story.

Mind Control 101

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He's wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb's famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers were paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant that later he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

Order THE MAN NEXT DOOR

We now know that D.O. Hebb's sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb's research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous "rat" study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind controlled pedophiles with an interest in eugenics -- and probably still is today.

In 1951, when this photo was taken, Leonard Cohen was 17, i.e. still a minor. One wonders who signed the permission slip -- his mother? Or perhaps they just didn't bother with those little details, back then.

Leonard Cohen went on to become a poet of note. In fact, that same year, 1951, he published his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies. It would be interesting to do a textual analysis of all of Cohen's writing - someday when I have more time I plan to do that (:  -- combing his poetry and novels for references to the secret program that he has been part of for most of his life. Up to now, his biographers seem to have overlooked all the references to hospitals, (Nazi) doctors, psychiatric experiments, electroshock, etc. They also have failed to adequately explain the missing years (mid-1950s, i.e. peak years of the MKULTRA program) when Cohen did some sort of graduate work at Columbia University in New York.

McGill and Columbia happened to be co-epicenters of MKULTRA research into mind control. As were certain studios and film-making teams at the NFB, the arm of British intelligence that brought our Leonard to national attention in 1966, with the film LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MR. LEONARD COHEN. As was the Silva Mind Control organization, where Leonard met Suzanne in the late 1960s. As was Nashville, where his musical career took him later. And let's not forget the Chelsea Hotel, where he hobnobbed with musicians and CIA programmers like Kris Kristofferson, always mentioned whenever Cohen introduces his song "Chelsea Hotel" about the time he had sex with mind-controlled singer Janis Joplin. That night Janis was apparently looking for Kristofferson one of the "handsome men" she preferred, according to the song, one of the creepiest in Cohen's repertoire in my opinion.

It's very obvious to anyone who happens to have followed Cohen's career, that the singer-songwriter who composed I'm Your Man has spent most of his life surfing the mind control circuit that took him from McGill to New York and then Europe where he connected with the Rothschilds.

Let's just say that early on, he "volunteered" and the rest is musical history. This is a topic for a long article, but for now I'll keep it small and personal. Lately I've been thinking back to times when I witnessed Leonard Cohen's programming either in operation, or failing to operate properly. That is, when I lived next door to him and one or more of his handlers. By the mid-80s had many people grouped around him who seemed to be there to smooth things over. He also once told me depended heavily on doctors and psychiatrists at the (notorious MKULTRA hospital) Allan Memorial Institute, a half hour walk from his house near Saint Laurence Boulevard. In fact, during those years, he frequented the swimming pool behind the Allan, where doctors, nurses, and other hospital staffers hung out with people from the Entertainment scene -- I was told by a former orderly that the purest cocaine from the hospital pharmacy could be bought beside the pool on just about any summer day.

It is one thing to meet and get to know Leonard Cohen. It would be hard to imagine or find a more charming, generous, affable, funny guy to have as a neighbour. Unfortunately, though, that's only one of many personae, or "alters" -- Cohen has many. I wouldn't like to guess how many. I suspect there may be hundreds. What this means is, getting to know him is virtually impossible, because his various alters are not necessarily aware of one another. This explains why, while living next door, I witnessed events that sometimes made no sense, and would have been impossible if Cohen were a normal person, with a single core personality.

Mind controlled entertainers and public figures -- and this also applies to certain mind-controlled politicians, like Pierre Trudeau, a friend of Cohens -- require handlers to help them manage situations caused by their having various alters that don't all work together. These handlers, e.g. Kris Kristofferson, who likely was Janis Joplin's programmer -- are there to coordinate and conceal the fact that these public figures are "programmed multiples."

An incident comes to mind that occurred in about 1985, when I had been living next door to Cohen for two years. During that time, I had rarely seen him. I was busy, in those days,making a living by writing and editing. I also had a weekly program on local community radio, went out with friends most evenings. I had little to do with my neighbours who, in many ways, behaved like members of an exclusive club.

The incident I'm thinking of happened out of the blue, one day. I got a phone call from Leonard, whom I hadn't seen in several months. He invited me next door for tea. Cautiously pleased with the invitation, which seemed to suggest we were back on a friendly footing, I rang his doorbell, he opened the door, and we drank tea in his kitchen. We chatted, he may have played me a new song or two, or showed me a drawing. Just like in the old days when we'd been friends.

Then he said he had an appointment somewhere and needed to take a bath. I offered to leave. He said, No, just sit here for a few minutes in case the phone rings. He got in the bath, I sat in the kitchen, and sure enough, the phone rings. It's Hazel, the woman next door. I tell her Leonard is in the bath, and to please call back in a few minutes, which she does. At this point, the story becomes a bit extraordinary. I am standing a few feet from the phone, and I can hear Hazel shouting. I can't make out what she's saying, but she is screaming what appears to be verbal abuse, and Leonard, who has his ear to the phone, becomes rigid and just listens. The screaming goes on for, maybe, half a minute during which he does not move, does not respond, or react. When the screaming stops he says "OK" and hangs up. The phone rings again, He picks it up. More of the same shouting. Once again, he listens without affect, without moving, and says "OK." Then he hangs up, turns to me, and in a blank tone says "You'd better go now." Which I do.

But I'm upset with Hazel, so I phone her when I get home, and leave a one-line message on her answering machine suggesting that she stop doing whatever it was she was doing when she phoned him, shouting like a drill sergeant.

Later that night, there is a meeting in his front room. I happen to walk by, and unusually, the blinds are up and I see Leonard, encircled by the people I thought of as his "cult followers". He is speaking to them, gesturing dramatic. I only get a glimpse of this meeting as I pass the window, but my snapshot impression is that he is asking for their help in some difficult matter that is causing him great anxiety.

And sure enough, half an hour later, I get a phone call, from a woman called Birgit, whom I know quite well, but consider to be a fairly hardcore Cohen groupie. She has come from the meeting. She arrives as I'm cooking supper, sits in my kitchen, and goes straight to the point. I have to move from the neighbourhood, she says, and stop harrassing Leonard Cohen. I'm, well, stunned. It's the first time anyone has spoken to me in two years about how I came to be living next door. The first time anyone has suggested it might be a problem. But I'm not stupid. I'm quite aware that my presence in the neighbourhood has caused concern for certain people. The fact, however, is, that I am there as the result of a peculiar coincidence. That there is no way I could have found this apartment on my own -- I'm there, and I can't really explain how it happens, in a city of 1 million people, I manage to move in next door to Leonard Cohen -- it just happened. That's it, that's all.

I also knew, back then and today, that nobody in Cohen's circle believed this. And neither do I, to this day, really understand how things like that happen. But that day, he had invited me over, as if letting bygones be bygones, and it had appeared, for about an hour, that relations were back to normal -- until Hazel called, that is, and shouted into the phone, and he went numb.

And who called the meeting? And what was it about? No explanation was ever given. Another cult member, Charlie, phoned me the next day and invited me across the street to his place, for tea. We sat in silence. I didn't feel like talking until someone explained to me what was going on on that block.

No one ever did.

Looking back, in the light of what I know now, but had no notion of back then, I would say: yes, there was a cult. Leonard seemed to be at the head of it. His word held great weight, then and now. But the man who invited me over for tea and chatted normally earlier that day, was not the same man who addressed the meeting later that evening.

These were separate "alters" that might not have known of each other's existence. The alter that addressed the meeting did not recall having phoned me that day, and may not have recalled the two phone calls that came from Hazel -- which was when they "switched" --

A few years later, when I had all but forgotten this incident, Leonard phoned me again from next door. This time, he told me, he was in very bad shape. "I can't get from one second to the next," he said. "Can you come over? You're the only one who understands me."

Worried, I rang his doorbell and he let me in. He asked me to go shopping for him, to buy food because he didn't feel able to leave his house. "I'm on this new anti-depressant, but it's not working. I'm in an incredible state of anxiety."

Remembering that other day, five years earlier, I said "You must be doing something wrong. You need to be in some kind of therapy to figure it out."

That suggestion just seemed to alarm him. "The doctors at the Allan are doing everything they can for me. Drugs are the only solution."

That was in about 1990. It was one of the last times I saw Leonard in person. Every so often, I'd read an interview with him, but over the next 20 years it seemed he just kept giving the same interview over and over.

We live in an age of totalitarian Mind Control, and entertainers like Leonard are front-line soldiers -- as well as victims. We listen to them at our own risk.

Mysterious Doctor Fischer

Another doctor who came to Canada from Nazi Germany is Dr. Martin Fischer, whose stellar career left a "harmful legacy" that some of his students are apparently still sorting out.

I learned about Dr. Fischer last year in a roundabout kind of way, when a judge, living in a small city in south-eastern Germany, suddenly contacted me. The judge, whom I will call Henry, had heard I was writing about secret Cold war experiments on children in Canada.

Henry appears to have been born in a Toronto mental hospital in 1959 or 1960, one of a series of illegitimate children fathered by Dr. Martin Fischer in bizarre experiments at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto.

When Henry was nearly 50, his adoptive parents told him the truth they had somehow managed to hide for decades: that he had been adopted, after his birth mother, a patient at Lakeshore, died in childbirth or shortly after. "Your real father was a Jewish doctor," said his adoptive mother, attempting to set the record straight on her deathbed. "They were experimenting on pregnant women at that hospital." After these cryptic remarks, his mother refused to speak any further on the question of Henry's birth, and remained silent til her death last year, in Germany, of cancer. His father had already died some years earlier.

Not long after the funeral, Henry flew to Toronto, and began contacting people there -- including the Jewish Genealogical Society, who told him the most likely candidate, and the only Jewish doctor at Lakeshore in the 1950s, was the celebrated Dr. Martin Fischer.

Anyone looking at Henry ought to have noticed he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the couple who had masqueraded as his parents all his life. But he happens to look quite a lot like Dr. Fischer, who became an influential figure through his work with the Children's Aid Society and later as the founder of the Canadian Art Therapy Institute with branches in Toronto and British Columbia. Dr. Fischer died in 1994, and his children, including a daughter who is a plastic surgeon in Toronto, refused to meet with Henry -- but sent their lawyer to question him.

During his brief conversation with the Fischer family attorney, Henry gathered that he was only one of a series of illegitimate Fischer children who have turned up over the years, looking for their father. He learned that Dr. Fischer came to Canada as a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1940, and spent time in a POW camp in Quebec before studying medicine in Toronto where he was "famous" for a time, after appearing in the 1967 NFB film, WARRENDALE.

Henry also learned a few strange facts about Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, and its associated cemetery which contains the unidentified bodies of 1500 "patients" who died there during the Cold War.

Not knowing what else to do with these disturbing bits of information, Henry returned to Germany, where I met him last June.

He showed me documents which reveal his adoptive parents both worked at Lakeshore Psychiatric, and were in Canada during the exact same period -- 1953-64 -- when the MKULTRA program was in operation. His birth certificate, dated January 1960, appears to be a fake -- he believes he was actually born in 1959, and showed me a bizarre home movie from 1960 in which he appears as a large, talkative baby in a high chair at their home in New Toronto. His arrival was filmed by a friend of the family, and there is a voice-over narrative in German and broken English: "Der ist der Vater; this is the father; Die ist die Mutti -- she is the mother." Seriously, who films their own baby with a voice-over stating "I am this baby's mother" --

There was other footage of Henry as a boy on the ship back to Germany in June 1964 -- looking more like a 6-year-old than the 4-year-old he was supposed to be, not to mention that he was big for his age and very blond, unlike either parent.

Back in Germany, the family spent a year in Gottingen, and then moved to a town near Mannheim where they bought a new car and a large house. Not your typical struggling hospital workers. His father, a jack-of-all-trades who sidelined as a smuggler, went back to work for I.G. Farben -- yes, his dad had been an employee of the famous chemical firm in the early 1950s. Henry's mother went back to nursing, and with money that mysteriously arrived every month in a special bank account in Bremen, Henry was sent to the best schools in Germany. After a stint in the Air Force -- he failed to pass his officers' exams and was judged 'too emotional' for a military career -- he studied political science and co-founded the German Liberal Party with its current leader. From there, he began a career in media, which foundered when his partner suddenly died. In his late twenties, he went back to university to study law and is now a judge in Child Protection court.

Ironic, perhaps, that he now sometimes takes children away from their parents and places them in foster care.


Henry suggested I write about his story. But he strongly recommended I not mention anything about Nazi medicine. "Everyone is tired of hearing about that," he said. "And you need to make money."

Instead, he recommended I tell the story of his adoptive parents, and how his mother came to Canada aboard a refugee ship with several hundred patients who, Henry believes, were Jewish concentration camp survivors who spoke German. This would explain the fact that many of the nurses and staff at Lakeshore Psychiatric were German speaking. Henry believes these Jewish patients, for whom all records were destroyed in 1962 by the then-director, are the same people who are buried, three-deep, in unmarked graves in the hospital cemetery, which a group in Toronto are now attempting to "memorialize."

His theory: they were too badly damaged by their concentration camp experience, too sick and insane, to function anywhere other than a mental hospital run by German staff. Sending them on a ship to Canada was the easiest way to get rid of these victims, who otherwise would have posed a burden on Germany's struggling post-war economy -- or Israel's.

Henry's mother has a letter from a Jewish Refugee organization showing she had worked at one of their hospitals in Munich. The letter is signed by a doctor whose first name was Moses.

"Make it a story of hope," Henry exorted me. "Jewish refugees, insane and disoriented, travelling on a ship to Canada, to be taken care of for the rest of their lives at a mental hospital on a lake. Listening to the doctors and nurses, and looking out the window at the lawn and the trees, they probably think they are still in Germany."

"And the experiments on pregnant woomen?" I asked.

"Yes, mention those. And the fact that all 1500 of them ended up in a mass grave, with their names missing."

"And the fact that this hospital was run by doctors who worked for the Canadian military?"

"Yes, but leave out the Nazi stuff. Nobody's interested. And for the conclusion, you can add my other theory," continued Henry, who has a computer-like mind which he claims actually whirrs like a hard disk when it's working at top capacity. "That they destroyed the records in order to steal these Jewish patients' identities, and gave them to war criminals who were trying to enter Canada."

"War criminals, such as Nazi doctors."

"Yes, probably," said Henry. "But I want you to sell this book -- so leave that part out of it."

Dr. Ruth

This photo shows a group of doctors standing on the steps of a notorious Montreal orphanage, ca. 1960. Circled, from left to right, are Dr. Ewen Cameron (CIA-funded head of psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute), Dr. Ruth Kajander (Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, Toronto) and Dr. Heinz Lehmann (Head of Research at McGill's Allan Memorial, Director of the Douglas Hospital, Verdun, Quebec).

A survivor of military mind control now living in Ontario helped identified Dr. Ruth, the only woman in the photo. I later learned more about her through another survivor living in Thunder Bay, where Dr. Ruth, now in her mid-80s, still practices psychiatry.

If you google her name, you can find out what her patients think of her here:

According to survivor advocate Lynne Sharman, Dr. Ruth (Koeppe) Kajander's career began in Nazi Germany where, as the grand daughter of the "father of German pediatrics," and daughter of a Nazi physicians, she studied medicine at the University of Gottingen. An auspicious beginning: Gottingen had an interesting relationship with Columbia University in NYC, where much MKULTRA research was conducted. After the war she moved to Finland where she married her husband, Arthur Kajander. She emigrated to Canada in 1951, taking a job at Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, which she soon left for a better position in research.

Why does a young Dr. Ruth Kajander appear in a photo on the steps of a Montreal Orphanage in 1960, along with another Nazi-trained psychiatrist (Heinz Lehmann) and MKULTRA programmer Ewen Cameron? What kind of "research" was Dr. Kajander doing on children in Canada at the time?

Allegedly Dr. Ruth Kajander has programmed children at Lakeshore Psychiatric in Toronto, and elsewhere around Canada, including Thunder Bay where she recently celebrated her 50th year in psychiatry and was honoured for her contribution.

Lynne Sharman says: "When the False Memory Syndrome Foundation emerged, it came out of nowhere and formed in every state in the United States and also here in Canada. At the time Dr. Kajander was quoted saying she did not believe what children say about sexual abuse. She joined a breakaway group of psychiatrists in Ontario who believed the children lied and that false memories were being implanted. Therapists across Canada were being sued by the F.M.S. Foundation. I believe this foundation was a C.I.A. funded operation, because it rose up so quickly, and the funds and legal monies they had access to were unheard of."




Dr. Kajander was awarded the Order of Canada on June 30, 2011, only days after this blog post first appeared.


A NOTE ON REMOTE VIEWING

Dr. Ruth first surfaced on my radar during a remote viewing experiment I participated in with Harley Monte in Montreal. At the time, I had never heard of her -- and neither had anyone else in this remarkable remote viewing session. Harley and other remote viewers described a group photo in which a woman bearing a remarkable resemblance to Dr. Kajander appeared with several other MKULTRA doctors associated with McGill in 1960.

Harley even came up with her husband's first name: Arthur. With amazing accuracy, Harley and others described her as looking very much like Cruella DeVille in Disney's 101 Dalmations -- due to her severe hairstyle, and pronounced widow's peak. The information he and the group spontaneously channelled suggested she was involved in experiments on children, along with Lehmann (named in the session as "Leeman") and several others, possibly part of an international team of scientists conducting lethal experiments on Canadian children.

Remote viewing is used by the military for various purposes, and one of MKULTRA's covert aims was to train children as remote viewers. I view information that comes through remote viewers as a form of witness testimony, not a substitute for fact-checking. In my experience, Harley and his group score high in accuracy. Here is a sample of their work from that session:


PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF REMOTE VIEWING SESSION, November 2004.

Just let me take one more look around here. Oh! On the wall there’s a picture of six men in white coats. You want to meet the doctors?

There’s a Chinese doctor. The names aren’t there that I can see, they may have been added later but at this time when the picture was taken they’re not there.

There’s a short man, wide shouldered, blackish grey hair, glasses.

The older woman, the shape of her face. You know the 101 Dalmations? The actress? Very similar there, the eyes... there is a situation in her own family at the present time and she’s not bearing up very well, rumour has it she will be leaving in the next month or so.

She’s not Canadian is she?

She looks very British but it’s more just how she has made herself up to be, and her shoes are weird, I have never seen shoes like that before, you know the old type that button up the side, she has a mark on her hand, right here.

Birthmark?

No it’s an injury. I don’t know if she had her hand crushed or something to an extent, and when she writes she writes like this. And there’s something happening to a child in her family at the present time. The time, wherever I am (1960).

I’m getting a name Leeman...

Arthur. There’s an “Arthur” here.

Cold, very cold. A lot of cold air around him. A mean person. I just feel he was totally disconnected, had no empathy, no, just cold, no feelings for these children.

Was he doing a job or was he out to make a name for himself?

I’m not sure, I just know whatever happened did not bother him at all. They weren’t human to him. They were like animals. They were like subject for tests.

I’m getting Russia. I think one of the people, maybe Arthur, I’m seeing a coat with long, buttons all the way down the front, double breasted. I think experiments, lots were going on there, I see snow, I see very wide steps, a very large building, very big square stones and very wide stairs where there are railings not just two on the side, more railings, going on, I got the word “government” -- whoever, someone wore that coat, it’s like an army green. Drab green and brass buttons wool coat

Indications are this was an international program involving secret factions of government and military, that targeted minority children in Canada, especially aboriginal and French Canadian orphans. Since so much of the evidence has been hidden, remote viewing seems a legitimate way to try to gather information. Dr. Ruth is still alive, still honoured by her peers for her pioneering work -- part of Canada's secretive elite which has never been called to account for crimes against humanity. This needs to change.

Dr. Mengele Comes to Quebec, 1949

These photos from a yearbook published in 1949 by Hopital Saint Michel Archange in Quebec city, were sent to me by a friend in Ontario. I believe the man on the left in the first photo, bending down to examine a boy in a wheelchair, is Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, who had interned in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig.

My friend Jane obtained the yearbook from the daughter of a Duplessis orphan who lives near Ottawa. It lay in a trunk for years. I'm extremely grateful to the women involved in bringing these images to light.

The other two images, from the same section of the yearbook, show recent achievements at that hospital in the field of neurology at the time.

Saint Michel Archange Hospital is notorious as a place where many Duplessis orphans disappeared in secret experiments. Its 1949 yearbook is festooned with dedications and photos of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, then Canadian Prime Minister Louis Saint Laurent, and various dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church including Cardinal Leger. This is not entirely surprising, since Dr. Mengele escaped Europe in 1948 with the help of the Vatican "Rat Line" which brought him safely to Argentina. From there, he moved to Brazil, Paraguay, and points beyond -- including, some have said, Montreal.

There is a stunning similarity between these photos, and my 2004 interview with Duplessis orphan Silvio Day who worked as an orderly in 1960 at another Quebec hospital, where he transported bodies of children murdered in Nazi-style medical experiments from the operating room to the "Locker Room of the Dead" and burial behind the hospital. The scenes he describes from memory – of nuns and orderlies in a zombie-like state, working together with doctors in experiments on young orphans – are perfectly illustrated in these photos taken ten years earlier. It's also interesting that a man bearing a strong resemblance to Dr. Mengele appears in both Day's account, and the yearbook photos.

A bizarre discovery – but is it proof?

I went to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre with the photo of Dr. Mengele examining the boy in the wheelchair, and they quickly dismissed it for predictable reasons: the vast quantity of bogus Mengele sightings, and the poor quality of the jpeg image I produced.

On the other hand, these experts could not prove it is not Mengele. The white-coated man in the photo appears to be exactly the right age (late 30s), slim build, and general appearance (note the hairline) as Dr. Mengele who was 38 in 1949, had escaped from Europe that same year and gone into hiding in South America. Mengele is known to have used various aliases, as well as his own name, and to have travelled around North America and Europe during the Cold War years when he allegedly worked for the US Department of Defence and even (for a time) McGill University.

His sponsors at the Vatican were high officials and member of the P-2 Lodge, which helped many leading Nazis escape prosecution for war crimes. Quebec’s Prime Minister, Maurice Duplessis was known for his pro-Nazi sympathies, and had corresponded with Hitler's Foreign Minister, Von Ribbentrop, before WW2, when the Nazis offered to send some of their young scientists to Quebec.

"So what if it's Mengele?" asked one of the Holocaust experts -- a question that had not occurred to me.

My guess is, the hospital published this yearbook, and included these photos, to demonstrate that it was making progress with the secret program laid out in 1944 at the Quebec Conference, the year Maurice Duplessis, re-elected as Quebec premier, sat at the table with Roosevelt, Churchill, MacKenzie King and Allen Dulles, to iron out details of a clandestine agreement by which Quebec’s orphan population would be placed at the disposal of the British and American military in their top secret program of chemical and biological warfare weapons development, some of which was based downriver at Grosse Ile. Some of these experiments involved psychosurgery, e.g. lobotomies, which witnesses like Silvio Day say were performed on orphans. Mengele’s work at Auschwitz involved Trauma-Based Mind Control would become the basis of the covert MKULTRA program in 1953, signed into effect by Allen Dulles in 1953, a few months before thousands of Quebec’s institutionalized orphans were relabelled “mental patients” and transported to hospital like Saint-Michel Archange in Quebec City, where many disappeared in drug trials and other criminal experiments.

Fascist-leaning Maurice Duplessis would have been happy to allow Mengele enter Quebec, in return for a place at the table of the Secret Government. So goes the “conspiracy theory” that explains how Canadian officials sold out a generation of children in order to profit from illegal weapons research

Below are photos of Mengele, probably taken in the late 1930s when he was graduating from medical school.