Sunday June 17, 2018

Breakthrough discovery: one of the CIA front organizations used to conduct research on psychedelics in the early 1960s was a group called the “Society for the Study of Human Ecology.” (Some publications, however, also refer to the group as the “Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology,” and in 1961 it changed its name to the “Human Ecology Fund.”) The society’s president upon its founding in 1955 was a Cornell scientist named Harold Wolff, and its executive director and treasurer was a former Air Force colonel and expert in brainwashing named James F. Monroe. At some point, however, Carl Rogers (who, along with Abraham Maslow, helped to found the decade’s humanistic psychology movement), served alongside Monroe on the board of this organization until it was disbanded in 1965. Another humanistic psychologist named George A. Kelly also served on the board. So far, the most extensive info I’ve found about the group appears in John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979), a book that draws upon documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.