Although later seasons of the sci-fi television drama Fringe features a parallel universe that is at war with our own, the original roots of the series reside in an X-Files-like exploration of “fringe science.” Just as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated weekly occurrences of the supernatural, FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and cohorts Dr. Walter Bishop and his son Peter embark on “mystery of the week” assignments that border the fine line between the possible and impossible from a modern scientific standpoint.
Genetic mutation, teleportation, and psychokinesis thus all find their way into the narrative alongside the overarching mythology of an alternative universe. There was one particular concept, however, that appeared in the series on at least three separate occasions and directly relates to real-world experiments secretly conducted by the United States government.
“Mind control?” Walter Bishop rhetorically asks during the second season of Fringe. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s attempted it. I told you about my work with the MK-Ultra Project. Of course at that time we supposed that we could do it with LSD and hypnotic suggestion.”
In the 1940s, dissidents in communist countries under the control of the Soviet Union were rounded up and arrested for manufactured crimes against the state. During the resulting “show trials,” the defendants were not only found guilty but confessed to their fabricated crimes as well. Because the falsely accused exhibited no visible signs of torture or duress, it was speculated that the Soviets had developed some form of mind control to keep disruptive citizens in line.
Fearing a “mind control gap,” the Central Intelligence Agency launched project Bluebird in 1950, which morphed into MK-Ultra in 1953. In his 2008 book Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, British documentarian Dominic Streatfeild traces both U.S. and Great Britain’s research into mind control, which in the fictional world of Fringe included efforts by Walter Bishop.
As Walter Bishop correctly mentions on Fringe, drugs were an initial focus of MK-Ultra, especially after Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally stumbled upon a synthetic hallucinogenic in the early 1940s. Hoffman named his discovery “lysergic acid diethylamide,” or LSD for short, and the CIA began testing the effects of the drug a few years later.
“In July 1954 an officer was given a series of ‘secrets,’ told not to reveal them and dosed with LSD,” Dominic Streatfeild writes. “In no time at all ‘he gave all the details.’ The Agency concluded that the drug had real potential in the field of ‘eliciting true and accurate statements from subjects under its influence during interrogation.’ Such was the CIA’s zeal for experimentation that a security memo in December 1954 specifically warned that ‘Testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties’ was not to be encouraged.”
The CIA created a number of charitable organizations during the 1950s and secretly used them to fund pharmaceutical research in civilian hospitals and universities. At the height of its LSD experimentation, MK-Ultra had “deals with eighty separate institutions including forty-four colleges or universities, fifteen research facilities or private companies, twelve hospitals or clinics and three penal institutions.”
Although the CIA was initially optimistic that it had found a way to control minds and elicit truths from foreign spies, further experimentations showed that LSD was far less reliable than initially thought, causing the agency to conclude that the effects of the drug were too unpredictable for its intended purpose. Rather than become disheartened, however, the MK-Ultra masterminds found an alternative use for the drug.
“In the mid-1950s, the CIA did a swift about-turn and decided that, rather than a truth drug, LSD might be an anti-truth drug: people on it were incoherent and completely out of control,” Streatfeild explains in Brainwash. “Mightn’t it be a good idea to give agents a small supply of the drug in case they were captured? Soviet interrogators wouldn’t know what to make of that!”
Drugs likewise play a key role in the mind control narratives of Fringe. In the episode “The Dreamscape,” for instance, scientific research firm Massive Dynamic discovers that a hallucinogenic even more powerful than LSD has found its way onto the black market.
“The drug can easily be mass produced as a cheap street drug or worse, in its potent form, used as a chemical weapon,” FBI Agent Olivia Dunham explains. “Apparently it can literally scare you to death.”
During another installment, a Seattle sleep disorder physician constructs a biochip capable of inducing a deeper restful state in patients suffering from chronic insomnia. The Fringe Division initially believes that the chip can also receive commands, allowing the sender to control the actions of anyone who has had the device installed in their brain. In turns out, however, that the opposite is true – instead of receiving signals, the biochip siphons off dreams and transmits them to another location.
“What’s more, I believe the chips have the ability to turn on a dreaming state while the patient is awake,” Dr. Bishop adds. “Which would lead to paranoia, hallucinations, and a complete inability to differentiate between reality and dreams.” Given the real-world CIA’s fascination with wreaking havoc on unsuspecting minds, the end-results of both Fringe episodes would no doubt have been of great interest to MK-Ultra.
While there is no documented proof that the CIA ever discovered an effective means of mind control, the same cannot be said of Massive Dynamic on Fringe. In the episode “Of Human Action,” chief operating officer Nina Sharp shows Olivia Dunham and Walter Bishop the company’s flight simulation deck.
“What you’re watching is a live test of our prototype hands-free guidance system,” she tells them. “Electrodes in the pilot’s helmet are picking up on his thought patterns, which send commands to an onboard computer. The pilot has been given a pharmaceutical enhancement, a drug to amplify his brainwaves, which makes it easier for the electrodes in the helmet to read them.”
When the son of the experiment’s chief scientist takes the drug, it gives him the ability to control another person’s actions. Although the father insists that such a side effect is impossible, Walter Bishop believes otherwise. “The brain is a computer,” he says. “It’s an organic computer. It can be hijacked like any other.”
Although Fringe is a fictitious television series, its delving into the scientific potential of mind control coincides with the factual CIA’s own investigation into such possibilities. It therefore isn’t a stretch to believe that MK-Ultra would have indeed recruited Walter Bishop into its ranks – and even potentially funded the research of Massive Dynamic – if the real and fictitious worlds had somehow intersected.
Thankfully neither of those two things ever happened, and minds remain safe from governmental control.
Anthony Letizia