Although the sci-fi television drama Fringe contains a main storyline regarding 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.”
Bishop’s background in fringe science allowed him to perform cutting-edge research in the field during the 1970s – a large percentage of which was on the behalf of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies – and his reference to MK-Ultra correlates to an actual clandestine program of the CIA that goes as to the early 1950s.
The heightened state of the Cold War during the era led to a “thinking outside the box” mentality by the United States when it came to potential weapons and espionage techniques – especially since the government believed that the Soviet Union was conducting similar research – and mind control was one of them.
In the 1940s, the confessions of liberation leaders in communist countries for manufactured crimes against the state were broadcast on television. 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 CIA launched project Bluebird in 1950, which morphed into MK-Ultra in 1953.
As Walter Bishop noted, LSD played a key role. In his 2008 book Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, British documentarian Dominic Streatfeild traces both the U.S. and Great Britain’s interest in manipulating the minds of its Cold War adversaries while likewise examining the various techniques utilized by the CIA and MI6.
Drugs were of specific interest from the very beginning and became a greater focus 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.”
Although the CIA was initially optimistic that it had found a way to control minds and elicit truths from foreign spies, further investigation showed that LSD was far less reliable than first thought after new test subjects began having different reactions. 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.”
According to Dominic Streatfeild in Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, 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 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