January 10, 2023, early afternoon, a neighborhood in eastern Modesto not far from Enochs High School
I drove to the store in my old station wagon and bought some potato chips and ice cream because I wanted to celebrate my birthday even though two weeks passed since that momentous occasion. While driving home, I suddenly couldn’t remember where I lived. I panicked, thinking that I had lost part of my mind and now experienced rapid early-onset dementia. I pulled over to the side of the road and used my cell phone to look up my address. I used the map application on my phone and plotted the directions to my house. The phone indicated that I already parked in the driveway, but I still felt disoriented and did not recognize my house. I looked around and saw many of my neighbors standing in the middle of the street, all in a state of extreme agitation. No one seemed to remember where they lived. Thankfully, the children who lived on our street were in school, and most of the adults were at work. There were about 20 or so people milling around, a combination of retirees, the unemployed, and people who worked from home. None of us remembered where we lived.
Ten minutes later, the confusion, anxiety, and uneasiness dissipated and all of us remembered where we lived, but everyone present remained in the middle of the street and we all held an impromptu meeting. We all had a very animated discussion.
“What just happened? I didn’t know where I was”
“It’s like I couldn’t remember where I lived for a couple of minutes, and my house is right in front of me. It’s right there!”
“You think we were involved in some sort of mind-control experiment?”
“I mean, why is everyone outside? It’s cold out here!”
“I’m gonna call the police.”
“You think it was aliens?”
“What the hell, man! Did everyone go crazy all at once?”
“I was several blocks away driving home from the store, and even parked my car in the driveway, but I suddenly could not remember where I lived,” I told the group. “I used the GPS on my phone to find my way home, but I still couldn’t recognize my own house. I was like, what? Where is it? Then I saw all of you and walked over.”
“Sat sri akal,” I said to my Punjabi-speaking Sikh neighbors.
“Namaste,” I said to my Hindi-speaking neighbors.
“Buenos dias,” I said to my Spanish-speaking neighbors.
“Shlamalokhoun,” I said to my Assyrian-speaking neighbors.
“As-Salaam-Alaikum” I said to my Arabic-speaking neighbors
“Hello,” I said to everyone else. I took pride in the fact that I learned how to greet people in a variety of different languages.
Then everyone started talking in their native language all at once, but I only speak English and a fair amount of Spanish, and one of my neighbors said, “¿Qué sucedió? Se me olvido donde queda mi casa,” meaning “What happened? I forgot where my house is.”
After we all calmed down a bit, we shook hands or hugged, and returned to our homes.
In a room filled with electronic surveillance equipment, a quartet of two men and two women paid close attention to a large monitor and watched people on a residential street in Modesto, my street. The people they watched all appeared to be very upset and confused. Thanks to hidden microphones and miniature cameras placed on the street, they could discretely observe and hear everything the residents did and talked about while outside. The people they listened to could not remember where they lived.
“Ok, it works, you guys. It’s been 10 minutes. Turn it off now,” project leader Minneola Provost commanded. “Can you imagine what would happen if the public ever found out about what we’re doing? Cut the signal, Frankie.”
With the signal turned off, the residents of the street appeared to return to normal but the people observing noted that the residents, the “research participants,” all stood around talking to each other for 17 minutes, and 53 seconds before returning to their homes. The researchers recorded everything the residents said.
Minneola Provost managed “Project Confusion,” a next-generation psychological warfare technology that used focused signals from cell phone towers to agitate the human brain’s prefrontal cortex and generate confusion about time and location. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known as DARPA, initiated “Project Confusion.” Leadership at DARPA wrestled with carrying out “Project Confusion” because implementing the project violated nearly every commonly accepted principle of ethics in human research, especially the principles of voluntary participation and informed consent. However, they considered the project to be an “alpha-level” emergency response to an attack that used similar technology. An unnamed but hostile Eurasian country triggered the mental onslaught that resulted in a mass shooting event on the outskirts of Bluefield, a small town in West Virginia.
On July 15, 2021, a sunny Monday afternoon in the rural northwestern corner of Bluefield, local authorities received an emergency call that several people in a wooded area just north of State Route 19 were involved in a “chaotic gun battle,” according to county sheriff Edmonia “Deedee” Lawrence. The whole episode lasted less than five minutes and by the time the sheriff and a couple of deputies arrived on the scene, they found several people suffering from gunshot wounds and two dead lying in the middle of the road. All of the survivors appeared confused and disoriented. Emergency vehicles from both West Virginia and Virginia arrived to provide medical care for the victims. Several unarmed bystanders appeared to display the same disorientation and confusion as those involved in the shootout.
Driving along route 19 in order to set up a roadblock, Deputy Sheriff Dexter Carmichael noticed a van parked near the railroad bridge on a side street that intersected with State Route 19. After parking his patrol car, his cruiser, so that the road was blocked, the deputy saw that the van had Maryland license plates. Curious, he walked toward the van and saw that no one sat in the driver’s seat. He walked around to the back of the van and opened the door, surprised it was unlocked. He saw a man with headphones and a mass of electronic equipment. He also noticed the shotgun propped up against the inside wall of the van. The man, startled, lunged toward the shotgun, but the deputy had already unholstered his service weapon and pointing his gun at the unidentified man, uttered a famous line from a movie. With a grim smile, Deputy Carmichael said, “You feeling lucky, punk? Go ahead; make my day.” He arrested the terrified man without incident and locked him in the back of the cruiser. Deputy Carmichael called in the arrest and told the sheriff that he planned to search the area for the driver of the van. As he walked around, the deputy looked up and saw a small “kettle,” or flock, of turkey vultures circling above an area about 50 meters away in a heavily forested area. He found the body of a man whose face had been partially blown off by a shotgun blast. “Yep, this must be the driver,” he said to himself, “This old boy was about to be dinner for those vultures. Damn. What a way to go.”
Again, he notified the sheriff. After marking the location of the body, Deputy Carmichael trudged back to his cruiser. When he returned to the patrol car, he was astonished to find his prisoner dead, still seated in an upright position on the back seat. He never learned his prisoner’s cause of death, because the federal authorities confiscated everything related to this strange case.
Several hours later, FBI officials showed up with representatives from the military and the NSA, the National Security Agency. They explained to the Sheriff and Deputy Carmichael that all records related to the mass shooting incident were to be turned over to them along with the impounded van, the deceased prisoner, and the body of the van’s driver. They explained that it all was an exceptionally grave and serious “matter of national security.” Further, they told the Sheriff that the arrest represented a coup for law enforcement and national security. Consequently, the Sheriff’s department for the county received a million-dollar grant, and Deputy Carmichael received a certificate of recognition from the FBI and a $10,000 reward for the arrest he made. Both the sheriff and her deputy signed non-disclosure agreements and the department received an extravagantly framed certificate that said it earned “the gratitude of a grateful nation for meritorious service.” It was actually signed by the President.
Officials at the NSA had been on the trail of the van for several months, after learning that an experiment in psychological warfare by a hostile Eurasian nation was imminent. A cognitive scientist from the hostile nation defected to the United States during a conference on brain imaging techniques in Geneva, Switzerland during the summer of 2020. At first, the cognitive scientist explained everything in handwritten notes. He told his American handlers that he had to be extremely careful about saying anything at all because the authorities in his country placed a microphone and “god knows what else” in a subdermal chip in his left forearm. American scientists and doctors extracted the dangerous chip and neutralized it using something called “frostbite pinchers,” a complicated pair of tweezers that deployed a tiny jet of liquid nitrogen able to instantaneously freeze the implant.
After the operation to remove the implant, the cognitive scientist thanked the doctors and suddenly screamed in pain. “Owww! Hurts!” he yelled while rubbing his arm, “Need medicine please!” he begged. The attending physicians gave him some painkillers and told him that his arm would likely hurt for several days.
“That sumbitch doesn’t realize that he could’ve lost his whole damned arm,” one doctor said to another, “he’s lucky the poison in that chip didn’t get released.”
“I know, right?” the other doctor replied, “And a small explosive too? It’s amazing how those bastards packed all that into one tiny implant. He’s lucky, all right. I’m glad we didn’t have to amputate.”
The cognitive scientist told the American authorities that the necessary equipment for an operation on a target community in America would likely be contained in a van loaded with sophisticated electronic equipment. He said the authorities in his native country required that the operation needed to take place in an area relatively close to Washington, D.C.
“It is very extremely likely that the van will travel somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States,” he told his American hosts, “The signal will last for only a few minutes.” This information helped the American authorities the opportunity to identify and scan for the transmission frequency the van would emit once the enemy agent activated it.
On July 15, 2021, an alarm went off at the NSA indicating that an attack was in progress. The signal broadcast lasted about seven minutes. Moments later, Sheriff Lawrence received a strange call from the FBI, informing her that an incursion with national security implications was taking place somewhere along Route 19 near the West Virginia state line and to be on the lookout for any unusual vehicles, most likely a van. The FBI advised that she and her deputies approach such a vehicle with extreme caution but by this time, the sheriff and her deputies were in the early stages of investigating the shooting and Deputy Carmichael was looking at the body of the van’s driver.
Shortly before the end of February 2023, the Modesto residents affected by the “Project Confusion” signal were invited to attend a meeting in an office in downtown Modesto “in order to discuss a strange event on their street that occurred on January 10, 2023.” A shuttle bus arrived on the street a few weeks later on February 27 and transported the residents to the meeting place, a building on I Street not too far from the Stanislaus County Office of Education.
During the meeting, the residents learned that they were involuntary participants in a psychological warfare experiment. Minneola Provost provided a rudimentary chronology of the Bluefield incident and explained the basics of “Project Confusion.” She stressed that the project was part of a broader strategy endorsed by DARPA, the NSA, the FBI, and other government agencies. Finally, she thanked the residents for their cooperation and understanding and profusely apologized to them. Everyone had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and swear under oath that the contents of the meeting were NEVER to be discussed with anyone for the next 25 years. As an inducement, each of these “involuntary participants” received a tax-free stipend of $100,000.00 per home and $25,000 per person affected by the experiment. The family living across the street from us received $175,000 because the man and woman who lived there were retired, and their son-in-law who lived with them was at home because he worked remotely on the day of the incident. In all, 20 people in seven homes received the money. In addition to the stipend, all the participants were required to receive a brain scan twice a year for 3 years, free of charge.