Monarch?

Going down these rabbit holes has brought some clarity to my younger years, but it has also left me with new questions. My social media has become a running archive of notes, thoughts, links, and observations gathered from years of quietly researching from home and trying to make sense of pieces that never quite fit together. 

Lately, I keep stumbling across references to “Project Monarch.” Google summarizes it as a “conspiracy theory alleging a secret CIA mind-control program involving trauma-based programming.” Even typing those words feels surreal to me because years ago I would have dismissed the subject outright. 

But then I look at the photos.

I look at the old California pictures of my parents from the 1960s. I look at the baptism photo that came straight from Grandma Woywod’s album, still attached to the page after all these decades, with “Fr. Patrick Peyton” written carefully across the back. I look at other photographs that appear to include people connected to worlds I later learned more about , names like William and Frances Hamling of Greenleaf Publishing. Then there is the photo of my dad at a Burbank bar near the studios, a photo that appears to include Jay Sebring. That one especially stopped me cold because my mother once told me she had known or met him. 

Those photos became tangible anchors. Without them, I probably would have convinced myself to stop digging long ago.

My childhood was surreal, it felt like an out-of-body experience before I even knew there was a word for that feeling. Some memories remain painfully sharp. I can remember tiny details most people would overlook in passing moments: a crack in the wall, the way sunlight filtered into a room, what I was wearing, the feeling in the air. Other stretches of time feel distant, fragmented, fogged over, or simply gone. 

Which brings me back to Monarch.

The discussion surrounding it claims it emerged after MKUltra and focused on children, layering complex trauma onto developing minds, then monitoring behaviors or placing subjects through further conditioning meant to compartmentalize memory, redesign personality structures, or create psychological triggers for later control. 

It sounds absolutely insane to even type those words.

But I have the photos.

I have spent years researching.

And I was positioned inside circles of intrigue from the moment I was born.

That does not mean every theory online is true. It does not mean every missing memory equals programming or every strange connection points to some hidden operation. But it does mean I cannot simply laugh these subjects away anymore either. 

The photos are real.

The people were real.

The environments were real.

The trauma was real.

I was there in California in the late 1960s. Later I attended the open lab school at Central Elementary in Evanston during the 1970s, where I was learning what I called “2e2 Math”,  algebra concepts,  at eight years old. My neighbors in the apartment building were Mike and John, and yes, I am 99.9999% certain the “John” who would appear there was John David Norman. 

Thank God I have those California photographs because I cannot imagine trying to put these pieces together without them. Without tangible evidence tying places, people, and memories together, the doubt alone would probably stop me before I ever allowed myself to ask the questions in the first place. 

I know a lot of weird things have happened to me over the years. I also know I can sometimes read people, especially survivors of CSA and severe trauma , with an accuracy that has startled even me. Maybe it comes from hypervigilance sharpened through survival. Maybe trauma survivors recognize things in one another that others miss. I honestly do not know. 

One moment especially has never left me.

When doctors first had me on Gabapentin, my emotional guards felt lowered in ways that made me uncomfortable. During a DV and SA support group meeting, a new woman arrived with a friend she had driven there. Out of nowhere, before I could stop myself, I blurted out that I was sorry for what had happened to her when she was sixteen,  that she had been gang assaulted.

The room went silent.

She stared at me in complete shock and asked how I could possibly know that because she had never told anyone there. She was not even the person attending the meeting , she had only driven her friend. 

That moment still unsettles me because it was not vague intuition or some broad statement that could be interpreted afterward. I knew specifically what had happened to her. The words came out before I could stop them, and the reaction in that room made it clear I had touched something deeply real and deeply hidden. 

I have gone over that moment in my mind countless times trying to explain it logically. Was it hypervigilance? Pattern recognition sharpened through years of trauma and observation? Was I unconsciously reading cues most people overlook? I honestly do not know. 

It wasn't a first for me, nor a last.

What I do know is that moments like that force me to confront questions I never expected to be asking about trauma, memory, intuition, survival, and the ways human beings carry pain beneath the surface.

And I also cannot fully dismiss Monarch.

Because honestly? It makes sense to wonder whether programs like MKUltra simply vanished without follow-up curiosity or continuation. Governments, scientists, intelligence agencies, and researchers have rarely been known to stop pushing boundaries simply because the public became uncomfortable. Human beings are obsessive by nature, especially when power, psychology, war, behavior, and control intersect. If experiments were conducted during one era, it is not irrational to question whether later generations explored related territory in different ways. 

That does not automatically validate every story attached to Monarch. It does not prove every internet narrative or survivor account. But it does explain why I cannot completely turn away from the subject either.

So if you see me wandering into these darker corridors of history and speculation, now you know why.

Above Image by SIP_Vienna from Pixabay