Unlike DHARMA, DARPA is actually a US agency, not a private endeavor. But, in addition to the name, there are some projects worth considering – especially the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP).

From Wikipedia’s DARPA entry:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. DARPA has been responsible for funding the development of many technologies which have had a major impact on the world, including computer networking, as well as NLS, which was both the first hypertext system, and an important precursor to the contemporary ubiquitous graphical user interface.

Its original name was simply Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), but it was renamed DARPA (for Defense) on March 23, 1972, then back to ARPA on February 22, 1993, and then back to DARPA again on March 11, 1996.

DARPA was established in 1958 (as ARPA) in response to the Soviet launching of Sputnik in 1957, with the mission of keeping U.S. military technology ahead of the nation’s enemies. [...]

DARPA is independent from other more conventional military R&D and reports directly to senior Department of Defense management. DARPA has around 240 personnel (about 140 technical) directly managing a $3.2 billion budget. These figures are “on average” since DARPA focuses on short-term (two to four-year) projects run by small, purpose-built teams.

DARPA is known for creating the Internet and, more recently, for their paranoia inducing projects like Information Awareness Office and creating robotic insects.

But no DARPA project has attracted as much interest from conspiracy analysts as HAARP. From 60 Greatest Conspiracies’s HAARP entry:

In an Arctic compound 200 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska, the Pentagon has erected a powerful transmitter designed to beam more than a gigawatt of energy into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Known as Project HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the $30 million experiment involves the world’s largest “ionospheric heater,” a prototype device designed to zap the skies hundreds of miles above the earth with high-frequency radio waves.

Why irradiate the charged particles of the ionosphere (which when energized by natural processes make up the lovely and famous phenomenon known as the Northern Lights)? According to the U.S. Navy and Air Force, co-sponsors of the project, “to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska’s ionosphere.” That, says the Pentagon, and also to develop new forms of communications and surveillance technologies that will enable the military to send signals to nuclear submarines and to peer deep underground.

60 Greatest Conspiracies first reported on HAARP more than a year ago. Since then, inquiring Internauts have blamed the peculiar project for everything from UFO activity to major power outages in the Western United States, to, most recently, the downing of TWA Flight 800. (The Pentagon maintains that the HAARP array has been inactive since late last year.) Some have dubbed it the “Pentagon’s doomsday death ray.” Though many of these theories are, well, creatively amplified, an assortment of more grounded critics–environmentalists, Native Americans and Alaskan citizens among them–argue that the military does indeed have Strangelovian plans for this unusual hardware, applications ranging from “Star Wars” missile defense schemes to weather modification plots and perhaps even mind control experiments.

Sounds oddly familiar, doesn’t it?

Most of the real life DHARMA initiatives we cover here are, like the DHARMA Initiative, private organizations. But the high weirdness that the CIA’s Project MKULTRA got into is too important to ignore. From Wikipedia’s entry on MKULTRA:

Project MK-ULTRA, or MKULTRA, was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s, and it used United States citizens as its test subjects. The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methodology, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.

Considering John’s experience with hallucinogenic drugs on the Island, and persistent hallucinations on the part of many of the characters, there’s a strong possibility that DHARMA conducted psychedelic experiments on the Island.

It’s also worth noting that the Hostiles/Others are engaged in some form of mind control themselves, as witnessed in Room 23.

Project MKULTRA was not the US Government’s first foray into mad science. Another infamous example is the Tuskegee Study:

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Public Health Service Syphilis Study, or the Tuskegee Experiment) was a clinical study, conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service. 399 poor, and mostly illiterate, African American sharecroppers were studied to observe the natural progression of the disease if left untreated.

The study became controversial, and eventually led to major changes in how patients are protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were not required to give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they were told they had “bad blood” and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial insurance in case of death in return for participating.

Not to mention government backed Human Radiation Experiments:

During and after the end of World War II, scientists working on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear weapons research projects conducted studies of the effects of plutonium on laboratory animals and human subjects. In the case of human subjects, this involved injecting solutions containing (typically) five micrograms of plutonium into hospital patients who were thought either to be terminally ill or to have a life expectancy of less than ten years due either to age or chronic disease condition. The injections were made without the informed consent of those patients.

In her book, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War, Eileen Welsome, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Albuquerque Tribune, revealed the extent of the experiments conducted on unwitting participants. At the Fernald school in Massachusetts, an institution for “feeble-minded” boys, 73 disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes. The only purpose of the experiment was to give Quaker Oats, the company behind the testing, a commercial advantage over Cream of Wheat in an advertising campaign. Immediately after World War II, 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee received what they were told were “vitamin drinks” that would improve the health of their babies, but were, in fact, mixtures containing radioactive iron, to determine how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. Other incidents included an eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a pituitary gland disorder, who was injected with plutonium. Such experiments are now considered to be a serious breach of medical ethics.

Do these remind you of the weirdness surrounding “the sickness” on the Island?

It would be comforting to think that these sorts of things don’t happen anymore, or at least not at the order of the US government at tax payer expense. But the events at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo make it hard to believe that this particular American nightmare is over.

Barack Obama signed an executive order to close down Gitmo and end extraordinary rendition. But there’s always potential for abusive tactics by government organizations either in secret or through “satellite” organizations – private organizations comprised of former government agents engaged in various law enforcement and espionage.

LOST acknowledges government sponsored torture, and the role of private organizations through the role Kelvin takes in encouraging Sayid to torture prisoners, and the fact that Kelvin and Mikhail are former military personnel now employed by private groups.

We’ll take a look at government satellite organizations in a future installment.

This is the first of a series of posts examining the a number of potential real life influences on the conception of the Dharma Initiative.

SRI International (previously known as Stanford Research Institute) is the clearest influence on the DHARMA Initiative (though DARPA is closer in name. Incidentally, SRI has been known to work for DARPA). SRI is a non-profit research institute working in a broad range of fields including, according to Wikipedia: “communications and networks, computing, economic development and science and technology policy, education, energy and the environment, engineering systems, pharmaceuticals and health sciences, homeland security and national defense, materials and structures, and robotics.”

Things got weird for SRI during the 60s and 70s, when it was engaged in parapsychology and LSD research. They hired L. Ron Hubbard, tested Uri Geller’s claims, and experimented with remote viewing.

They also compiled a report called The Changing Images of Man, contracted and funded by The Charles F. Kettering Foundation (the real life equivalent of Alvar Hanso?). The states purpose of Changing Images of Man:

First, we attempted to identify and assess the plausibility of a truly vast number of future possibilities for society. We next followed a method of analysis that determined which sequences of possible futures (that is, which “alternate future histories”) appeared to be the most plausible in light of human history and to most usefully serve the needs of policy research and development. Lastly, we derived a variety of policy implications, some of which dealt with how best to continue this type of inquiry.

The document allegedly comes to some creepy, fascist conclusions (I’ve not read it), and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists for years.

More info:

SRI International on Wikipedia

Changing Images of Man PDF

Scientists on Acid: The Story Behind “Changing Images of Man”

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