Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The Pentagon Hunts for the "Scent of Fear"

Antifascist Calling...

Just when you thought the news couldn't get any worse, it did!


David Hambling informs us:
American military researchers are working to uncover and harness the most terrifying chemical imaginable: that most primal odor, the scent of fear.

Pheromones are chemicals released by animals as signals to their own kind: for sex, for territorial marking, and more. They're often detected in the olfactory membranes. But there's more to pheromones than attraction. Many animals have an alarm pheromone which is used to signal danger; aphids, for example, use it to cause their fellow lice to flee.

Now, the US Army is trying to track down and harness people's smell of fear. The military has backed a study on the "Identification and Isolation of Human Alarm Pheromones," which "focused on the Preliminary Identification of Steroids of Interest in Human Fear Sweat."
I don't know about you, but bizarre tinkering with the psyche such as this, under cover, as always, of "national security," smacks of Dr. Ewen Cameron's horror-show "depatterning" research for the CIA's MKULTRA projects. Needless to say, their application would constitute a profound manipulation of human interactions on a grand scale. The Army's latter day Dr. Mengeles' report:
"Such systems could be used to assess fitness for duty, integrated into closed loop systems regulating user vigilance and workload, or used to detect the sinister intent of individuals and prompt pre-emptive interdictions. These systems could unobtrusively monitor individuals within military operational environments or crowded civilian settings by relying on passive detection."
"Prompt pre-emptive interdictions"! Are we now to believe we are entering the era of "pre-emptive" crime suppression a la Philip K. Dick?
But what about offensive use? Pheromones are effective in minute quantities, so a wide area can be blanketed with just a few liters. Given sufficient concentration, would everyone exposed start suffering from an unidentifiable dread? The contagious aspect means that those affected would start churning out fear pheromone as well.
Need to disperse an "unruly mob," aka a legal protest? No problem! Just drop a "fear bomb" on the suckers!

And they wonder why we despise their system...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering how Hollywood could make use of this technology. Could you imagine sending the "smell of fear" wafting through a theater showing a horror movie?

Antifascist said...

A new "high" in the realm of terminal entertainments...

AitchD said...

The experimental testing descriptions are funny. Reminders of the 'lab rats' chapter/scenes in "The Right Stuff". How far along up the Pentagon's flow chart has this nonsense gone? It sounds like someone still has to pitch the Major Kilgore package to higher brass. You'd think a much easier experiment would be to have someone speak in front of a large group, and then take booger cultures from the people at various distances from the speaker, re-testing the same people later to get a control sample.

Remember Faulkner's "The Bear"? [Southern, early 20th-century dialect] "Now he knew what he had heard in the hounds' voices in the woods that morning and what he had smelled when he peered under the kitchen where they huddled. It was in him too, a little different because they were brute beasts and he was not, but only a little different--an eagerness, passive; an abjectness, a sense of his own fragility and impotence against the timeless woods, yet without doubt or dread; a flavor like brass in the sudden run of saliva in his mouth, a sharp constriction either in his brain or his stomach, he could not tell which and it did not matter...".

Anonymous said...

Strange, I was just thinking about "Minority Report" the other day (the much better short story, not the Spielberg version).