Bill’s Lost Site

The Manchurian Candidate was originally a novel written in the late 50’s. The novel then became a classic movie that reviewed the power of brainwashing in creating the perfect assassin.

Further information on the CIA brainwashing program is hard to come by. The programs, known as BLUEBIRD and MKULTRA, ran officially from 1950 to 1964 (how long the programs ran unofficially nobody knows for sure). It appears that in 1973 Senate investigators wanted to know more about these defunct programs. Rather than disclose the classified information the CIA destroyed records relating to MKULTRA.

It appears that the CIA used both willing volunteers as well as unsuspecting American citizens. These individuals were drugged and hypnotized. One such example that came out of the testing proved very chilling. The story goes like this:

A woman who had shown an aversion to using firearms was hypnotized. She was instructed that upon waking she would pick up a gun and shoot another woman participant. After shooting the woman she would fall back to sleep. Woman “X” woke up, took the gun and shot Woman “Y” with an empty gun. Woman “X” then fell back to sleep. Upon waking she was told that she had used a gun to shoot Woman “Y”. She refused to believe that she had engaged in that type of activity. Woman “X” had no recollection of using the gun.

The benefits of creating this type of assassin are abundant. First, the killer has no memory of the event making interrogation useless. The killer also would show no signs of remorse, guilt, or even concern of getting caught. The assassin would not care if he were caught - ramifications for his action mean nothing to him.

There are numerous examples that clearly demonstrate the mind control occured at least on some level. Participants would kill (or at least think they were killing), they could carry out complex sets of instructions that could span days, and the mind control could work on children as well as adults. In each case, upon waking, the time spent under mind control was erased from their memory.

There are some great websites that go into detail about Mind Control. Want To Know Info, Building the Manchurian Candidate book excerpt and The Drug Library.

What does this have to with Lost? Think about the potential of our Lostie’s going through this type of a program. Could Locke have been trained on hunting/wilderness survival and then had that memory erased? Or, how about the Others? Are they human test subjects that are given instructions to perform certain activities? Was someone like Ethan simply carrying out orders for someone else? Did Ethan really seem like he wanted Claire for personal reasons? Anyway, food for thought.

Minor quibble in the writing or is this part of the clues that we are supposed to be looking out for?

There appears to be a discrepancy in the amount of time the Losties were in the air. Several accounts below tell different stories.

In “The Other 48 Days” Ana Lucia becomes suspicious that Nathan (a fellow surivor) is in fact one of the Others. Her suspicions are solidified when he disappears into the jungle to go and releave himself. Ana justifying herself to Bernard for throwing Nathan in a pit then says, “We were in the air for 2 hours - I didn’t see him once - not once.”

Earlier in that same episode Cindy mentions that, “Before the crash, the pilot said we’d lost communication; we were turning back. We were flying for two hours in the wrong direction. ”
Click Here for the transcript.

Was it 2 hours in the air or 2 hours of flying in the wrong direction?

In the Pilot episode Jack, Kate and Charlie search for the nose section of the plane - looking for the transceiver. They come across the pilot of the plane. His account of the events are: “6 hours in. Our radio went out, no one could see us. We turned back to land in Fiji, by the time we hit turbulence we were 1000 miles off course. They’re looking for us in the wrong place.”
Click Here for the transcript.

The Pilot’s version is in line with Cindy’s story. A plane like that would travel around 500mph at a cruising altitude. That would put them 4 hours (and approx 2000 miles) between Sydney and LA when they lost contact with the ground. Then they changed course and started back to Fiji and flew in that direction for 2 hours.

Was Ana Lucia wrong? Seems to me that someone would know the difference between 6 hours in the air compared to 2. Also, since the statements contradicted themselves in the same episode I cannot accept that somehow this flaw got through the editing process. I believe that we were supposed to discover that there was a flaw in the timeline.

Now we know that there is a discrepancy of hours, how would you feel about a discrepancy of days? That post is coming soon.