Was Your Gifted Child Part of a CIA Program?

When former gifted program students started comparing notes about their unusual class assignments – from Russian lessons to meditation tapes – they began wondering if there was more to their special education than just extra homework.

As she leafed through her old school workbook, Sarah could hardly believe the things she was discovering. She had been in something called GATE — the Gifted And Talented Education program — in the 1990s. Like lots of other kids across America in the ’80s and ’90s, she assumed it was just a special program for students who needed extra-challenging work. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

“What were we really being trained for?” she asked, scanning categories of pages filled with code-breaking exercises and Russian language lessons.

Sarah wasn’t the only one with questions. Some former GATE students around the country were already beginning to share their bizarre memories of the program on social media. They recalled strange elements of a normal school program — such as listening to bizarre audio tapes of ocean sounds, cracking complex codes and collaborating with mysterious teachers who were not usually employed at their schools.

A former student, Rachel, vividly recalled the audio sessions. “We were forced to wear these big headphones,” she said in a video she later posted online. “Then, we would hear the voice of a woman take us through all types of tests. Some of these were run-of-the-mill IQ tests, but others seemed more like meditation exercises.”

It was the audio recordings that students recalled that were the most bizarre. They would hear electronic beeping sounds, then a man speaking in a calm, steady voice: “This is the first step along your path to a gateway,” he would say. The gateway beyond which is discovery, your own discovery of reality, truth, of who and what you are.” Next came the sound of ocean waves, encouraging students to relax and meditate.

Another former student, Anna Mills, recalled the unconventional assignments. “We learned various types of codes and spent a lot of time…. with worksheets titled ‘Codes to Crack’ and ‘Strange Message,” where we had to decode secret messages. “We even learned Morse code and Russian!”

They suspect their special classes may have been part of something known as the Gateway Program — an actual CIA program from the 1980s that studied human consciousness via sound and meditation. They realized the audio tapes they heard in school were very similar to audio tapes that the CIA used in their program.

There isn’t solid evidence to back up the idea that the CIA was behind these school programs, but back then the agency had an interest in some strange stuff, Smith noted. For instance, they were examining accounts of Chinese children who reportedly had special powers, such as the ability to see inside another person’s body or perform miraculous physical feats.

These emerging memories have people talking online today. Old GATE students are comparing their old worksheets and sharing story after story to see if there was more to their gifted classes than they thought or were told. While it’s most certainly a possibility that some of their activities appeared similar to CIA programs through coincidence, it has also certainly made for an interesting mystery to talk about.

For the moment, the reality of these gifted programs still seems like precisely what it appeared to be on the surface — they were specialized classes meant to challenge smart kids and teach them to learn differently. But that hasn’t kept former students from speculating about all those bizarre assignments and audio tapes from their early years.

(Source: DailyMail.co.uk)

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