They Put Electrodes in His Brain. He Put Metal on His Head.
In 1966, a brilliant engineer with patents on the Polaroid camera had electrodes implanted in his brain at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Doctors controlled his moods by remote stimulation. They obtained his consent while his brain was being stimulated into euphoria. They published him as a success story under a false name. He spent his remaining years in a VA hospital. A staff member found him holding a metal wastebasket over his head to stop the microwaves. A sympathetic doctor ordered him a sheet of aluminum foil so he could make himself a helmet. His name was Leonard Kille. This is a documented case. MIT teaches it.
The Engineer
Leonard Arthur Kille was born on June 7, 1933, at Cambridge City Hospital, Massachusetts. His father was an unemployed stone mason. His mother struggled to hold the family together during the Depression. Both parents were second-generation Irish Catholic working class. Leonard and his older brother were sent to Catholic boarding school, a place later identified as a site where boys were not uncommonly abused by priests.
Despite this beginning, Kille became a brilliant electronics engineer. At sixteen, he dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force. He served as a ballistic missile defense radar monitor at a remote early warning outpost during the Korean War, where he nearly died from a perforated ulcer that left him in a prolonged coma with cardiovascular shock. He was mustered out, returned to Cambridge, and resumed his education.
He was awarded multiple United States patents for his work at the Polaroid Corporation, where he contributed to the development of the Land camera, the instant camera that made Polaroid a household name. The camera was named for Edwin Land, Kille’s employer, the co-founder of Polaroid. After Polaroid, Kille worked as a senior engineer at Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier (EG&G), an MIT spinoff that investigative historian Annie Jacobsen describes as “the most powerful defense contractor in the nation that no one had ever heard of.” He then moved to Honeywell, another multinational defense contractor.
Leonard Kille was, by every professional measure, a success. A working-class kid from Cambridge who became a patent-holding engineer at one of the most innovative companies in America.
His patents were later willed to MIT.
The Referral
Kille’s marriage was in trouble. He believed his wife was having an affair with a boarder in their home. He was correct. She was. The boarder, Robert Dirkman, had been recommended to the Killes by their parish priest, Father Paul Shanley, who suggested they rent their upstairs apartment to Dirkman, a recently divorced fellow parishioner. Shanley was later charged with predatory sexual behavior involving children. But Kille’s anger about the affair was interpreted by a psychiatrist as a “personality pattern disturbance.” His jealousy was classified as “paranoia.”
His most violent outburst, according to all records, consisted of throwing tin cans toward his wife. He missed.
The psychiatrist described Kille as “uncontrolled” and “dangerous.” He was referred to Dr. Vernon Mark of Boston City Hospital and Dr. Frank Ervin, a psychiatrist affiliated with Harvard and later UCLA, for neurological evaluation. They diagnosed him with mild psychomotor epilepsy and “episodic dyscontrol syndrome,” a behavioral diagnosis that pathologized his anger as a brain disease.
Kille was hospitalized at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was pressured into brain surgery. He refused at first. His wife threatened divorce if he did not submit to the psychiatrists’ recommendation. He submitted. She divorced him after the surgery anyway, to marry the man she had been having the affair with.
A man discovers his wife is having an affair. He is angry. He throws tin cans in her direction and misses. A psychiatrist diagnoses him with a personality disorder. He is referred for brain surgery. The affair was real. The anger was proportionate. The tin cans did not connect. The diagnosis was “dangerous.”
The classification of his response as pathology rather than reaction is the first act of the mechanism Julian Huxley described in 1926. The subject’s experience is reframed by an authority. The reframing becomes the official record. The official record determines what happens next. Kille’s anger was not investigated as a response to betrayal. It was classified as a brain malfunction. The classification authorized what followed.
The Electrodes
At Massachusetts General Hospital, doctors implanted electrodes in Leonard Kille’s brain. Four electrical strands, running the length of his brain, each studded with approximately twenty electrodes. The apparatus was implanted bilaterally in the amygdala, the region of the limbic system associated with emotional processing, fear, and aggression.
For weeks, doctors remotely stimulated Kille’s brain through the implanted electrodes, meticulously mapping the effects of each contact point. Some made him feel like he was losing control. Others produced a sensation of floating. Some induced euphoria. Some induced terror. The doctors recorded his responses and documented which electrodes produced which states.
The remote stimulation was conducted using a device called a “stimoceiver,” invented by Dr. Jose Delgado, a Yale neuroscientist who advocated for what he called “physical control of the mind.” Delgado had famously demonstrated the device by stopping a charging bull in a ring with the push of a button, activating an electrode implanted in the bull’s brain.
The same technology was now being used on Leonard Kille’s brain, in a locked ward at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Consent
After the initial electrode implantation and weeks of remote stimulation, the doctors proposed a more permanent procedure: using the implanted electrodes to pass high-frequency currents through the brain tissue, burning lesions into the amygdala. A bilateral amygdalectomy. Destruction of the brain tissue that regulated Kille’s emotional responses.
Kille refused. When he emerged from stimulation-altered states, he became, in the doctors’ words, “wild and unmanageable” at the idea of further surgery. He fled the hospital repeatedly.
The doctors found the electrode that produced euphoria. They activated it. While Kille was in this stimulation-induced state of calm and bliss, they presented the consent form. He signed it.
He signed consent to the destruction of portions of his own brain while those portions were being electrically manipulated by the people asking for his consent.
Documented in medical records obtained by Dr. Peter Breggin and reported in MIT OpenCourseWare lecture materials.
In Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-Culture King” (1926), the narrator describes what happens when the broadcast signal reaches a mind without metal shielding: “It had come into our subconscious, and thence insidiously affected our conscious emotions and will, and, they once affected, in stepped rationalisation… a hundred excuses constructed by servile logic to serve the needs of emotion, the master.”
The mechanism Huxley described as fiction was performed on Leonard Kille as a medical procedure. The signal entered his brain through implanted electrodes. It affected his emotions and will. And then, his conscious mind, operating under the influence of electrically induced euphoria, signed a consent form. The rationalisation was not metaphorical. It was neurological. The servile logic was not a literary device. It was a clinical outcome, documented in progress notes, obtained through FOIA and malpractice discovery.
Huxley wrote fiction. Mark and Ervin built the apparatus.
The Surgery
The lesions were burned into Kille’s brain by passing high-frequency currents through the implanted electrodes, destroying portions of both amygdalas. A second surgery in 1971 resulted in further brain tissue destruction and left Kille with grotesque facial movements and stiffened limbs.
The doctors published the case. In their 1970 book Violence and the Brain, Dr. Vernon Mark and Dr. Frank Ervin presented Kille under the pseudonym “Thomas R.” They described Thomas R. as “a brilliant 34-year-old engineer with several important patents to his credit” whose “episodic dyscontrol” had been successfully treated through their pioneering neurosurgical techniques. The book’s foreword stated that their project “holds out the hope that knowledge gained about emotional brain function in violent persons with brain disease can be applied to combat the violence-triggering mechanisms in the brains of the non-diseased.” In essence: everyone.
The book was reviewed favorably in professional journals. The case was presented as a triumph.
The Reality
In 1971, Dr. Peter Breggin, a Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and critic of psychosurgery, read Violence and the Brain. He investigated. He located “Thomas R.” His real name was Leonard Kille. Breggin found him at his mother’s and stepfather’s home in Long Beach, California.
Breggin obtained Kille’s hospital records. They told a different story from the one published in the book. In the records, Breggin found progress notes documenting that Kille had repeatedly tried to leave the hospital. When he wanted to leave, Dr. Ervin’s note read: “Take his pants away.” Breggin found a handwritten note by Kille himself, scrawled on the wall, documented in the progress notes. The word was: “murder.”
After discharge from MGH, Kille drove across the country to Long Beach, California, to be near his mother. He was patently deranged. Police found him wandering aimlessly in a supermarket parking lot late at night. He was forcibly hospitalized. He was diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic,” largely on the basis of an incredible story he told, in great procedural and technical detail, about doctors at a Boston hospital operating on his brain, implanting electrodes, stimulating him remotely, and destroying his mind. The story sounded insane. Every word of it was true.
Breggin’s conclusion, published in his investigation: the brain surgery had rendered Leonard Kille incurably disabled. The man presented as a success story in a book published by two Harvard-affiliated doctors was, in reality, “totally disabled and subject to nightmarish terrors that he will be caught and operated on again at Massachusetts General Hospital.”
Kille’s mother, acting as his legal guardian, filed a medical malpractice suit against the doctors in 1973. The case went to trial in 1978. After six weeks of proceedings, the defendants were acquitted on all charges. The doctors won. Kille spent the rest of his life at the Bedford VA Hospital in Massachusetts. He died there in 1993.
The Helmet
After the second surgery in 1971, Leonard Kille was transferred to the Boston VA Hospital. The circumstances of the transfer are not fully documented in the available sources. What is documented is that the medical staff at this facility had never been informed that Kille had undergone experimental electrode implantation, that his brain had been remotely stimulated for weeks, or that portions of his amygdala had been destroyed by high-frequency currents passed through implanted wires. The staff who received him did not know what had been done to him. They saw a patient. They did not see the apparatus.
A hospital attendant found Kille holding a metal wastebasket over his head. He said he was trying to stop the microwaves.
The staff diagnosed him as delusional.
A sympathetic doctor at the VA, seeing the former engineer with his head inside a small metal trash basket, ordered the nursing staff to bring Leonard Kille a large sheet of aluminum foil so he could fashion himself a protective helmet.
Leonard Kille, a man who had electrodes implanted in his brain, whose moods had been controlled by remote electrical stimulation, whose consent had been obtained while his brain was being stimulated into euphoria, whose amygdala had been burned by high-frequency currents, who had been published as a success story under a false name, who had been rendered permanently disabled by the procedure, independently arrived at the same countermeasure that Julian Huxley described in fiction forty-five years earlier.
He put metal on his head.
Not because he had read “The Tissue-Culture King.” Not because he knew about Huxley’s caps of metal foil. Not because he was performing a cultural reference. Because he was an electronics engineer whose brain had been manipulated by electronic signals, and the only defense he could construct from the materials available to him in a VA hospital ward was a metal barrier between his head and the source of interference.
The staff called him delusional. He had electrodes in his brain.
Documented in clinical records. Reported in MIT OpenCourseWare, Course 9.68, Lecture 9. The BINJ investigative report, 2017. The Minds of Men documentary, 2018.
The foil the doctor ordered was aluminum. Tin foil had disappeared from consumer markets by 1950, replaced by aluminum during and after World War II. In 2005, MIT tested aluminum foil helmets and found that while most frequencies were attenuated, specific frequencies (1.2 GHz and 2.6 GHz) were amplified by up to 30 dB: one thousand times stronger under the helmet than without it. The likely mechanism is cavity resonance, where the geometry of a partial conductive enclosure on a human head concentrates specific wavelengths. The material difference between tin and aluminum is documented on our Science page.
The sympathetic doctor who ordered Leonard Kille a sheet of aluminum foil may have given him a material that, at certain frequencies, amplified the very signals he was trying to block. The engineer who understood electromagnetic shielding was handed the wrong conductor. He could not have known this. Nobody would know it for another thirty-four years, until MIT tested it. The countermeasure was correct. The material may not have been.
The Connections
Edwin Land, the man the camera was named for, was Kille’s employer at Polaroid. Edwin Land was also a veteran researcher in government-sponsored programs and the founder of the Scientific Engineering Institute on behalf of the CIA. The SEI, according to declassified records, conducted electrode implantation experiments on animals and, at South Vietnam’s Bien Hoa Hospital in 1968, implanted electrodes in the brains of three Vietcong prisoners of war in an attempt to control their behavior by remote stimulation. The experiment failed. The prisoners were shot by Green Beret soldiers and their bodies burned.
Along with MIT President James Killian, Land was a “prime mover” behind the establishment of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, according to National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson.
Kille’s patents were willed to MIT. MIT’s Course 9.68 (Affect: Neurobiological, Psychological, and Sociocultural Counterparts of Feelings), taught by Professor Stephan Chorover, uses the Kille case as Lecture 9 material, with a detailed chronology publicly available through MIT OpenCourseWare. The same institution that inherited Kille’s intellectual property now teaches what was done to his brain as a case study in the ethics of neuroscience.
There is another connection the secondary sources do not emphasize. Before Polaroid, before EG&G, before the electrodes, Leonard Kille was a military radar operator. A teenage airman monitoring electromagnetic signals at a remote early warning station during the Korean War. A man whose first career was sitting inside the signal, watching for threats on a screen. His last years were spent in a VA hospital, trying to block signals with a metal wastebasket. The distance between those two moments is the distance the dispatch series covers.
In 2005, MIT researchers tested aluminum foil helmets and found that they amplify certain frequencies. The institution that teaches the case of a man who put metal on his head because his brain had been manipulated by electronic signals also conducted the study that is cited whenever anyone puts metal on their head. The study is presented as comedy. The case is taught as tragedy. They are in the same building.
And Kille’s patents went to MIT. The intellectual property of the man whose brain was destroyed within MIT’s institutional orbit returned to MIT. The value he created flowed back to the system connected to his destruction. In Huxley’s story, the scientist Hascombe has the means to escape the village but reasons that he must return, because the apparatus requires him. Hascombe chose to go back. Kille’s patents went back without anyone needing to choose. The system does not require your consent to complete the circuit.
Leonard Kille was filed three times.
First: he was filed under “Thomas R.” in a published book that described his destruction as a success. The filing concealed his identity and inverted his outcome.
Second: he was filed under “delusional” when he put metal on his head in a VA hospital. The filing dismissed his behavior as psychosis. He had electrodes in his brain.
Third: the concept of putting metal on your head was filed under “comedy” when MIT tested foil helmets in 2005. The filing ensured that the gesture Kille made, from inside the apparatus, would be received as a joke by everyone outside it.
Three filings. Each one moved the same action further from its meaning. A man who had been subjected to electromagnetic manipulation of his brain put metal on his head. The book said he was cured. The hospital said he was crazy. The study said it was funny. The man said he was trying to stop the microwaves. He was the only one telling the truth.
What This Dispatch Documents
Every fact in this dispatch is documented in publicly available sources. The MIT OpenCourseWare lecture notes for Course 9.68, available at ocw.mit.edu, contain a detailed chronology of the Kille case compiled from medical records, court documents, and published sources. The BINJ (Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism) investigative report “LOBOTOMASS,” published in 2017, provides extensive sourced reporting on the case and its institutional context. The documentary film “The Minds of Men” (2018) by Aaron and Melissa Dykes contains interviews with Dr. Peter Breggin and reconstructions based on the medical record. The book Violence and the Brain by Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin (1970) contains their published version of the case under the name “Thomas R.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner published “Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves Are Murdering Him” on March 21, 1979.
This is not speculation. This is not conspiracy theory. This is a documented case, taught at MIT, reported in the press, litigated in court, and available for anyone to verify. The man was real. The electrodes were real. The remote stimulation was real. The consent obtained under stimulation was real. The publication of his case as a success was real. The aluminum foil helmet was real.
The only thing that was not real was the name they published him under.
The Question
In 1926, Julian Huxley described a system in which a scientist implants a broadcast apparatus in a population, controls their behavior through electromagnetic stimulation, obtains their compliance through the manipulation of their emotional states, and shields himself from the effects using metal. The population does not know they are being controlled. The operators do. The only barrier between the signal and the mind is a cap of metal foil.
In 1966, at Massachusetts General Hospital, a team of doctors implanted electrodes in a man’s brain, controlled his emotional states through remote stimulation, obtained his consent while his brain was being electrically manipulated, published the result as a medical success under a false name, and left him permanently disabled. In a VA hospital ward, the man put metal on his head.
Huxley wrote fiction. It was published in his father’s literary magazine, in an academic journal, and then in a pulp science fiction magazine. The genre filed it as entertainment. The Kille case was published as medical science. The filing determined the reception. One is a story you can enjoy. The other is a case study you can teach. The mechanism described in both is the same.
Leonard Kille did not need to read Huxley to understand the countermeasure. He arrived at it independently, from inside the apparatus, using the only materials available to him. He was an electronics engineer. He understood electromagnetic shielding. He understood that metal attenuates signals. He put metal on his head because it was the rational response to what had been done to his brain.
They called it a delusion. They called it a joke. They called it Thomas R.
His name was Leonard Kille. He died in 1993 at the Bedford VA Hospital in Massachusetts. He was 60 years old. He spent the last twenty-six years of his life in institutional care for damage inflicted by doctors at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world, under a program connected to the CIA, funded by Congress, and published in a book that described his destruction as progress.
The hat was the only thing he could do. It was also the only thing that made sense.
Leonard Kille. Reported in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 21, 1979.
Sources
MIT OpenCourseWare, Course 9.68: Affect: Neurobiological, Psychological, and Sociocultural Counterparts of Feelings. Lecture 9 Notes: Kille Case Chronology. Compiled by Professor Stephan L. Chorover, MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. Available at ocw.mit.edu (PDF).
Chorover, S. L. (1979). From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Nature and the Power of Behavior Control. MIT Press.
Mark, V. H. & Ervin, F. R. (1970). Violence and the Brain. Harper & Row. Contains the case of “Thomas R.”
Breggin, P. R. Investigation of the Kille case, published findings documenting post-operative condition contradicting Mark and Ervin’s published claims.
BINJ (Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism). “LOBOTOMASS.” Investigative report, 2017. Extensively sourced reporting on the Kille case and institutional context.
Dykes, A. & Dykes, M. (2018). The Minds of Men. Documentary film. Contains interviews with Dr. Peter Breggin and reconstruction from medical records. Available on YouTube (Truthstream Media).
“Man Hallucinates, Says Microwaves Are Murdering Him.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 21, 1979.
Lemov, R. (2024). Harvard HSS Workshop presentation on the Kille case and the attempt to create predictive violence intervention.
Delgado, J. M. R. (1969). Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society. Harper & Row.
Connected Research
This dispatch is part of the TINFOIL™ research series. Related dispatches:
You Would Call It Thinking · The Mechanism That Predicts Its Own Dismissal · The Gap Between the Fabric and the Head · The MIT Study · The Tissue-Culture King: TFRi Annotated Edition · The Man Who Tested It First · The Science
TINFOIL™ is a cognitive defense company. We sell hats. Leonard Kille made his own.