Miami University – A Good Man Is Hard to Find — My Search for Ronald H. Tammen, Jr.

CIA, Hypnosis, Miami University, MKULTRA, Psychology Department

More evidence that St. Clair Switzer was on the CIA’s payroll

Plus a bonus puzzler: Let’s make a little history and break some CIA code

Have you had enough holiday yet? Same. You want to do something kinda wild during this down week before New Year’s? Me too.

Let’s break some CIA code.

The CIA code I’m referring to can be found on a large number of MKULTRA documents that have already been released to the public. According to Google, the project I’m proposing has never been done before. If we can do this—and I believe that we can—we’ll be ripping open a whole new portal into the top secret world of MKULTRA.

You heard me right. Us. Remember us? The ones who, I believe, first put two and two together to reveal Commander Robert Jay Williams as the former project coordinator of Project ARTICHOKE? The first ones who let the universe at-large know about St. Clair Switzer’s MKULTRA connections? The ones who discovered—much to the consternation of the FBI—why they’d purged Ron Tammen’s fingerprints 30 years ahead of schedule? We’re qualified to do this. We’re credentialed. The good news is that we won’t even be starting at square one. I do believe I’ve figured out some of the code already. And the better news is that the code I’ve figured out tells me that St. Clair Switzer was indeed working for the CIA at some point of his career. They said so themselves. Let’s do this!

Background

At an unknown point in time, one or more persons within the CIA had gone through every surviving MKULTRA document and, on many of them, had written a letter of the alphabet and sometimes an accompanying number alongside key places of redacted text. The alphabetical list isn’t very long. It starts with the letter A and ends with H.** To the best of my knowledge, only three numbers were used: 3, 6, and, on the rarest of occasions, 1.

The letters or letter-number combos appear to refer to a person who is employed by an organization, the organization as a whole, or, very generally, a place, be it domestic or international. The CIA categorizers, as we shall refer to them, probably did this because lots and lots of names are dropped in CIA memos. It’s useful to have some additional identifying information about who Joe Blow is and what his role is in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t know who the intended audience is or was of this helpful, categorized information. The CIA staffers of the future? The guys and gals in the business wing at Langley who were keeping the books? (If you’ll recall, most of the MKULTRA docs had been destroyed in 1973, so the only surviving records originated with the people in accounting.) Given the CIA’s distaste for the Freedom of Information Act, I doubt very much that they were doing it to help out you and me.

But therein lies the poetic justice in all of this: even as someone at the CIA was busily crossing out names and job titles and hometowns and whatnot, someone else at the CIA was actually offering up a clue into a certain person’s identity. Very, VERY cool of you, CIA.

The puzzle

You know the letter that I believe was written by Louis Jolyon West to the CIA on February 6, 1957? In that letter, the man whom I believe to be Jolly West refers to another man who is spending the 1956-57 academic year helping him with his research. It was (I believe) West’s intention to create a hypnotic messenger during the summer of ‘57 and to have his eminently qualified helper, well, help him. And it’s my hypothesis that his helper was St. Clair Switzer, who was Ronald Tammen’s psychology professor the semester that Tammen disappeared.

At that point in our country’s history, the CIA and U.S. military wanted to learn as much as possible about interrogation techniques that could be used on prisoners of war, such as those involving hypnosis and drugs. They wanted to learn how they could elicit treasure troves of intelligence from POWs that the Americans had captured, and, conversely, how to ensure that American POWs wouldn’t give away the store to their captors. The interrogation aspect of the CIA’s mind control endeavors was known as Project ARTICHOKE, which was later broadened in scope beyond POWs. The creation of a hypnotic messenger—someone who could be hypnotized to deliver a detailed message of high sensitivity to an intended recipient without ever knowing what the message was—would’ve been right up the CIA’s alley back then.

Let’s begin by reexamining that letter, which was mailed to the CIA’s Morse Allen to accompany the hypnotic messenger proposal. The author (who, again, I believe to be Louis Jolyon West) has the letter C written next to his blacked-out name. The letter-number written next to his associate’s name is H-B/6. If we could figure out the meaning of H-B/6, we could further strengthen, or weaken, our argument that Jolly West’s helper was St. Clair Switzer.

*Document provided thanks to* TheBlackVault.com; click on image for a closer view

After rereading a lot of MKULTRA documents—especially those pertaining to Project ARTICHOKE—and comparing notations from one document to the next, I think I’ve figured out the meaning of H-B/6. And (spoiler alert!) I believe that our argument has been strengthened. What’s more, I think I’ve found additional evidence to show that the CIA welcomed St. Clair Switzer to its cadre of hypnosis researchers with open arms.

The letters

The letters and letter-number combinations that the CIA uses throughout the MKULTRA documents, some more frequently than others, are as follows:

B/1

B/3

B/6

H-B/1

H-B/3

H-B/6

That list may not seem too terrible, but there’s a reason that (to the best of my knowledge) this project has never been attempted before by a layperson. Reading MKULTRA documents is always irritating. No one does it for fun.

The ones I think we know for sure

Let’s start with the easy letters—the meanings for which I’m 99.9% certain:

A is the Agency itself. Anyone with an A next to his or her name is employed by the CIA. It’s written next to a lot of important job titles in the “To” and “From” lines of a CIA memo, and it’s often written next to an author’s name at the bottom of a CIA-composed letter. It’s written next to the names of CIA staffers whose identities have been revealed—people like Morse Allen and Robert Jay Williams. It’s this simple: if you have an A next to your name, you, my friend, are in the CIA.

B, I believe, stands for a Business or Organization that conducts the type of research in which the CIA was especially interested. And, in the early to mid-1950s, the type of research that the CIA’s ARTICHOKE program was especially interested in pertained to hypnosis and drugs. As you can see on the February 6, 1957, letter, an address at the top right is blacked out and marked with a B, which is likely Jolly West’s business address.

Here’s a table in which the letter B clearly signifies a Research Organization, versus C, which stands for…

C stands for Consultant. Anyone with a C next to their blacked-out name is employed by another entity, likely a university or research organization. They may be partially supported by the CIA through a grant or contract or some other temporary means for their expertise, although not everyone with a C was paid. Some offered up their expert opinions free of charge. In the February 6 letter, ostensibly, Jolly West was considered a C, but his workplace was categorized as a B.

F is for Foreign. The letter F is used to signify a country whose name has been redacted, sometimes as a location to conduct ARTICHOKE experiments or perhaps to denote other related overseas travel or consultation.

Clever, right? Our friends at the CIA came up with alphabetical shorthand that uses the first letter of the word it represents. I don’t know if that will apply to all of the categories, but it’s a nice way to start. As you can probably imagine, the letters A and C are by far the most frequently ones used in the ARTICHOKE documents.

The tougher ones

The Bs and Hs gave me the biggest trouble, since they appeared alone as well as with numbers. I also knew that the three main branches of the military were heavily involved in ARTICHOKE, but I was having difficulty identifying which branch might be represented by a corresponding letter. I won’t bore you with why I thought this, but for a while, I thought the B might mean Navy, the H might mean Air Force, and the G might be the Army. But that system didn’t play out in the documents.

Just an example of a confusing document; click on image for a closer view

And then I started to think like the bean counters in the CIA. You know what? If they can lump all the research orgs together, and they can lump all the consultants together, and they can lump everyone in the CIA together, then they can certainly lump all of the people in uniform together. I’d concluded that the B/3s and B/6s were part of the military because of their “tour of duty” and war talk and their inclination to measure hours in a day by the hundreds. That’s when I determined that B/3 meant a military base and B/6 meant an officer who is affiliated with a military base. As for the H that precedes the B/3s or B/6s, I figured out what that meant when I read the following two paragraphs from page 5 of a lengthy document in which the writer was kvetching about how no one, particularly researchers affiliated with the military, ever briefed him on any of their ARTICHOKE-related activities. Here are the two most awesome grafs:

So, now we know, and I just want to thank the CIA categorizers for practically handing us the working definitions of an H-B/3 and an H-B/6. H-B/3 ostensibly refers to a hospital or clinic on a military base and an H-B/6 ostensibly refers to an officer, and most likely a medical specialist, who is affiliated with a military base that has a hospital or clinic on site. A hospital on a military site would be considered a huge plus in conducting ARTICHOKE research. You, as an ARTICHOKE researcher, would be among friends. You wouldn’t have to hide what you’re doing nearly as much as if you were in a non-military hospital.

Aaaaand, guess what? Wright-Patterson Air Force Base had just completed a 314-bed, 7-floor, state-of-the-art hospital facility in June 1956. So, yeah, if psychologist St. Clair Switzer was still active in the Air Force Reserves in 1957, and he very much was, and he was known in the hallways of Wright Patterson AFB, and he no-doubt was, then an H-B/6 next to his name would be apropos. I’d think that having an H-B/6 next to your name would be one of the more glowing attributes in the eyes of Morse Allen, the recipient of (ostensibly) Jolly West’s letter.

The ones that could use more research

Before I get to the most exciting part of this post, here are the categories that I’m still stuck on. If anyone has an inkling to visit The Black Vault’s MKULTRA collection to find occurrences of the following and to help figure out their meaning, I’d be grateful:

D – The March 25, 1952, letter that (ostensibly) refers to Clark Hull, St. Clair Switzer, and Griffith Williams, the Rutgers professor and hypnosis expert who’d also worked under Clark Hull, is studded with handwritten letter Ds. Because Ds weren’t used very frequently in the MKULTRA documents I’ve examined, I haven’t yet figured out a pattern. Perhaps it indicates referrals for consideration, but I don’t know. I don’t think it stands for drugs, since neither Clark Hull nor Griffith Williams had expertise in that area.

G – I think G stands for an internal group within the CIA, such as the gadgetry group mentioned in this memo. (Good Lord, do you think it stands for Gadgetry?) A letter for various separate internal groups makes sense if we’re considering the perspective of an Agency accountant. If they need to expend money from a specific line item for a designated group within the Agency, then that would be an important distinction.

H – I’m most stymied by the letter H when used on its own, with no B/3s or B/6s nearby. At one point I thought it represented hypnosis, but I don’t think so. When I noticed the blurb about the pilots, that’s when I thought it might mean the Air Force. But that would be weird to have a special designation for the Air Force and not the other military branches, wouldn’t it?This one definitely needs to be investigated further. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

B/1 (H-B/1) – I haven’t seen enough of this designation to ascertain how it differs from the B/3 and B/6 designations, but I think it’s probably similar. I don’t think it matters for our purposes though.

The most exciting part: why I think St. Clair Switzer was on the CIA payroll

In my blog post about how St. Clair Switzer spent his 1956-57 sabbatical, including the summer of 1957, I introduced two letters that I believe were written from St. Clair Switzer to his former colleague under Clark Hull, Griffith Williams. In the letters, Switzer is hoping to obtain guidance from Williams, who was, by then, an internationally recognized expert in the field of hypnosis.

Let’s have another look at those letters with our newfound knowledge.

As you can see, any references to Williams have a C attached to them—in CIA lingo, he was considered a Consultant. But in the December 6, 1956, letter, references to West and Switzer were bestowed with As. They were considered Agency. Curiously enough, in the February 8, 1957, letter, West and Williams were designated as Cs, while the letter writer, whom I believe to be St. Clair Switzer, was an A-lister once again.

You may ask: are you sure that it was Switzer who wrote the two letters? Couldn’t it have been Morse Allen? I honestly don’t think so. First, the letters aren’t written in Allen’s style. Allen wasn’t an academic. The two letters were written by someone who clearly was. His words, “We grant that the above list is long and that any item individually could well deserve a Ph.D thesis,” tells me that the writer held his own doctorate degree, and he was acknowledging that the recipient did as well. He’s comfortably collegiate. In addition, the letter writer is gracious and deferential, both to the recipient, who is unquestionably Williams, but also to the researcher with whom the writer is working. He uses the term “we” quite a bit. Morse Allen worked alone. There was no “we” when he wrote his letters and memos about ARTICHOKE. From what I’ve read, Morse Allen didn’t do gracious. Switzer was no sweetheart either, but he knew how to write as if he were.

If St. Clair Switzer was the letter writer, and I continue to believe that he was, then he wasn’t a wannabe sitting on the sidelines. Switzer was CIA, at least for part of his career. That’s big. I also think he was running in those circles for quite a while.

******

P.S.: This post came to be because of one person’s recent email asking a question about Lackland Air Force Base. His question led me back to the MKULTRA documents, which was when I started fixating on the H-B/6 notation. I’m not sure I would have tried to figure out its meaning without that email. So…thank you…to all of you, for your input. You really do contribute to this process and influence my thinking in new ways.

******

** Late in the process, I noticed a faint S at the top of several documents, and on one document to date, several Js and Es. These are the exceptions to the rule. I’m going to ignore them for this blog post, since they don’t pertain to the question at hand, but I acknowledge their existence. If you can figure out what in the heck they mean, let me know!

Carl Knox Investigation, Joe Cella, Miami University, Potential Tammen Sightings, The Investigations

Was Ron Tammen spotted by H.H. Stephenson at the Adirondack Inn?

We’re still in wait mode regarding the two hockey tapes, which means that I’m biding my time working on other questions pertaining to the Ron Tammen mystery. In fact, just a couple days ago, as I was going through photos from my last trip to University Archives, I noticed a new detail that was screaming to be investigated.

The item had to do with something a volunteer researcher had found on the second day of our visit this past June. In a box holding Tammen-related materials are notes that had once belonged to Dr. Phillip Shriver, president emeritus of Miami University and a historian who had done so much to keep the Tammen mystery alive on Miami’s campus. The notes were typewritten on index cards in outline format, and the purpose of these cards was to provide Dr. Shriver with a scaled-down version of his renowned Miami Mysteries talk. In order to keep his talk to 50 minutes, he decided to skip over the part about H.H. (Hi) Stephenson. Nevertheless, Dr. Shriver had elected to include one important detail in line #6, and that rarely disclosed detail was the name of a hotel, which was the Adirondack Inn.

I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. So was this our answer? Was the Adirondack Inn the hotel in Wellsville, NY, where Hi Stephenson thought he saw Ron Tammen? You’re probably brimming with questions about this discovery too, which is why I’ll now be switching over to Q&A format.

Q: So, is that the answer? Did the serendipitous meet-up happen at a restaurant in an establishment called the Adirondack Inn?

Oh, there’s no way.

Q: How can you be so sure?

Several reasons. According to Manning’s Directory for May 1953, there was no hotel by that name in the village of Wellsville, NY. Or Andover. Or Belmont. Or Scio. Those are four towns in Allegany County in order of population size. Wellsville was by far the biggest town in the county and it was also a major stopping point for travelers. If you were going to stop for dinner anywhere between New York and Ohio, Wellsville would have been a choice spot.

Under the category of “Hotels,” Manning’s listed five of them, all in Wellsville, all off of route 17, which, in town, was known as Main Street:

Al-Ha-Mar Motel, 475 N. Highland Avenue (Route 17)
Brunswick Hotel, 173-177 North Main
Fassett Hotel, 55 North Main
Pickup’s Hotel, 38-40 North Main
Wellsville Hotel, 470 North Main

Therefore, one of the reasons that it couldn’t be the Adirondack Inn is that there was no such hotel in or around Wellsville. I could go on.

Q: Please do.

I’ve also looked up the terms “Adirondack Inn,” “Adirondack Hotel,” and “Hotel Adirondack” in newspapers from that era to see if anything popped up that’s close to Wellsville. The only Adirondack Inn that I was able to find was the one at Sacandaga Lake in upstate New York. It was beautiful in its heyday, and I’m sure they had a nice restaurant, but it was 4 hours and 21 minutes from Wellsville.

There’s also the Adirondack Hotel, which is in Long Lake, NY. It, too, is nice, but it was over 5 hours from Wellsville. And that sums up our options.

It’s worth pointing out that the Adirondack Inn and the Adirondack Hotel are both located in the Adirondack Mountain region, which makes so much sense. What makes less sense is for a hotel in a town near the border of Pennsylvania to be named for a mountain range that’s 325 miles away.

Q: Where do you think Dr. Shriver got the name?

These things happen innocently. Phil Shriver surely would have known Hi Stephenson. Phil had arrived in Oxford in 1965 and Hi had already been working at the university since the 1940s. Hi retired in 1977. Phil stepped down from the presidency in 1981 and retired from teaching in 1998. Hi passed away in 2006 and Phil died in 2011. So I’m sure there were plenty of opportunities for Phil to ask Hi the question that I’d always wondered if Carl Knox had asked him—“What was the name of the hotel, Hi?”

The problem is…people’s memories have a way of jumbling things up over time. It could be that Hi accidentally told Phil the wrong name. Hi and his wife Kay had been vacationing in upstate New York before driving home through Wellsville. Maybe they even stayed in the Adirondack Inn, and, when he was talking to Phil, he accidentally confused the two hotel names. Or maybe Phil had gotten the details wrong. He’d mixed up other details about Hi’s story before, as a matter of fact.

Q: Really? What makes you say that?

On another note card, Phil has written some additional details regarding Hi’s story, several of which are inaccurate. In ink, he wrote the following:

“N.B. Hi & Kay Stephenson were returning from Connecticut and stopped in Waynesboro, PA.” Above that line he wrote, “Hi recalls young man’s piercing eyes.”

From what I can determine, the “N.B.” is a Latin phrase meaning “Nota bene,” or “Note well.” He’s saying that this is important, and I can totally see Phil Shriver using that terminology to do so. The man had panache.

But the locations—Connecticut and Waynesboro, PA—don’t agree with Joe Cella’s April 18, 1976, article in the Hamilton Journal-News. Joe was quoting Hi directly in that article, so that’s the source I’m going to go with factually: that the Stephensons were vacationing in upstate New York and they dined in Wellsville on the way back. (By the way, I checked and there’s no Adirondack Inn in Waynesboro, PA, either.)

But don’t be too critical of Phil or Hi. They couldn’t instantly fact check some fuzzy detail like we do now. If the information wasn’t stored securely in their brain or a file folder somewhere, it could get muddled up or completely lost.

Q: So where does that leave us? Are you still unsure about which hotel it was?

Well, funny you should ask, because when I revisited Joe Cella’s article I noticed an additional detail that could help us further narrow things down.

Let’s listen to Joe tell the story again, paying close attention to the last paragraph:

On Aug. 5, 1953, five months after Tammen was gone, Stephenson, who was in charge, and still is, of housing assignments and campus permits at Miami University, was returning with his wife from a short vacation in upper New York State.

Stephenson recalled they stopped for the evening in Wellsville, N.Y. At dinner that night, in a hotel dining room, he said he noticed three or four men sitting a few tables away. At once he said he became aware one of the men looked exactly like Tammen. He said he knew Tammen.

“When my eyes looked toward him, I would find he was looking at me. He was sort of looking right through me. For some reason that I’ll never know, I said nothing to my wife about the fact that this young man was Ron Tammen. I was sure it was him.”

After finishing dinner, Stephenson said he and his wife walked out of the hotel onto the street. He then told his wife. At her urging, they went back inside, but the men, one of whom Stephenson thought to be Ron Tammen, were gone. There was no trace of them in the lobby or anywhere else.

Thanks to Joe’s clues, I have three criteria to narrow things down. I’d had the first two criteria for a while now. The third one is new.

The hotel had to have a restaurant that served dinners. This may seem like a no-brainer, but two of Wellsville’s five hotels weren’t serving regular meals.
The hotel had to be on the street.
The hotel had to have a lobby near its restaurant.

Regarding criterion #1: The Al-Ha-Mar Motel was a typical 1950s-style one-story motel in which all overnight guests had their own street-level entrance. They didn’t have a restaurant.

The Brunswick Hotel had a coffee shop and a bar. According to local historians, they weren’t serving meals then. So those two hotels can be ruled out.

Regarding criterion #2: The Hotel Wellsville was a stately old building about one mile north of the center of town on Main Street. It also had a restaurant. However, the hotel was set back away from the road, nestled among trees. For this reason, I don’t think it was the Hotel Wellsville.

*Hotel Wellsville. Used with permission of the* Allegany County Historical Society.

And finally, criterion #3. The Fassett Hotel was a striking red brick building with spectacular windows. They had a dining room that served breakfast, lunch, and dinner all week as well as Sunday afternoon. And importantly, the Fassett Hotel was right on North Main Street and had a lobby that owners made use of by frequently featuring the work of local artists.

*The Fassett Hotel. Used with permission of the* Allegany County Historical Society.

*Pickup’s Hotel. Used with permission of the* Allegany County Historical Society.

Pickup’s Hotel wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as the Fassett, but it had a coffee shop, a cocktail lounge, and a dining room, where they served meals. It was also on North Main Street. What isn’t clear is if there was a hotel lobby near the dining area. If there was one, I don’t think it was big. A 1961 article on a fire that had broken out had said that “Principal business activity in the building centered around its restaurant on the ground floor.”

Although it’s possible that Pickup’s Hotel was where Hi Stephenson saw Ron or Ron’s look-alike, I now strongly believe that the encounter happened at the Fassett Hotel. And doesn’t it sort of fit that, given a choice between a cobbled-together medley of wood, stone, and whatever else, and an elegant building of red brick, H.H. Stephenson and Ronald Tammen, Miamians through and through, would have been drawn to the latter?

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Update 10/5/2022: Before posting the above write-up, I had emailed several historians from Allegany County to see if anyone had heard of an Adirondack Inn anywhere near there. Today, I heard back from Craig Braack, Allegany County’s official historian. Craig had asked a few local “old-timers” about a possible Adirondack Inn in Allegany County and no one knew a thing about it. This is one more piece of evidence that the Adirondack Inn was not the name of the hotel where Hi Stephenson thought he saw Ron Tammen.

CIA, Hypnosis, Miami University, MKULTRA, Psychology Department, University Faculty and Administrators

More evidence that St. Clair Switzer was involved in something in 1956-57 that he didn’t want to talk about

I’ll keep this short.

I’ve been thinking more about St. Clair Switzer.

You know how I have this theory that Doc Switzer was on a sabbatical in academic year 1956-57 with Louis Jolyon (Jolly) West, the world famous psychiatrist and MKULTRA researcher who was at the University of Oklahoma at that time? And you know how I also believe that Jolly West was the author of a February 1957 CIA research proposal seeking funding for himself and a visiting academic (Switzer, imo) who was “thoroughly familiar with hypnotism at the theoretical level” to create a hypnotic messenger that summer for use by the military?

Gosh, when I put it like that, it does seem a wee bit far-fetched, doesn’t it?

Well, I have a little more info to help back it up.

Don’t get too excited—it’s not that big. But it’s not nothing either.

We already know that Switzer had been granted permission for a sabbatical for that academic year. His original plans had been to work under psychophysiologist Marion A. (Gus) Wenger (no relation) at UCLA the prior year, but those plans had to be postponed. Everett Patten, chair of Miami’s psychology department, felt that he needed Switzer around to help with a curriculum change that was taking place at that time, and he suggested that Switzer’s sabbatical be pushed back a year. With this turn of events, Switzer checked with Wenger to see if the change was OK with him and Gus said that the new timeframe should still be fine. But in December 1956—three months into the 1956-57 academic year—Gus wrote to Switzer telling him that he’d decided to travel to India to study yogis instead. He offered a space for Switzer in September 1957, but, because Switzer’s sabbatical would have ended by then, that would be too late.

How do we know that Switzer found somewhere else to go?

We know that Switzer was definitely not working in Miami’s psychology department that year because his earnings sheet shows a total of $00 for the year 1956-57. Here’s the document:

The stray mark to the right of the “7” had first made me wonder if the earnings line for that year just hadn’t picked up enough inkjet toner, but I don’t think so. To me, it looks more like something had been written there but was erased. For this reason, I think it’s safe to conclude that Switzer made zero dollars and zippo cents that year from Miami.

That’s a little odd, since Clarence Kreger, Miami’s cantankerous provost, had informed Switzer that he could earn half his salary while on sabbatical. (These days, sabbaticals are usually fully paid, but times were different then.) (I feel like I say that a lot on this blog.) (I feel like I use parentheses a lot too.) Anyway, somehow, Switzer was able to make ends meet without needing that little boost. He was out of the office all year, including the summers of 1956 and 1957.

How do we know that he was gone during the summers too?

We know it because Switzer was a self-promoter. If there was an achievement that he wanted other people to know about, he’d alert one of the local rags, especially the easier ones to get into, like the Miami Student or the Oxford Press. This was especially true when he was an assistant professor in the 1930s. Often the hard-hitting news blurbs were about prize money he’d won for an ad or slogan he’d submitted in a contest, which he did frequently as part of his business psychology course. If he spent the summer doing something prestigious-sounding—like the time he’d worked with prisoners at Northeastern Penitentiary in Lewisburg, PA—you can bet that Switzer would make sure it was brought to the attention of fellow faculty members, administrators, and the surrounding Oxford community. Promotions received, degrees earned, joining the war effort, returning from the war effort—he liked to have such things documented. (As a historical researcher, I’m not opposed to this practice.)

Later on, as his extracurricular activities became more, um, stealth, he reined in his need for newsprint.

During the year of his sabbatical, Switzer found two occasions to show off a little for the folks at home. In August 1956, an article appeared in one of the local papers announcing that Switzer had returned from a “tour of duty” at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado. (According to his military records, his tours of duty averaged 15 days.) During that visit, he’d helped develop the psychology curriculum for the new Air Force Academy, which had been temporarily located there while the permanent school was being constructed in Colorado Springs. A year later, a much shorter article was published saying that he’d just returned home after spending three more weeks at the Air Force Academy.

What I’m trying to say here is that Switzer had been on a sabbatical for roughly 64 weeks, yet we only get to know what he did for five or six of those weeks. Whatever he was doing between the two Augusts, he wasn’t saying. And trust me, if Switzer was ever presented with the chance to boast about his accomplishments, he seized it. If he’d spent the year conducting psychophysiological research in Gus Wenger’s lab, the world would have heard about it.

It was uncharacteristic for him to be so tight-lipped in those circumstances, which leads me to wonder if he used the second news item to bookend his time away. Maybe then people wouldn’t ask questions about all that time in between.

How did he manage to find a spot with Louis Jolyon West so soon after Gus Wenger let him down?

This is where the timeline gets murky. Gus Wenger’s letter was dated December 1, 1956, and by the sound of it, it was late in coming.

“Dear Doc, I have been meaning to write you for some time about our plans,” he said. He then proceeded to describe a number of monkey wrenches that had been thrown into their original arrangements while offering an alternative date that was much too late.

The letter was addressed to Switzer’s office in the Department of Psychology, which Switzer surely wasn’t occupying by then. The department secretary would’ve probably forwarded the letter to Switzer’s home address, but that would have taken even more time away from his eroding sabbatical.

It’s possible that Switzer was biding his time at Wright Patterson as he waited on Wenger. But patience isn’t exactly a virtue that I would ascribe to St. Clair Switzer. Sometime after returning from Colorado, I can see him giving up on the prospect of spending a year in California and seeking assistance from his highly decorated contacts with the Air Force. By late fall, I think they’d put him in touch with Jolly West.

You’ve already seen the letter that I believe Switzer had written to a colleague he knew from his Clark Hull days, Griffith W. Williams, who was then at Rutgers. That letter, dated December 6, 1956, had been a follow-up to a discussion that had taken place between the three hypnosis experts, likely over the phone, on November 27.

Here it is again:

Document provided with thanks to The Black Vault at https://www.theblackvault.com/

By the time Wenger finally wrote to Switzer on December 1 saying “no can do,” I think Switzer had already moved on.

How about you—what do you think?

Miami University, Psychology Department

A rift between friends: Did Doc Switzer and Everett Patten have a falling out?

Well hello there! Good to see you. As you may know, we’re currently awaiting word from Miami University officials regarding the two remaining Oral History Project recordings that weren’t posted to the university’s bicentennial website back in 2009. We’re especially interested in the recording that was ostensibly titled “Miami Hockey Coaches,” since our running theory is that there really isn’t a recording of Miami hockey coaches at all, but rather a tape of Carl Knox’s former secretary that had been mislabeled. As soon as I receive their response, no matter what it is, I have a blog post all raring to go. Here’s a sneak peek at the three possible headlines:

A. Amazing news: Miami U has just released the recording of Carl Knox’s former secretary; OR

B. Miami U found the tape. It really is just a bunch of hockey coaches; OR

C. Miami U can’t produce the hockey coach tape. Here’s why that’s a very big deal.

So, that’ll be fun, even if it turns out to be Option B, which is clearly the least thrilling one. (Sorry, Miami hockey coaches, but we’re on a mission here. Maybe under different circumstances, we’d be more interested in hearing your tales of puck hoisting, flip passing, sweep checking, and whatnot, but now’s just not that time.)

In the meantime, let’s talk a little more about St. Clair Switzer and Everett Patten, the two heavyweights in Miami’s psychology department when Ron Tammen was a student. As you’ll recall, both men had studied under the eminent psychologist Clark Hull and both had expertise in hypnosis. Doc Switzer was Ron’s general psychology professor during both the fall and spring semesters of 1952-1953, though, for whatever reason, Ron had dropped his course both times. Patten, who’d been teaching psychology courses at Miami for roughly 30 years by then and had served in its highest post for 20 of those years, was also a familiar face in the corridors of old Harrison Hall. Based on everything that I’ve read, Patten and Switzer had gotten along well.

In the early days of their association, the dynamic between Patten and Switzer was one of mentor and student. Patten was seven years older than Switzer. In 1924, as Switzer was beginning his undergraduate courses at Miami, Patten was an assistant professor there. He’d completed his master’s degree under Hull at the University of Wisconsin and would soon be working toward his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. It’s a near certainty that Patten had talked Hull up to his promising protégé. And in 1928, when Switzer had decided he’d like to pursue his master’s degree under Hull too, I’m sure Patten wrote to Hull on Switzer’s behalf enthusiastically recommending him as a graduate student.

If it hadn’t been for Everett Patten, St. Clair Switzer likely wouldn’t have encountered Clark Hull, let alone been able to hitch his wagon to Hull’s luminous star.

By the early 1930s, Switzer’s relationship with Hull appeared to be growing closer than Patten’s had been, which seemed to alter the dynamic between Patten and Switzer. While Patten had only worked with Hull for his master’s degree, Switzer had earned his master’s with Hull and was now working with him for his doctorate too, this time at Yale. Though Patten had continued to correspond frequently with Hull and performed experiments for him at Miami, Switzer was on the receiving end of more in-person Hull time. There would be regularly scheduled tête-à-têtes; impromptu pop-ins; and the occasional bonding over breakfasts, brown bag lunches, dinners, and post-Prohibition drinks with Hull and his stellar cadre of graduate students. Switzer was playing in the big leagues now and it appeared to be going to his head.

Such was the backdrop in March 1934, as Hull and his team were still riding high on the recent publication of his book Hypnosis and Suggestibility, that Switzer typed a letter to Patten on cream-colored Yale letterhead. In the space of three pages, he exudes unbridled arrogance as he first discusses an experiment that he and Hull would like Patten to conduct for them—an experiment for which Patten had needed some additional clarification.

Letter to Patten, p1-3 Download

“Dear Pat,” Switzer opened, “When your letter arrived this morning the boss and I decided that it was time for us to go into a huddle and find out where we had confused you on the program of running subjects.”

I mean, it’s not quite “Pat, Pat…What were you thinking?”, but it’s close. He then explains step-by-step what he and Hull needed Patten to do for them.

Switzer gets even higher and mightier on page 2, when he broaches one of his favorite subjects: money. At that time, psychology at Miami was part of the Philosophy and Psychology Department, with Everett Patten heading up the psychology side. (Psychology became its own department in 1943.) Patten was the person who’d granted Switzer leave to pursue his Ph.D. at Yale. Now, Switzer is informing him that a professor in philosophy, W.W. Spencer, and President Upham had been discussing Switzer’s possible return between themselves, sans Patten. Spencer had expressed interest in having Switzer teach a course in logic on top of his psychology courses, and Upham was in favor. Here’s where Switzer makes his big ask:

“So I’m anxiously waiting to hear what [President Upham] has to offer in the way of salary. If you have a talk with prexy [a nickname for a university president that I’d never heard of before St. Clair Switzer came into my life] I hope you’ll try to persuade him that I’m worth not a cent less than $2000, and more if possible! Also, as I have held the position and rank of instructor here you might suggest the rank of associate there. I know that I’m not likely to get these things, but there is a possibility and now is the time to take advantage of it. I feel that if I’m worth $2500 to Yale I must have at least an equal value for Miami, but there’s no use trying to get it. However, I like Miami and I like to work with you, and I like to teach psychology, so I’m willing to pass up some things to come back.”

Seriously, St. Clair? His ballsiness and fake modesty all smushed into a single paragraph is bizarre. But I think my biggest beef is with his use of an exclamation point when making a salary request. Who does that? It’s important to note that the $2000 figure is actually $300 less than what he was earning as an assistant professor before he left Miami for Yale. But this was the Great Depression, and Miami had been cutting salaries, not handing out raises. His request to be promoted to an associate—as in an associate professor—at this stage in his career is laughable, even back then when the rules were a little more relaxed than they are today. As it turns out, Miami offered him a salary of $2100. As for the promotion to associate professor, Switzer wouldn’t get that until 1939.

Here’s a little more of what Switzer had to say to his boss and former mentor further on in his letter: “I’ve been terribly busy during the last two weeks trying to put the finishing touches on my dissertation. Boy, am I anxious to get things finished and get back and have a look at you again. It certainly will be great to sit across the desk from you again—if I may have my old desk back again.”

I mean, we’re all adults here. We’re able to discern a load of disingenuousness when we hear it, right? Despite Switzer’s supposed eagerness to have a look at Patten from across their shared desk in the west tower of old Harrison Hall, I’ve learned from other letters he’d written over the same period that he was upset at how tight money had become in Oxford. He’d been putting his feelers out elsewhere. A month earlier, he’d attempted to secure a fellowship from the National Research Council so that he could work at Stanford alongside fellow Yale graduate Ernest “Jack” Hilgard, thus bolstering his research credentials and opening up new doors to who knows where. A month after he wrote his letter to Patten, he applied for a job in the Office of Industrial Relations at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati. But the fellowship didn’t pan out and neither did P&G and, by September 1934, he was back at Miami, staring at Patten’s pencil mustache and receding hairline from across their communal desk.

Whether Switzer was happy about returning to Miami or not, Patten had come through for him once again.

But that was Patten’s management style. He aimed to keep his staff happy while also meeting the demands of tuition-paying students. Switzer, who didn’t seem to relish the part of academia that involved teaching—he liked doing research far better—was always on the look-out for prestigious side gigs, particularly those having to do with the federal government, the U.S. military, or both. Usually, the opportunities were temporary, summers mostly, and Patten could be counted on to lend his support.

During World War II, Switzer left the psychology department for a much longer period than normal, although he wasn’t alone. Many professors at the university joined the armed services. In June 1942, he signed up to work in test development at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. By August, he was commissioned as an officer in clinical psychology for the U.S. Army Air Forces, and there he remained for 3 ½ years, continually advancing in leadership posts all the way up to his role as chief of demobilization procedures at U.S. Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C. When the war was over, he returned to Oxford in December 1945, yet he still didn’t return to the psychology department. Instead, he worked as chief vocational appraiser for returning GIs in the Veterans Administration Guidance Center at University Hospital. Not until the fall of 1948-49 did he return full-time to the Department of Psychology to teach some courses.

Think about that—Switzer was away for over six years and he still had a job to come back to.

Switzer’s career continued to flourish thanks in large part to Patten’s benevolence and accommodating nature. In the post-WWII years, Switzer would continue to periodically request leave from his departmental responsibilities whenever Uncle Sam sought his services as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserves. He made himself available for other opportunities as well, including briefly working as a consultant for the Air Research and Development Command in Baltimore in 1951. If, as I strongly believe, he was approached in 1952 to help out the CIA with their interrogation endeavors, aka Project ARTICHOKE, I’m sure he went all in with that effort too.

We already know what happened in the spring of 1953. Doc Switzer was back to teaching full-time in the classroom when a student of his—Ron Tammen—disappeared after dropping Switzer’s course for a second time that year. It probably irked old Doc that Ron had left his psychology book open on his desk before disappearing, since it brought some unwanted attention his way. He was questioned by investigators, though if he knew anything, the information he provided was never made public. Likewise, Switzer’s name never made it into news articles concerning the Tammen case. Instead, it was his old friend and mentor, Everett Patten, who would occasionally speak to reporters (particularly those reporters who were affiliated with the university) on the topic of Ron Tammen and why Miami was leaning so hard toward amnesia as the most likely reason Ron disappeared.

The tl;dr of all of the above is that Everett Patten had Switzer’s back for as long as he was in a position of power at Miami, and he proved it over and over and over.

In 1961, Everett Patten stepped down as department chair, recommending that Switzer be named to replace him. For a long time, I was bemused by that move. Why would he step down as department chair but not retire at the same time?

I think I know now. It had to do with the university’s retirement policy back then. In 1960, Patten had turned 65, the age at which the university required that a faculty member’s tenured appointment be converted to an annual appointment (which is insane and no longer the case). He would then have the opportunity to work an additional five years, with his appointment being renewed each year until he reached the age of 70, at which time he would be required to retire.

But Patten had a slight advantage. The university’s cut-off date was July 1, so if a person turned 65 by that date, their tenured appointment ended June 30 of the current academic year. But Patten was born on July 7, which meant that he could work through another entire academic year—until June 1961—before being switched over to an annual appointment. Likewise, even though he’d be turning 70 on July 7, 1965, he could feasibly work until June 1966 before mandatory retirement. It’s confusing, and this paragraph took me an embarrassing amount of time to write, but it’s important for this story. Just hang with me, people!

So the short answer is that in 1961, Patten was preparing to change over to an annual appointment. He couldn’t serve as chair of a department without knowing where he’d be from year to year, could he? So he stepped down and got his long-time colleague, St. Clair Switzer, to take over for him while he would continue teaching until he’d finally retire.

But retirement is a complicated prospect. The word itself sounds so old and exhausted. (I think it’s the root word “tire” that brings everyone down so much.) I’ll never forget the time I was stewing about my own early retirement with two friends over lychee martinis and dim sum near Dupont Circle. One of them looked at me and said very matter-of-factly, “Don’t think of it as retirement, think of it as rewirement.” Which is brilliant, right? Think of it as a chance to do the stuff that you never had the chance to do before because you never had the time—like dive into the Ron Tammen case, for example. So yeah! Rewirement, baby!

Man, I could really go for some dim sum right about now; Photo by K8 on Unsplash

Unfortunately, Everett Patten didn’t have the pleasure of meeting my friends over lychee martinis when he was at his crossroads. He was harboring different thoughts. According to university documents, Patten first thought he might like to retire in June 1964 because of “ill health,” and he told Switzer as much. Switzer actually told him to think it over a little more, and Patten indeed changed his mind and decided to retire in June 1965. Switzer agreed. But then, Patten must have remarked to one or more people that he was considering making use of the July 1 cut-off and retiring in June 1966. When Switzer found out, he wasn’t having it. Instead of talking with Patten one-on-one, he wrote a letter to acting President Wilson, telling him:

“Dear Ray: I notified Dean Limper several months ago that I plan to terminate Professor Patten’s appointment as of June 1965. Technically, he would be eligible for an additional year since his 70^th birthday falls on July 7, 1965, one week after the official deadline. However, for reasons which I have outlined to Dean Limper, it seems that the best interests of the department will be furthered by termination of his appointment next June.”

Later on, he says: “I have not yet informed him of my decision to relieve him of his duties next year (June 1965), since I’m hoping that he will make this choice himself. However, it has come to my attention from other sources that he now hopes to invoke the technicality of his 70^th birthday falling one week after July 1, 1965 to request an extra year. In this case I shall have the unpleasant task of refusing this request.”

And he ends with this:

“I thought you should have these notes for your file in the event that he should appeal my decision. I can only say in advance that under no circumstances would I alter this decision.”

In a follow-up memo to the president, several months later, he wrote:

“My decision to ask for termination of his appointment in June is based on consideration of the best interests of the Department of Psychology. I have explained to Dean Don James some of the reasons that impelled me to this decision.”

That memo was dated December 28, 1964, and on January 7, 1965, Everett Patten submitted his resignation to acting President Charles Wilson at the request of Dean Don James. It was short, but painful.

“Dear Ray: In order to comply with your request, transmitted to me by Dean Don James, I hereby tender my resignation from the Miami University Staff, this to take effect June 30, 1965. Sincerely, E.F. Patten.” (President Wilson’s reply is lovely and deserves a read.)

Switzer-recommends-Pattens-appt-terminated Download

Sorry, but I can’t tell you why Switzer had taken his harsh stance against his former boss and mentor who had helped him get to where he was in life. Switzer made a point of not putting his reasons in writing. I will say this: I don’t know what the health issue was that was affecting Patten in 1964, but it’s my understanding that the health issue that Patten died of in September 1966 happened quickly. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that his brain was deteriorating or that he was somehow showing worrisome signs of aging. In February 1963, 1½ years before Switzer wrote his letter to President Wilson, Patten had joined on with other psychology professors in the tri-state area to form a behavioral science firm. That doesn’t sound like someone who was slipping.

I’ve wondered if perhaps Ron Tammen’s disappearance might have had something to do with it. Had Patten put two and two together and asked Switzer if perhaps he’d orchestrated it?

I don’t know, but something must have set him off.

********

Correction: Letters that I’ve rediscovered between Switzer and Pres Upham indicate that Switzer was offered $2100 to return to Miami from Yale, not $2160. I’ve made the change.

Joe Cella, Miami University, University Faculty and Administrators

Halloween 2021 and the muzzling of…me

As most of you know, I’m a fan of Joe Cella’s. After everyone else had moved on with their lives regarding Ron Tammen’s disappearance, after they’d all shrugged their collective shoulders and resigned themselves to the notion that they’d never truly know what had happened to Tammen, Cella refused to join them. He continued working the case, steadfast and alone, until the August day in 1980 that he abruptly passed away at the young age of 59. Thirty years later, when I began my book project, I consulted Cella’s news articles for guidance. I’d hoped to pick up the story where he’d left off. I aspired to follow in his footsteps.

I’ve now come to believe that I’ve achieved my dream. Not only am I following in Joe’s footsteps, but I’m facing the same old obstructions, smokescreens, and pushback that Joe had encountered in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.

What’s more, when it comes to the Tammen case, I’ve discovered that if a person employs more than the minimal amount of stick-to-itiveness in their investigation, it won’t be long before they breach the space-time continuum and go hurtling back to the days of Joe.

Here are some examples:

When I read Joe’s assertion in the Hamilton Journal-News that school officials hadn’t been cooperative, I thought “Same.”

When I saw in the Dayton Daily News that he felt that the university tried to cover up the case, I thought “Omg, SAME.”

And when I learned that, in 1973, the university had stepped in at the last minute to prevent Joe from presenting his latest evidence on Tammen to the campus community, I thought “OK, this is getting really weird.”

Because, you guys? They’re doing it to me too.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that the Miami University Alumni Association (MUAA) had written about Tammen’s disappearance on their blog known as Slant Talk. The post had been published online a year ago on October 30, 2020. For some reason, I’d missed it back then—2020 is such a blur. But early this month, I was searching a Tammen-related topic and up it popped.

Here’s the post: Ron Tammen? Where are you?

I was bemused by their lack of new information. You and I have learned way more about the Tammen case than their write-up has indicated. All they had to do was Google “Ron Tammen” and they should have been able to find my blog. If they’d reached out to me—an alum who has dedicated a sizable chunk of her life to researching the Tammen case—I would have given them a nice quote. They didn’t even write about Butler County’s well-publicized reopened investigation in 2008.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Jenny, you didn’t make any new friends in Oxford with all your talk about Carl Knox’s former secretary and her relatively recent interview about the university’s Tammen investigation. Did you really think that they’d want to point anyone to your blog after all that?

But that’s the most interesting part. In October 2020, I hadn’t yet rediscovered the interview summary that someone had placed in the Ghosts and Legends folder in University Archives. The only post in which I’d written about a possible university cover-up had to do with Gilson Wright’s avoidance of the word “psychology” whenever he described the book that lay open on Ron’s desk.

That was such a long time ago. Could that have been the reason that they chose not to highlight my work, or was there another reason for the virtual snub?

At the bottom of their blog post is a comment made by a former friend of Ron’s from Fisher Hall. I recognized his name because I’d spoken with him early in my research. I’d also spoken with his roommate. He describes his memories searching for Ron as well as students’ mysterious encounters in the Formal Gardens after Ron had disappeared. It’s a moving sentiment.

The comment box is still open, so I decided to write a comment of my own. With as many followers as I’m sure MUAA has, I thought it would be a good way to talk about my project and steer people who have an interest in the Tammen story to my website.

Here’s what I wrote.

“Hi! I’m a 1980 Miami grad who has been researching the Tammen disappearance for nearly 12 years for a book project. I’ve been blogging about it too. I’ve discovered a lot of new information. Like…did you know that the FBI had Ron Tammen’s fingerprints when he disappeared and they expunged them in 2002, 30 years earlier than normal? You can read a lot more info here: https://ronaldtammen.com. Stop by!”

The comment made by Ron’s Fisher Hall friend was posted on November 1, 2020, two days after the blog was posted. My comment, which I’d submitted on October 8, 2021, is still awaiting moderation.

Two weeks later, I wrote to MUAA to see if perhaps there was something about my comment that they weren’t happy with. I wanted to let them know that I’d be open to submitting a new comment that fell within their guidelines. Here’s my email:

Dear MUAA,

I’m a 1980 graduate and recurring donor to Miami University. Recently, I noticed that, in October 2020, your blog “Slant Talk” had discussed the disappearance of Ronald Tammen from Fisher Hall (https://miamialumniblog.com/2020/10/30/ron-tammen-where-are-you/). I’ve been researching Tammen’s disappearance for nearly 12 years for a book project, and have turned up some interesting findings. I submitted a comment to Slant Talk encouraging people to come to my website to read more about that topic, but after two weeks, my comment is still awaiting moderation. Is there a problem with my comment that I should adjust? It would be wonderful if MUAA would acknowledge the work of one of its own in helping solve this mystery.

Their bounce-back email said that they receive a lot of email traffic, and they would try to respond as soon as they were able. If I needed a more immediate answer, however, they provided a number to call.

Six days later, I’d still heard nothing, so I decided to call the number today. I identified myself and asked if they’d be approving my comment. I was informed that they would not. When I asked why not, the MUAA staffer told me that they had a policy not to direct their readers to other websites. When I asked if I could resubmit my comment without the URL, she responded (and I paraphrase here), “Was that on Ronald Tammen?” “Yes,” I said. She then told me that they’d already written a couple times on Ron Tammen and had no interest in writing anything more. “Interesting,” I think I said, and I told her to keep an eye out for my blog because I’d be discussing their blog post.

“Thank you,” said she. “You bet,” said I.

The internet can be a daunting place for people like me. Compared to an organization like Miami University, I’m small and insignificant. So when MUAA posts a generic piece on Ron Tammen, it’ll trounce my stuff every time. They have way more followers plus an IT team who is busy maximizing their SEO through meta tags and alt texts and all the other stuff I’m supposed to do but I’m not very knowledgeable about.

Credit: The IT Crowd, via GIPHY

It’s OK though. When A Good Man Is Hard to Find winds up on page one of a Google search (we’re #2!) or DuckDuckGo search (we’re #1!) on “Ronald Tammen,” you can bet that it landed there based on the content (85 posts and counting!). The search engines are confident that if you click on one of my links, you’re going to learn something about Tammen.

Does Miami University want people to ignore my blog? All signs point to yes, though I don’t get it. No one alive today on or off campus had anything to do with Tammen’s disappearance. Why doesn’t the university want to help find the solution?

If they really wanted to know the answer to the question “Ron Tammen? Where are you?” they have a funny way of showing it.

Joe Cella, Miami University, University Faculty and Administrators

Halloween 1973 and the muzzling of Joe Cella

On Friday, October 26, 1973, a calendar item appeared in the Miami Student announcing a talk to be delivered Halloween night. The speaker, Joe Cella, would be presenting at 8 p.m. in the Heritage Room of Miami’s former student center, now known as the Shriver Center. His presentation had been titled “The Ronald Tammen Disappearance.” There was no need for additional verbiage explaining who Ronald Tammen was or why anyone should care—everyone already knew.

Cella was the Hamilton Journal-News reporter who’d devoted decades to investigating Ron’s disappearance from Miami University in 1953. He’d intended to solve the mystery. He dug and he dug, until, quite probably, he’d made a nuisance of himself on Miami’s campus, at least in the minds of the administrators. If it hadn’t been for Joe Cella, some of the most significant clues of the case would have remained in faded notes and eroding memory banks.

In 1973, Cella had been on a roll. Earlier that year, he’d broken the story about Garret J. Boone, a family physician and Butler County coroner who’d said that Ron had walked into his office in Hamilton on November 19, 1952. (The article erroneously says the office was on Third Street, when it was actually located at 134 North Second Street. You can step inside that very building the next time you’re in or around Hamilton. Doc Boone’s old office is now a bar that features artisanal beer and live music.)

The reason for Ron’s visit was to request that his blood type be tested. Boone said he’d never received such an odd request in his 35 years of practice, and he’d asked Tammen why he needed to have his blood typed. Tammen responded, “I might have to give some blood one of these days.” Doc Boone was able to provide documentation to Cella—a medical record that included Ron’s name, address, and the date of Ron’s visit.

Cella’s fresh lead was published on April 23, 1973, for the 20th anniversary of Tammen’s disappearance, which had likely captured the attention of students serving on Miami University’s Program Board. Someone reached out to Cella to see if he’d be willing to give a talk on campus, and Joe said “sure.” Of course, they picked Halloween for the date of his talk. That’s when students always turned their thoughts to Tammen.

I mean DAYUMMM, you guys. Who among us wouldn’t have paid hundreds to hear that talk? I would have given my eye teeth, my “J” teeth, my “K” teeth, and my “LMNOP” teeth to get a chance to hear Joe Cella riffing verbatim on the Tammen case. The Heritage Room would have been packed to the rafters that night. Joe would have been fielding student questions way past his allotted time. But alas, it wasn’t to be. Something happened in the short time interval between Friday’s printed announcement and the following Tuesday that brought Joe’s talk to a grinding halt. In the next issue of the Miami Student—October 30th—this notice was published:

Cella cancelled

Joe Cella’s presentation on the “Ronald Tammen Disappearance” which was scheduled for October 31 has been cancelled. Cella, a news staff worker on the Hamilton Journal, has not received clearance from federal authorities to release material which he has acquired concerning the case. Cella has promised to present his material as part of a Program Board event pending receipt of such clearance.

“Hmmm,” thought I, when I first read the blurb.

Let me tell you a little something about practitioners of journalism, especially journalism of the investigative variety: we don’t wait around for permission to reveal something we’ve managed to dig up. We’ll protect our sources till death if need be, and we’ll protect people’s personal information too. Also, journalists who have somehow accessed classified information that could impact our national security have often elected to withhold that information for, you know, national security’s sake. But material on Ron Tammen? That seems like fair game to me.

So who put the kibosh on Cella’s talk? I doubt that it was the students who served on the Program Board. In 1973, Watergate was front-page news and the Vietnam War still had two more years before all U.S. troops had exited Saigon. Students were wary of feds in general—plus, what student wouldn’t want to hear the inside scoop on Tammen?

What about Cella? From what I’ve learned about him over the years, I’m sure there’s no way that he would have accepted a speaking gig and then, at the last minute, said that he needed to get an “all clear” from some federal agency before he could go public with the juicy tidbit he’d managed to get his hands on. Look at it this way: Can you imagine me calling the FBI and saying, “Hey, I’ve obtained a document stating that Ron Tammen’s fingerprints were expunged due to the Privacy Act or a court order. OK if I print that on my blog? If you could send me your blessing ASAP, I’d be so grateful.” Yeah, right. If you’ll recall, I posted that discovery within 24 hours of my learning it.

Also, how would Cella have obtained whatever he obtained? It’s difficult to say, since we don’t know what he had, but someone representing a federal agency had probably given it to him. And once that happens, boom. It becomes public information. No additional permission necessary.

That leaves us with Miami University administrators. Did Miami officials cancel Cella’s talk, and if so, why would they give two hoots about what Joe would be presenting that night and whether he’d obtained prior permission from “federal authorities”?

Before I address that question, let’s refer back to Cella’s article from April 23, 1973. Not only did we learn about Doc Boone’s visit from Tammen in November 1952 but we learned something else in that article: that Doc Boone had attempted to tell Miami officials about Tammen’s visit back in 1953 but he’d been summarily rebuffed.

“I offered this information (the medical file card contents) to local authorities at the time, but it was always discounted,” the article quoted him as saying. Also, “I discussed it in the past a number of times with two or three persons associated with Miami University, but they didn’t want to discuss the case.” And this: “I feel I definitely got the brush-off.” And then: “As I said before, I offered the information but they didn’t care to listen or pursue it. So I just put the card away and forgot about it.” And finally: “Maybe this information could have been valuable then. I was upset because I was given the run-around by the school.”

Terms like brush-off and run-around aren’t the sorts of things a university likes to read about itself, and the article had indeed been noticed on Miami’s campus. Affixed to the back of the article in University Archives is a note with the letterhead of the Office of Public Information, which was under the direction of Robert T. Howard. Howard had succeeded Gilson Wright in leading Miami’s News Bureau in 1956, and in 1960, he was promoted to director of the Office of Public Information.

The quasi-mocking note says:

Paul –

Who’s left for him to scold but thee and me?

Howard

Based on the letterhead, I believe the note was written by Robert T. Howard. I’ve tried to determine who Paul is, and I’ll offer up my guess here: I think Robert Howard was writing to Paul Schumacher, the director of Miami University’s Health Service. There weren’t that many Pauls in high posts at Miami in 1973-74, and it seems that it would be on topic for Howard to write to the head of the health service over a fuming physician and his evidence of an off-site doctor’s visit by Tammen.

Several months later, that little flare-up would have still been fresh in the university’s mind, particularly in the mind of the person whose primary responsibility was to show the university in the best possible light, Bob Howard. As Howard was reading the October 26th issue of the Miami Student, sipping his coffee and pondering the fall weekend ahead, he probably had a mini-meltdown when he read who’d be coming to campus on Halloween night. As head of Miami’s Public Information Office, Howard oversaw media relations for the university. Managing Joe Cella would have certainly been within his job description.

Perhaps Howard was still stinging from Cella’s article about Doc Boone and decided that he wouldn’t be welcome on campus. If so, he might have called Joe to find out what he’d be talking about and made up the excuse that he’d need to obtain federal approval first, just to introduce a roadblock. Maybe.

Or could the request for clearance from federal authorities have reflected a degree of familiarity with Tammen’s case? Maybe Howard, who’d been working in communications for the university in various capacities since 1947, knew about the federal government’s involvement in Tammen’s disappearance. If so, he would have also known that the university wouldn’t want to anger the sorts of people who I believe were pulling the strings. Perhaps Howard told Cella to seek clearance to make sure the university didn’t stray from whatever marching orders they might have been given back in 1953. If the feds say it’s OK, then it’s OK with us too, Howard might have told Cella.

I have no idea what materials Joe Cella had in his possession from the federal government concerning Tammen. Cella’s sons weren’t able to shed light on that question and his Tammen file is long gone. Likewise, when I asked them if they could recall the Halloween of 1973 when their father’s university talk had been abruptly canceled, it didn’t ring any bells with them. I also contacted former student representatives of Miami’s 1973-74 Program Board and asked if they could recall the incident. Only one person responded and that person had no recollection of the Tammen program that had been canceled.

In 1977, Cella was interviewed by a reporter for the Dayton Daily News about his search for Tammen. He didn’t mention the government materials he’d had in his possession in 1973. Instead, the article says: “Cella said that federal agencies have refused to cooperate with him or Tammen’s family.” In addition, it said that he’d attempted to obtain Tammen’s records from the Social Security Administration but was refused.

This past week, I was in Oxford again, conducting more Tammen research, and I was standing in Miami’s Athletic Hall of Fame inside Millett Hall. There, among the photos of swimmers, wrestlers, football players, basketball players, and the like was a photo of Robert T. Howard, who’d been inducted in 1989 for his role in directing sports information.

So…who do you think canceled Joe’s Halloween talk in 1973?

As for the year 2021, Happy Halloween to all who celebrate! 🎃

Miami University, Psychology Department, University Faculty and Administrators

The second man, part 2: a Friday-night document drop

Good evening, dear AGMIHTF readers. Tonight I’ll be dropping three historic documents for your perusal. Please be advised: the forthcoming document drop will not be answering any major questions. Rather, these documents are more corroborating in nature. But, hey, corroboration is a good thing too, right? In fact, imho, there’s nothing quite like a little corroboration to get the weekend off to a half-decent start.

Tonight’s documents have to do with Richard Delp. As I explained two blog posts ago (and for those of you who are keeping score at home, that was post #79. Can you believe we’re now at #81?!), Richard Delp was an assistant professor in psychology who, for whatever reason, was listed in the number two spot of three professors in Carl Knox’s notes concerning Ron Tammen’s disappearance.

Here’s a quick refresher from that post:

In October 1952, Richard Delp had been called onto the carpet by an unidentified supervisor, most likely department chair Everett Patten, to discuss his lack of a Ph.D., a crucial thing for someone in his position to have. He was given until the end of the 1953-54 academic year to finish his thesis, otherwise, his job would be in jeopardy.

In a follow-up report of the conversation, the supervisor described admonishing Delp thusly: “I pointed out to him that he was now in his third year as an assistant professor, that the probation period was from two to four years, and that if he didn’t have his Doctor’s degree by the end of 1953-54, the question of his retention might arise.”

For those of you who are still keeping score at home, the end of academic year 1953-54 would be sometime in late May or early June of 1954, depending on whether or not you’re counting finals week in your calculations. Therefore, Delp had been given roughly 20 months in which to double down on getting his doctorate degree. Twenty months sounds totally doable, but it’s not realistic. Since Delp had such a taxing teaching schedule, and since he was pursuing his degree at Ohio State, he did most of his graduate work in the summers. Essentially, he had one summer—the summer of 1953—to get everything done.

He didn’t.

Most people would guess that Delp’s job in psychology would have come to an abrupt end, but that’s not what happened. A one-page administrative sheet documenting his salary and promotions while in the psychology department said that, in 1954, not only didn’t he receive a pink slip, but he received tenure.

This concludes the refresher.

In academia, tenure is a prestigious perk that assures a professor that, unless they do something egregious, their job will always be safe. It’s a big deal. In order for Richard Delp to receive tenure, his nomination would have to be approved by the president of the university—who was Dr. John Millett—and the Board of Trustees, which met every year at the end of the spring semester. But at that level, the list is pretty much rubberstamped. The more in-depth conversations would have taken place earlier in the year with the provost, Dr. Clarence Kreger; the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Dr. W.E. Alderman; and of course, the chair of the psychology department, Dr. Everett Patten.

So I wondered: were university administrators a little more lenient back then? I don’t know much about Dean Alderman, but I’ve read about how Kreger operated, and he was legendarily tough as nails. It wasn’t a secret that he intimidated people—a lot—Everett Patten being one of those people. How could Patten have convinced Kreger that Delp should be rewarded with tenure when his job performance in 1954 was so lackluster and he still didn’t have his Ph.D.? Was the one-sheeter accurate? I mean, look at it. It’s a mimeographed form with notations hand-scrawled in ink or pencil lead. It hardly looks like an official document. However, I’d seen records on professors in other departments, and they had the same penned-in forms. It seemed to be factual, but I wanted to be sure.

I went back to the university. The Board of Trustees meetings are posted on Miami’s Digital Collections, so I located the one that seemed to be the most promising contender for granting Delp’s tenure: June 4, 1954. However, when I read the minutes, I discovered that the handouts containing the names of the employees who were being voted on weren’t included online. I submitted a public records request to Miami’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC), asking if they still had them, and if so, could I have a copy.

Yesterday, the OGC sent me a scanned copy of the handout.

handouts-from-June-4-1954 Download

Document #1: Board of Trustees handouts – June 4, 1954

Two things jumped out at me: Not only did Richard Delp indeed receive tenure on June 4, 1954 (see page 7), but he’d been on leave during the spring semester of that year as well (see page 1).

So it all boils down to this:

In October 1952, Richard Delp is warned that he has until the end of the 1953-54 academic year—by June 1954—to get his Ph.D., and he promises to ask his thesis adviser and others at Ohio State how he can do that.
Except for the year he took off from Miami to work full-time on his doctorate degree, Delp was mainly commuting to Ohio State during the summers to work on his Ph.D.
The only summer between October 1952 and June 1954 was the summer of 1953. But Delp didn’t register for graduate work at Ohio State that summer.
Also, he took time off from teaching during the spring of 1954, though we don’t know why. Perhaps he was writing his thesis, but, if so, he never defended it. He never registered for graduate work at Ohio State after summer 1951.
June 4, 1954, Richard Delp is approved for tenure by Miami’s Board of Trustees.

Richard Delp’s transcripts from Ohio State University. He never attended after summer 1951.

I may be wrong, but I think something happened between October 1952 (when Richard Delp was warned to get his Ph.D.) and June 1953 (when he should have been enrolled in graduate work at Ohio State) to make Richard Delp think that his position was safe with the Department of Psychology.

Documents 2&3: Men’s Disciplinary Board nomination

The other two documents I’m dropping tonight were written in August 1956, when Richard Delp was invited to sit on the Men’s Disciplinary Board, a board by which male students who veered outside the university’s rules were dealt with accordingly. Delp felt conflicted about sitting on the board, and he wrote to Kreger to explain why. Mainly, it was because Delp had been informally counseling students and he felt that assuming the two roles—informal counselor and disciplinary board member—would be problematic.

Dr. Kreger was not pleased. The next day, he wrote Delp, telling him that he wasn’t aware that Delp was acting in that role, and adding: “If you have assumed a personal counseling function which is taking a sufficient amount of your time to interfere with intellectual growth and scholarly productivity, I think we ought to know about it.” In a postscript, he reminded Delp that any extra time should be devoted to working on his Ph.D. instead. Kreger invited Delp in for a meeting, though I don’t know if it took place. I do know that Delp served as a member of the Men’s Disciplinary Board for academic year 1956-57 and possibly the following year as well.

My point is this: Clarence Kreger was definitely not a softie and the fact that Delp still didn’t have his Ph.D. in 1956 did not escape his notice. I just wish I knew what convinced Kreger and all the others to nominate Delp for tenure in 1954.

Again, I’m just putting the question out there. If you have thoughts/comments/questions, please feel free to DM me or write rontammenproject@gmail.com. Have a great weekend, everyone.

Miami University, Psychology Department, University Faculty and Administrators

The second man

During the brief period in which Miami University officials were actively looking into Ronald Tammen’s disappearance, Carl Knox had written three names on a legal pad. The first name was Prof. Dennison, which makes total sense. J. Belden Dennison was a revered professor of finance at Miami in addition to being an academic adviser to students in the Business School, Ron included. If I were Carl Knox, I, too, would have reached out to Dennison—“Denny” as his colleagues liked to call him. Denny would have let Knox know about how Ron had been falling behind in his coursework that year. He would have been a little perplexed when Knox informed him that Ron’s psychology book was left open on his desk the evening of his disappearance.

“Are you sure it was his psychology book, Carl?” Denny might have asked.

“That’s right—by Norman Munn. It was open to a section on Habits…or maybe he was reading about post-hypnotic suggestion on the righthand page. I don’t know.”

“Hmmm. That’s weird,” Denny would probably say. “Tammen had dropped his psychology course just recently. I know because I signed his withdrawal slip.”

The third name on the list was Prof. Switzer, instructor of said psychology course. We’ve gotten to know Doc Switzer quite well over the years on this blog site. In fact, if he knew how many column-inches I’d be dedicating to his, um, extracurricular activities, I’m guessing the super-secretive Switzer would be rolling over in his grave right about now. (Sorry, Doc, but you fascinate me.)

It’s the second name on the list that we’ll be focusing on today: Prof. Delp.

In 1952-53, Richard T. Delp was an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. He, St. Clair Switzer, and Ted Perin, another Miami psychology professor who’d studied under Clark Hull, shared office space in room 118 of old Harrison Hall. I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog site that the inclusion of Delp’s name in the #2 position of Knox’s list is especially curious since Ron wasn’t taking a course from him. Why would Carl Knox think that Richard Delp could provide useful information concerning Ron Tammen?

Richard Delp was the consummate teacher. He loved to learn and he loved to teach. In fact, his zeal for learning made it somewhat difficult to pin down his area of expertise. As an undergraduate at Miami, he majored in psychology and sociology for his bachelor of arts degree, and the next year, he earned a bachelor of science degree in biology and English. As for biology, he especially enjoyed the flora and fauna of Ohio, and he seemed to get a lot of joy out of his farm on Morning Sun Road, where he would host picnics and lead groups of students on nature hikes. He built a cabin there for use by the local Boy Scouts, an organization he was active in for decades. A year after graduating with his B.S. degree, Delp earned his master’s, also from Miami, in education.

Delp’s academic career at Miami began in 1945-46, when he was hired by the English Department. (He taught recognition and code at the Naval School on campus for several months during WWII, although info is conflicting regarding the precise timeframe. Also, it was war-related so we’re not counting it here.) In 1946-47, he moved to the Department of Psychology, where Dr. Patten, the chair, probably felt incredibly fortunate to have found him. Throughout the war, the department had been chugging along on fumes as several faculty members had left their professorial posts to serve in the armed forces, including Switzer. After the war was over, the student population nearly doubled the next academic year, from 2345 to 4559. Courses in general psychology were back in high demand, jumping from 9 sections in 1945-46 to 22 in 1946-47. The department needed qualified people to teach heavy course loads throughout each day. Although Switzer had returned to Oxford, he wouldn’t be teaching for several more years as he was helping counsel returning veterans about possible career options. Richard Delp would have been a lifesaver to help carry some of the burden.

But there were aspects to academia that Delp struggled with, one of the main hurdles being the pursuit of a doctorate degree.

Currently, anyone who aspires to teach at a university generally progresses straight through their educational training, from undergraduate degree to doctorate, oftentimes earning a master’s degree along the way. He or she then performs post-doctoral research somewhere until finally landing a position as an assistant professor, usually somewhere else. It’s a long and arduous process, but essential. Having a doctorate is pretty much a prerequisite to getting your foot inside the door as a faculty member at a university.

That’s only the beginning. You’ve heard of the phrase “publish or perish”? It’s definitely a thing. As soon as a person is hired as an assistant professor, they have several years in which to publish as many papers as they can, plus do anything else to stand out among their peers: acquire grants, serve on university committees, accrue some grad students, hobnob at professional meetings, deliver presentations, take part in media interviews—establish themselves as an expert. They also have to teach a bunch of classes, which includes grading a ton of papers. A cake walk it is not.

After several years, the promotion and tenure committee holds a high-def magnifying lens to that person’s accomplishments and decides if they deserve to be promoted to associate professor. If the answer is yes, they’re usually granted tenure—job security—at roughly the same time, generally after a probationary period. An answer of no is tantamount to being fired, and they need to begin a job search. Of course the process by which an associate professor is promoted to full professor requires more of the above, although they’ll still have a job if they should be turned down since they already have tenure.

Back in Delp’s day, there was a little more wiggle room. A person holding a master’s degree might be hired as an instructor or even an assistant professor. Such new hires would be expected to work toward a higher degree, and Delp certainly worked toward his. After Patten hired him in 1946-47 as an instructor, Delp began taking graduate classes at The Ohio State University that summer. He continued doing so during the summers of ’48 and ‘49, and in 1949-50, he attended graduate school full-time, residing in Columbus. His research thesis was on student ratings of college instructors. When he returned to Oxford in 1950, he was promoted to assistant professor in psychology, which was accompanied by a nice pay raise. In the summer of ’51, he was back to commuting to Ohio State to work on his research.

However, he didn’t finish his dissertation. With no dissertation, there’s no Ph.D. And with no Ph.D., well…he probably shouldn’t have been teaching the courses he was teaching. The 1950 faculty manual stipulated for assistant professors “whose major responsibility is the teaching of academic classes, the doctor’s degree or its equivalent from an accredited college or university shall be required.”

Can I just interject here that I feel for the guy? Spending nine months a year teaching hundreds of students and grading thousands of papers and then taking time off during the summer months to take graduate classes—which he excelled at—and conduct research sounds like a hard life with no let-up. By 1952, he didn’t do anything more toward his degree at Ohio State, according to his transcripts. Goodbye, Columbus.

On October 15, 1952, someone in a position of authority—I’m guessing it was Patten—had a sit-down with Delp to discuss his situation. The supervisor reminded Delp that his probationary period as an assistant professor was nearing an end and if he didn’t have his Ph.D. “by the end of 1953-54, the question of his retention might arise.” Delp vowed to discuss the matter with the folks at Ohio State and to work out a plan to “finish for his degree” by 1954. To soften the tone of his write-up, the supervisor added in the last paragraph that Delp was extremely busy with teaching and that “he seems to be happy with the work which he is doing with the Business students…,” though the supervisor doesn’t specify what work Delp was doing.

A supervisor’s report from a meeting with Delp on 10-15-52; click on image for a closer view

As we all know, the next semester, Ron Tammen, a sophomore business student at Miami, went missing, and Delp’s name as well as that of his office mate, St. Clair Switzer, who taught Tammen’s General Psychology course, were jotted down in Carl Knox’s notes.

The year 1954 came and went, and Delp still hadn’t made headway toward his doctoral degree. A review of his accomplishments for January 1, 1954–June 1, 1955 shows none of the activities expected of someone in his position. Other than joining several professional organizations—paying his dues, basically—his form is mostly left blank. (Inexplicably, activities for subsequent years were written into the space for the last question.)

You might think that it would have been the end of the line for him. With no Ph.D. and no publications or any other accomplishments to speak of other than teaching, you’d think that the year 1954 would have been his last in the psychology department. But you’d be mistaken.

In 1954, Richard Delp was granted “indefinite tenure” according to his administrative one-sheeter, though he remained an assistant professor. He also received sizable pay increases for that year and the succeeding year, which are difficult to explain based on his 1954-55 progress review form.

The 1950 faculty manual defined tenure as “a means to certain ends, specifically: (1) Freedom of teaching and research and of extra-mural activities, and (2) A sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability.”

Despite being granted tenure, Richard Delp resigned from his position in psychology in 1961, shortly before Switzer was named department chair. In her book “Eighty Year of Psychology at Miami,” Fern Patten said that it was for health reasons. Two years later, he would be hired by the School of Education, where he would receive accolades as an outstanding professor.

But my question is this: what happened between October 1952, when a supervisor was warning Delp about his precarious academic position, and academic year 1953-1954, when he received the first of two big pay increases, not to mention indefinite tenure, which was awarded in 1954?

I’m only asking the question, guys. There may be a perfectly good explanation.

Salary progression during time in the Psychology Department

Here’s a chart I’ve created of Richard Delp’s salary progression, year-by-year, while in the Psychology Department. The numbers to the right of the bars are the percent increase he received from the prior year.

I’ll be turning comments off for this one. I am continuing to seek documents that could help address my question. If you have thoughts on this topic or if you happen to have additional information, feel free to DM me on Facebook or Twitter or email me at rontammenproject@gmail.com. Requests for anonymity will be honored.

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As a postscript, it’s hard to believe that a year has passed since we lost Marcia Tammen, who passed away on August 31, 2020. We miss her so much, and in her memory and honor, we will continue seeking evidence that may one day tell us what happened to her brother Ron.

CIA, Hypnosis, Miami University, MKULTRA, Psychology Department, University Faculty and Administrators

The sabbatical: how I think St. Clair Switzer and a well-known MKULTRA psychiatrist spent the summer of 1957

There’s nothing quite like the fourth wave of a pandemic to put one in the mood to read old MKULTRA documents. For some reason, the prospect of reading indecipherable photocopies with all the good parts blacked out made me want to do anything else BUT that. However, because the delta variant has been keeping me from doing more exciting research, I’ve decided to mosey on back to The Black Vault website. I’m currently rummaging through the stash again—both the documents I’d already been through as well as the ones that were released in 2018.

It’s been time well spent.

In my recent Facebook post, I describe a newly released document that appears to be written to Griffith Wynne Williams, a hypnosis expert who’d studied under Clark Hull at the University of Wisconsin. Williams and St. Clair Switzer (Ronald Tammen’s psychology professor) would have known one another pretty well back in the day. They were graduate students under Hull at the same time, with Williams receiving his Ph.D. in 1929, the same year that Switzer earned his master’s degree. I’ve brought up Williams’ name before on this blogsite. I believe he’s the third person mentioned in our March 25, 1952, memo, along with Hull and Switzer.

In this newly discovered letter—dated December 6, 1956—the writer mentions the recipient’s workplace, Rutgers, a revelation that somehow escaped the CIA’s black pen. I know of exactly one hypnosis expert from Rutgers during that era. Griffith Wynne Williams.

December 6, 1956 letter

After reading more documents on The Black Vault from that general time period, not only am I even more convinced that the recipient was Williams, but I also believe that the letter writer was St. Clair Switzer. I also think that at the time that he was writing the letter, Switzer was on sabbatical and working with…

wait for it…

Louis Jolyon (Jolly) West.

Those are some bold assertions, I know, but I have evidence. Let’s do it this way: I’ll present two additional documents that I’ve found on The Black Vault website, one that was released in 2018 and the other that had been available on CD-ROM but that has gained new significance now that we know about the two letters. After each document, I’ll submit my arguments for why I’ve reached the above conclusions. Here we go.

February 8, 1957 letter

This letter is from the same person as before, and its recipient is also Griffith Williams. I’m 100 percent confident that it’s Williams because the letter writer refers to the recipient’s recent “attack of arthritis.” Williams had a long history with rheumatoid arthritis. Also, Williams was a respected hypnosis researcher who frequently demonstrated hypnotic phenomena before large audiences. In 1947, he hypnotized members of a theater troupe between the first and second acts to see if it might improve their acting ability, a stunt that brought him national attention. The topics of discussion in both letters were right up Williams’ alley.

Because this letter is tougher to read, I’m including the verbiage here:

8 February 1957

Dear [BLANK],

We were delighted to receive your most interesting letter of 22 January 1957. Sorry to hear of the attack of arthritis and we hope that it is better now. [BLANK] and I have gone over your material and suggestions and find them very useful.

The problem of the use of hypnosis by a public speaker or some related technique which could be used by an individual to control or influence a crowd is of considerable importance and as you have noted there is very little information along these lines anywhere. This area is particularly interesting to [BLANK]. He told me that he will obtain [BLANK’S] book immediately.

Your comments concerning the possibility of making the subjects do something against their ethics or religious convictions were also extremely interesting. Unfortunately, these single tests, without proper conditioning or properly building a background are not too valid. In general, your examples cover most of the experience in the field. However, the next time we see you we will tell you of some unusual work and results with which we are familiar. I found your reaction to the carotid artery technique interests me. Some people insist the technique is very dangerous and your reactions convinced me that this area could stand a great deal of work. I have not tried the technique myself but have been present when it has been done. There is some debate as to whether or not this is true hypnosis or a coma-like condition produced as a result of pressure on the artery. I’ll have to start looking for volunteers.

The rest of your suggestions and ideas are very worthwhile. As I said before I hope to discuss them with you in the near future at some greater length.

[BLANK] and I know that you are very busy what with teaching and the special work you do for the [BLANK]. We were, however, very impressed with you [sic] honesty in this field and the fact that you were willing to spend some of your valuable time with us. Sometime in the near future we will get in touch with you and try to arrange it so that our visit will not interfere with any school work or other work you may be doing. I am very much in favor of informal discussions in this [field?] at some quiet spot and perhaps we can arrange it so that you could come to the local hotel and have dinner with us and talk later.

While I know it is unnecessary for me to again caution you concerning the highly sensitive nature of this material, I will ask you to destroy this letter when you have read it.

With kindest personal regards.

Very sincerely,

[BLANK]

Why I think St. Clair Switzer wrote the 1956 and 1957 letters

My dear BLANK

The opening to the 1956 letter, “My dear BLANK,” is pure Clark Hull. I have dozens of Hull’s letters to both Switzer and Everett Patten, Miami’s longtime department chair in psychology, and nearly every single one of them opens with that phrase. It’s cute and endearing. I think Switzer seemed to like it too. He would use it from time to time, depending on the stature of the recipient and his relationship with them. He used it in a letter to Miami University President Upham in 1936. Because he was writing to a fellow Hull student, he probably thought it would be a nice reminder of their former mentor, who’d passed away in 1952.

His use of telltale vocabulary words

In the 1956 letter, after the list of topics, the letter writer says “We grant that the above list is long and that any item individually could well deserve a Ph.D. thesis…”. In my experience, these are the words of someone who holds a doctoral degree. The general public frequently calls the product of someone’s doctoral research a dissertation. But among doctoral degree holders, they’ll frequently refer to their dissertation as a Ph.D. thesis. These are the words of someone in academia.

A telltale vocabulary word in the February 1957 letter is the reference to “conditioning” when talking about a subject being made to do something against his or her ethics or religious convictions. Clark Hull was a behaviorist who felt that all human behavior could be defined through conditioned responses. Conditioning was part of Switzer’s academic upbringing, probably Williams’ too. Switzer’s first scientific paper was titled “Backward Conditioning of the Lid Reflex.” The czar of conditioning himself—Pavlov!—had requested a reprint of Switzer’s paper back in 1932, which was a major coup. Clark Hull’s (endearing) response was “I think that if Pavlov should ask for anything that I had done I should have some kind of seizure – I don’t know just what!”

The insecure tone

Switzer’s words are gracious and deferential, but also self-important, which isn’t an easy vibe to pull off. He would be obsequious to those he viewed as “better” or more knowledgeable than he was about a particular subject area or if he needed something, both of which I think applied to Williams.

As for his self-importance—his repeated cautionary words, his bragging about being privy to insider info—I view Switzer as an insecure academic. He published very little after he returned to Oxford from WWII and he didn’t maintain strong relationships with his academic peers outside of Oxford. Therefore, he seemed to bolster his self-esteem through his association with the military.

He was writing to an old associate from his glory days with Hull

Switzer wasn’t good at making friends with colleagues. He didn’t attend professional meetings. He didn’t go to departmental picnics. He rubbed people the wrong way, especially as he got older. Because he published very little, he probably wasn’t keeping up with the scientific literature either. So, here he is, ostensibly working on a “highly classified” hypnosis project with someone big, and they have some questions about what’s currently happening in the field. Who does this letter writer contact? A person Switzer used to know in grad school.

He was approved for a sabbatical for the 1956-57 academic year

In his 1957 letter to Williams, the letter writer talks about how busy Williams must be with teaching, which made me wonder: why isn’t this person also busy with teaching? He’s an academic too. As it so happens, Switzer had been approved for a sabbatical that year. Originally, he was planning to go to UCLA to work in the laboratory of Marion A. (Gus) Wenger. (Uncle Gus! Nah…no relation.) However, that fell through at the last minute when Gus decided to go to India to study yogis.

So what’s a guy to do? Say “oh well” and go back to his regular teaching schedule at Miami? Hardly. That sabbatical had been approved two years earlier by President Millett and if Switzer could get out of a year of teaching, he surely would. I’m certain his friends in the Air Force helped him find a replacement gig, which leads us to the third document.

A proposal for “Studies in the Military Application of Hypnotism: 1. The Hypnotic Messenger”

As I said before, even though this document was included on the original CD-ROM I’d received from the CIA, it takes on new relevance when juxtaposed with the two letters that weren’t available until 2018.

First, note that it was written just two days before the February 1957 letter. Second, the timeframe is rather, um, ambitious, shall we say? The proposal writer calls the development of a hypnotic messenger “uncomplicated” and claims that he and his associate should be able to complete their project by the end of the summer. That’s a special kind of arrogance. Third, there’s no meat to this proposal. People who oversee federal grants might be inclined to call this a “trust me” proposal, something that a researcher—particularly one who is well known in his or her field—might send to a funding source before the details have all been fleshed out. (Thankfully, funders of today can spot a “trust me” proposal a mile away, and they’ll send it back unfunded.) But this proposal writer appears to be saying: “Hey, you guys, it’s me here. You know I can do the work. Heck, I have a couple other projects waiting in the wings that are MUCH harder. Can I expect the ten grand in the mail ASAP?” (In today’s money, that’s a little over $97,000.)

Why I think Jolly West was the proposal writer and St. Clair Switzer was his associate

Both West and Switzer are military officers in academia who have expertise in hypnosis. I don’t believe there would have been a large number of people meeting these qualifications back then.

The proposal writer seems to be a big deal. His cover letter is relatively informal, as if he’s on a first-name basis with the recipient. His tone isn’t the least bit deferential. They appear to have an “ask and you shall receive” sort of relationship.

The proposal writer’s cover letter also mentions a man he is fortunate to have with him “this year” who is “thoroughly familiar with hypnotism at the theoretical level.” That sounds a lot like St. Clair Switzer to me. The reference to his knowledge of hypnosis theory could certainly be attributed to his experimental work for Clark Hull’s 1933 book, Hypnosis and Suggestibility: An Experimental Approach.

On the last page, the proposal writer makes the point that both the principal investigator and his associate are academics and the work needs to be completed by summer. Guess when Switzer’s sabbatical likely ends?

West was well known to the CIA at that point. He’d communicated with Sidney Gottlieb, who headed the CIA’s MKULTRA program, about hypnosis research since at least 1953. He had other projects going on too—including his USAF study of interrogation tactics used on POWs during the Korean War and his MKULTRA Research, Subproject 43, “Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility.”

The proposal states that volunteers would be recruited from military personnel as opposed to college students. West, who’d concluded his detail at Lackland Air Force Base, near San Antonio, in June 1956 and was now at the University of Oklahoma, had easy access to both demographic groups.

In March 1957 West had been given a SECRET security clearance for his POW interrogation research and, according to author Colin A. West, he held a TOP SECRET clearance for his work on Subproject 43. This could certainly explain why the letter writer referred to the information as “highly classified” and insisted that the letters be destroyed after they’d been read.

Since 2019, this blog has been waiting for confirmation on two CIA documents to help prove our theory: a March 25, 1952, memo that I believe recommends St. Clair Switzer and Griffith W. Williams as consultants in their hypnosis studies, and a January 14, 1953, memo that I believe recommends Major Louis J. West and the Lt. Colonel Switzer to lead a “well-balanced interrogation research center” for Project ARTICHOKE. Judging by the contents of these three documents, I don’t think our waiting is going to be in vain.

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MANY THANKS to TheBlackVault.com for doing the hard work and pursuing the documents that had been missing from the CIA’s earlier release!

CIA, Miami University, MKULTRA, Psychology Department, University Faculty and Administrators

Breaking: the 9-5-52 Project Artichoke report wasn’t typed on St. Clair Switzer’s typewriter*

*but that doesn’t mean Switzer didn’t write it

Sigh. It would have been so unbelievably cool, wouldn’t it? To be able to say that a CIA Project Artichoke report was typed up on Doc Switzer’s typewriter—a 1947 Smith Crappola, I’m guessing—with its wayward y’s and c’s and capital R’s, would have been too, too cool. A smoking typewriter could have saved this girl a lot of additional sweat and heartache and saved you all from having to read any more 3,000-word blog posts. (Oh, relax. This one’s shorter.) It would have been time for the party planning to begin because we would have attained our goal. Because, you guys, we’ll probably never know for sure what happened to Ron Tammen. The only thing we can probably hope to know is whether St. Clair Switzer indeed had CIA ties. And if the CIA was anywhere near Tammen during the second semester of 1952-53, then they made Tammen disappear. Plain and Simple.

But the report that had been written for the Psychological Strategy Board on September 5, 1952, wasn’t written on St. Clair Switzer’s typewriter. We know this because a forensic document examiner compared the three surviving pages of that report to a job application and letters that Switzer had typed up in 1951. She’s certain that they came from different typewriters, and now, so am I.

In the world of forensic document examination, a questioned document (Q) is compared to a known document (K) to see if they came from the same source. In our case, the Q is the 1952 Project Artichoke report and the K is Switzer’s job application and letters. Our examiner, Karen Nobles, concentrated on the typefaces of the two documents to arrive at her conclusion, and the evidence is compelling.

Here’s what she found:

the uppercase M: the center does not extend to the baseline on the questioned (Q) text, but does extend to the baseline in the known (K) text
the number 2 has a flat base on the Q, but a curvy base in the K
the bottom of the number 3 extends downward in the Q, but curves up in the K; the top of the 3 in the Q is rounded and in the K it is flat
the number 4 in the Q has an open top, but in the K it is closed
the number 5 in the Q has a flag on the top that extends upward and the bottom bowl extends downward; in the K the number 5 is flat on top and curves upward in the bottom bowl
the top of the number 6 extends upward in the Q, but in the K it curves downward and has a ball ending
the number seven may or may not have a downward extension on the top left in the Q but in the K, the 7 has a significant downward extension
the number 8 is much narrower in the Q than in the K
the number 9 extends downward in the Q, but curves upward and has a ball ending in the K

She also created this chart that shows the above differences in the numbers and letters:

So the report wasn’t typed on Switzer’s typewriter after all—OK, fine. That doesn’t mean that Switzer wasn’t on the RDB’s ad hoc committee or even that he didn’t write the report. It only means that our job isn’t over and we need to keep searching for clues.