SLAIN CHUCH FOUNDER PLANNED FILM ON CIA DRUG EXPERIMENTATION

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201140013-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 25, 2010
• Sequence Number: 13
• Publication Date: November 14, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/25: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201140013-9
ASSOCIATE PRESS
14 NOVEN.BER 1982
Slain Church ^oun_er. Planned Film on CIA Dreg Experime
LCE AN3ELES
George Peters, the Church of Naturalism founder who was murdered at its
"071V- 10d Hills CC,-,jpound a week ego, had been work_n,' on a film in which he
involvement in CIA crug experiments, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner said reters ha' for several years been
worr,ing with church secretary Susan Shore on the film about a Central
Intelligence Agency mind-control program tailed KK ULTRA ti;at he claimed to
have been involved in.
"I was writing the story of his life prior to the founding of the church,
when he was supposedly one of the people with whom the CIA was doing a lot of
experimentation with drugs," Ms. Shore told the newspaper. "We were going to
make a film that was going to expose what the government was doing back in the
early 1960s."
Ms. Shore told the newspaper she began taking notes from Peters on MK ULTRA
in 1977.
Peters, 43, and church treasurer James Patrick Henneberry, 31, were found
slain Nov. 6 in one of two houses in the church's barb wire-ringed, six-acre
hilltop complex. Both had been beaten ant shot. Police have made no arrests in
the murders.
The Church of Naturalism grew out of a 1960s drug counseling program Peters
ran in Chicago.
MK ULTRA was the last code the CIA cave to its Experiments in using drugs,
~:,cl+. ding LSD, to try t: control human behavior. Ny p Tr,_ rag ram be--an in "I.,9
C ;r;tinued throe and
5h 1964. According to congressional testimony in 197/7 by former
;IA Director Stansfield Turner, the agency sponsored 149 projects on methods
ranging from drugs to magic.
Universities, foundations, hospitals, prisons and chemical companies
performed the research, largely unaware the projects were sponsored by the
CIA.
The newspaper said Peters did not speak in detail of his involvement in the
)rogran until The New York Times exposed the program :n August 1977.
Peters reportedly outlined his connection with MK ULTRA in July 1981 in a
;yrposium at the University of California at Santa Cruz, titled, "The Social and
:ultural Implications of Consciousness Research."
The Herald Examiner said Peters had claimed to have volunteered to be a
ubject in LSD experiments in 1957 while in the Navy. He also had said he was
nvolved in two other CIA mind-control programs after his discharge from the
avy, the newspaper said.
But the Herald Examiner also said it could not determine whether Peters had
ver been in the Navy.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/08/25: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201140013-9