SLAIN CHURCH FOUNDER PLANNED FILM ON CIA DRUG EXPERIMENTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000100200071-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 9, 2010
• Sequence Number: 71
• Publication Date: November 14, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/09: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100200071-0 STAT
ASSOCIATED PRESS
14 HOVE! ER 1982
1 .
Slain Church Founder Planned Film on CIA Drug Experim
LOS ANGELES
George Peters, the Church of Naturalism founder who was murdered at its
Hollywood Hills compound a week ago, had been work_ng on a film in which he
c1c !BEd involvement in CIA crag experiments, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner Said Peters had for several years been
working with church secretary Susan Shore on the film: about a Central
Intelligence Agency mind-control program cared P1k ULTRA that 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-rinoed, six-acre
hilltop complex. Both had been beaten and shot. Police rave 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 gave to its experiments in using drugs,
LSD, to try to control human behavior. Th_ program began in 1949 ands
continued through 1964. According to congressional testimony in 1977 by former
CIA 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
program until The New York Times exposed the program in August 1977.
Peters reportedly outlined his connection with MK ULTRA in July 1981 in a
symposium at the University of California at Santa Cruz, titled, "The Social and
Cultural Implications of Consciousness Research."
The Herald Examiner said Peters had claimed to have volunteered to be a
subject in LSD experiments in 1957 while in the Navy. He also had said he was
involved in two other CIA mind-control programs after his discharge from the
Navy, the newspaper said.
But the Herald Examiner also said it could not determine whether Peters had
ever been in the Navy.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/09/09: CIA-RDP90-00806R000100200071-0