I was perusing the Federal of Information Act (FOIA) 2013 log when I came across an interesting request by one "Matthew LeDoux."
The request was for:
Documents sufficient to establish that DARPA has had a secret relationship with the office of Silicon Valley Brain Spect Imaging in order to conduct secret experiments on patients of that clinic without their consent: These experiments are related to DARPA's goal of developing technologies of artificially reducing the need for sleep
Surprisingly the request, sent by Mr. LeDoux via E-mail in January of 2013, was fulfilled by FOIA in February of the same year. Startled that a request with such accusatory language would be honored and delivered by FOIA I figured that the Silicon Valley Brain SPECT Imaging deserved a closer look. My goal in this project was to identify what connections, if any, had been made between Silicon Valley Brain SPECT Imaging and DARPA covert operations as well as hopefully uncover some sort of new information in the process of research.
For a while I found little information to back up LeDoux's accusatory FOIA request. The Brain Spect website, while suspiciously "templatey" and unfinished (even though it was created 7 years ago) threw no particular red flags.
The lead M.D. at Silicon Valley Brain SPECT Imaging Center is William C. Klindt, M.D. The Meet Dr. Klint page on the site, as well as his profile on San Jose's Christian Counseling Center describe Klindt as a "Board Certified Psychiatrist specializing in child and adolescent Psychiatry."
I was beginning to think that LeDoux's FOIA request suggested nothing but a dead end when I came across something amazing on the Web. A user on www.dr-bob.org posted a thread regarding a first-hand experience accusing Brain SPECT of Non-Consensual Research. The original post (to which there are many reply's and sub threads by users, none of which are confirmed to be doctors) claims that the original poster "was the subject of a guinea pig experiment" when he visited the office of Dr. William C. Klindt in 2005 (the same year that the practice opened). The poster claims:
I took the SPECT twice. These visits occurred during late April of 2005. Once for a resting scan, and another for a concentration scan. On the first scan I experienced for several seconds confusion and an interruption of my normal thought processes. (Its difficult to explain but you aren’t supposed to feel or experience anything under a SPECT scan) After that, and before I took a second SPECT scan several weeks later, I experienced periods of confusion and difficulty concentrating which occurred periodically and lasted from 10 minutes to about a half hour at a time.
He goes on to describe symptoms of sleep loss, blurred and doubled vision, memory problems, decreased typing speed, "word mix-ups", problems hearing and doing mathematical calculations, decreased sociability, etc...
After describing his medical side effects, the poster outlines his reasons to believe that Klindt's practice was conducting experiments on him for military research. Some (even most) of his reasons seem paranoid (and none of them are credible) he brings up a few interesting ones:
Dr. Amen is a former military doctor who mentored Dr. Klindt.
Dr. Klindt provided research for the testing of Provigil, a drug originally designed by the military to keep soldiers awake.
Ceretec, the imaging tracer that was used, has a short half life and no known side effects besides cancer.
SPECT scans have never been shown to have side effects.
Dr. Klindt has the most advanced SPECT machine in the world and is the only doctor in the United States who uses that model for clinical purposes.
Unfortunately I was unable to find any sufficient evidence that further suggests that Dr. William C. Klindt's Silicon Valley Brain SPECT had any involvement with a DARPA initiative to test medical and prescriptive practices to decrease the brain's need for sleep. However, the specificity of LeDoux's FOIA request is interesting, especially as 1) government documents are confirmed to have been supplied to him and 2) the request was made in 2013, significantly after the allegations against Silicon Valley Brain SPECT in 2005.
That said, I am personally intrigued by these findings and am tempted to make the same FOIA request that LeDoux did last year with hopes to acquire government documents that suggest Silicon Valley's Brain SPECT Imaging's work with DARPA.