the saltbox

i haven't moved. dr. alaine moreau. that name has been burned into the backs of my eyes for four days now. after the last post i went straight to searching. not in the footlocker this time but online. i routed through so many public library proxies i could barely load a webpage. but then i found her. or at least who she used to be. post-war france called her a prodigy in psychiatry. her 1950s papers are fucked up. she didn't want to heal trauma at all. she was obsessed with it. she wrote about "collective psychic events" and the theoretical possibility of a "harmonized consciousness," arguing that a group of traumatized minds, if properly "attuned," could create a perceptual field greater than the sum of its parts. her work wasn't just theoretical. her name was scrawled in the footnotes of a project gabriel file i had overlooked. it was about an experiment at the fernald school in massachusetts. the public story, the one you can look up, is tha...

it's been 3 days since the last post. i haven't really slept, just micro naps in the car, parked in various locations and never for more than a night or two. lamb's microfilm index is stuck in my head. a grid of numbers and letters, each one tied to a child. i started cross-referencing the french test identifiers with lamb's list. most are dead ends. but one of them wasn't. the name on the list was subject 09-f. the coordinates didn't point to the pacific this time, they pointed to creuse, france. date range of 1968. then i found the corresponding file in my grandfather's european liaison folio. it was a phoenix transfer manifest, co-signed by claude and a functionary from the c.e.p. the manifest detailed the "asset relocation" of a seven-year-old girl from a village near mururoa atoll in 1968, following the hygienic detonation of a device codenamed Canopus. the public records show france conducted a series of atmospheric tests at mururoa from 1966...

i pulled a thin folio from the footlocker today labeled “liaison intelligence - europe.” i assumed it was just diplomatic cables. but it’s actually a stack of translated memos from the c.e.p. (centre d’expérimentation du pacifique) -- the french nuclear testing authority from the late 1960s. the public story is that france was building its nuclear deterrent at mururao atoll. the memos don't corroborate that. they're field reports and medical annexes that tie the c.e.p. directly into phoenix operations. the author of several of them is phoenix director claude veyreir. one memo describes a hygienic detonation. not a test but a targeted strike a manifestation that had blossomed over the atoll. it's the same pattern as wigwag, using nuclear weapons to try and collapse whatever the ants are. the medical annexes are much worse. they're a mirror project gabriels language, almost line for line. "brûlures du cinquième degré," “chéloïdes atypiques," and repeated re...

i'm back. i had to go away for a little bit after the last post. i thought going offline would make me safe. but of course i was wrong. some of you saw in my last post that i've been receiving physical mail from a source that calls itself lamb. while i was gone, however, they escalated. they're not just using my grandfather's dead drop anymore. they somehow got into my blogger account. they created a new, fake blog. the only post was a poem and some kind of command. i deleted it immediately. i know i should have taken a screenshot, but i panicked. but the contents of the blog was the poem "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep." it has to be a message. they're confirming what i've suspected all along. the victims of sef, the ones who were erased. they aren't dead. they're just. somewhere else. transformed in a way. and then the command: find the gabriel children. this connects to the last package they sent me. the list of unclaimed child victims fr...

a few of you may have seen my earlier posts about project archer and project gabriel, the cold war programs my grandfather (us navy radio operator rmc1 joseph daniel mercer) was involved in. i've been working through all the files and tapes for the past few weeks, and it's becoming clear this wasn't an american program. i said in my previous post last night that i wasn't going to post again until i had a full story and until i had a name. well, here is everything i managed to compile together. the soviet connection --- kyshtym and chelyabinsk-70 one phoenix brief completely recontextualizes the 1957 kyshtym disaster. officially, it was a chemical explosion. but this document calls it a "catastrophic containment breach of asset 2-n." (which is the soviets' demon core). according to the file, it had created a permanent deaf zone and left survivors with profound psychological and perceptual damage. afterward, research at chelyabinsk-70 focused on what they ca...

i can’t get the words out of my head. “transferred for processing.” that's a factory term. a term used for cattle. they’re not just making people disappear; they’re refining them. turning them into something. i don't even want to think about what. after my last post, i went back through everything again. not just the files, but the tapes too. i re-listened to the slotin recording, the one about the three demon cores. and this time something hit me. he said the soviets took one. we kept one. and the third, the one the navy pulled from the pacific "still warm," and its fate unknown. i had just assumed it was a loose end. something meant to gnaw at me, to keep me up at night forever unsolved. but it’s not. i found a PHOENIX memo from 1957, buried in a folder full of atmospheric radiation charts. it's a budget request. plain language and very boring. but halfway down it references a new “joint research initiative” with a “private european partner.” the purpose: to stu...