https://www.heritageofandover.com/obituary/william-hayes   

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Let’s start with my dad working with another HARP program in the 1950s and early 1960s with a gentleman by the name of Gerald Bull. That was the High Altitude Research Project, not the HAARP I was later involved with in Alaska. My dad was at a site in the Aleutian Islands called Cape Lisburne, setting up telemetry receivers and transmitters pretty similar to the new Space Fence to monitor high-altitude research projects like Bull’s supergun firing satellites up into space.

While Dad was remote for several years, Mom and my family were stationed at Eglin Air Force Base in Niceville, Florida. In the early 60s I ran away because I didn’t have a father and wasn’t accepted by the local groups on base and felt lost. I was a troubled kid. I ran to New Orleans and found a job as a bus boy at a bar / restaurant called The House of the Rising Sun in downtown New Orleans. I “played” the tables, I “played” the bar, I washed dishes. I did anything to make a buck. That’s how I survived. A lot of other kids were there, too, in those days, but they were living on the streets. I was living pretty good in the restaurant with my own little corner where I slept and plenty of food. What people didn’t eat, I ate.

But I was found and brought back to Florida. My mom said to the Judge, “I do not know how to handle him,” and the Eglin Base Commander said, “Well, we could do this or we could do that, but not right now, we’re too involved in projects out here.” And the Judge said, “I’ll take care of it,” and he did: he sent me to the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Marianna, Florida. I was 12 years old.

That first year at the Dozier School, I was beaten twice. The second time I was taken to the hospital at Eglin Air Force Base because I was beaten so bad, I almost died. When I was put back into the program at Dozier, I was a very good boy. I knew how to not “trip the trigger,” you might say. Stay out of the way.

Boys were being trained on site and also at Eglin for a pre-op to the Bay of Pigs invasion to take photos with small cameras after swimming to Cuba from a boat called the Barbara Bush at that time parked at Eglin outside the Boy Scout Camp on Eglin Main. The boys were 12 or 13 and younger, could speak Spanish, and were trained to be spies and information gatherers. Most of them never came back. Where did they go? Did they disappear into Cuba, or did they disappear when they came back to Florida? Of the 22 guys from the Marianna school, only four came back. Did they not survive, or were they trained for other secret programs?

The government profiling young men in reform schools and utilizing them for Cold War projects was part of MKUltra. Talk to them today and they don’t remember anything that went on. Drugs were involved. Later, we learned that LSD was one of those drugs . . .

 

Billy Hayes, 10/10/2020