It’s 2014. I’m writing an ill-conceived paper about LSD as a kind of ‘technological’ advancement in psychiatry and how that idea connects to themes in some American novels from the 1960s.

While researching, I come across a blurb about Hollywood Hospital, a facility in Vancouver BC that conducted LSD trials with their patients. This eventually leads me to a finding aid for a collection of lecture notes at Purdue University’s Archives and Special collections, where I learned the last person known to have the hospital’s files was supposedly one Frank Ogden.

Frank Ogden is an interesting character. A flight engineer during WWII, after the war he ran an airplane company at Toronto Island Airport. In 1961, after reading an article about LSD in a magazine he became interested in Hollywood Hospital’s activities. He sold his portion of the business, travelled to Vancouver and, in his words, “just knocked on the door”. With no medical background, but offering three months of free labour, medical director Dr. J. Ross MacLean hired him. Ogden took LSD under supervision twice, which was a relatively standard protocol for staff working with these patients. He then started working along side staff supporting these patients, which included ‘a large clientele from California’ - mostly said to be celebrities and the like looking for a kick.

Fast forward. Ogden eventually transitions to a career as a futurist under the moniker Dr. Tomorrow, living in a houseboat in Vancouver. He did speaking engagements, wrote books, hosted a radio show, etc. He died at 92 on December 29th, 2012.

Super interesting guy, and worth further digging into if you’re curious (I know I’m revisiting him now that I’ve written this, lol). But I noticed something interesting when I dug up his homepage. It was now redirecting to something called the Global Consciousness Project, a parapsychology initiative. This is a weird one - basically, the theory is that events causing widely experienced, shared emotions or attention could have an effect on the output of hardware random number generators, and fluctuations in output could be a measure of a ‘global consciousness’. It’s batshit, but fascinating at the same time. The questions I had at the time were “Why this, over anything else, as the redirect? What happened between May 3 2009 and February 17 2010 where this was the choice? Unrelated, but WHERE ARE THE FUCKING HOSPITAL FILES??”.

I walked away. Ultimately, I had a paper to finish, and while fascinating this was becoming a timesink. But this man lives rent free in my head to this day