As a child in elementary school, I remember being selected for the G.A.T.E. program, or Gifted And Talented Education. I qualified by scoring high in what was basically an IQ test, which tested for mostly spatial reasoning and verbal skills. On the surface, this program was intended to provide advanced education for intelligent young children, but when I try to remember it, I don't think that was what it was about at all. I don't think many people have the lived experience of going through the program as generally less than 5% of children qualified, probably much less.
There are few concrete facts I can remember from this special class:
- I remember being tested on what was basically an IQ test, but also motor skills, and being recommended by my homeroom teacher, much to the surprise of my parents.
- The classroom was off campus, I had to travel on a bus during school time to some other school, and there were maybe twenty or so kids, it was a small class. The windows had been papered over.
- The teacher was a blonde white woman in her 30s-40s, unknown what her affiliation was.
- The other kids seemed pretty bright, basically just a class without rabble-rousers, with an equal number of girls and boys. I was the only Asian, the rest were white (this was proportional to where I grew up). I don't remember being particularly challenged or stimulated in this class though.
- There were a ton of guessing games, this was the biggest hint that there were ulterior motives. Even as a kid, I could intuit that they were looking for kids who could defy probability. I remember Zener cards, Rorschach tests, and various puzzles.
- There were some hearing tests, and I felt disadvantaged in that I am hard of hearing in one ear. Again, I felt that they were looking for kids who could hear what others couldn't, and I don't mean just high frequency sounds.
- I had to complete some project of my choosing, and I remember making a mod for a freeware game, Dink Smallwood. It was a lot of lines of DinkC. I had a self-assembled PC (Pentium I) as a kid and would surf the web in the 1990s.
Here's where it gets weird: I believe they were testing for extra-sensory perception. This aligns with the theory that G.A.T.E. is connected to the CIA, and has some relation to its MKULTRA program.
Myself as a child
Probably the earliest memory I have as a child is feeling extreme pain, getting my hand or fingers stuck on a door, when I was less than two years old. Then meeting my parents at an airport at about age two and being scared. I remember being literate at age three or four, definitely before pre-school, as I had written words on wooden blocks with markers, some of the words being "SECRET" and "POLICE" (Geheime Staatspolizei?). I think I was a pretty social child, there are photographs of me smiling with the other children in kindergarten.
I remember being acutely aware of my own mortality at a young age, one of the times I cried the hardest was when I was trying to sleep but kept thinking about the certainty of my own death. Dreaming about looking in a mirror and watching myself age quickly. Being reminded that historical figures like Socrates, Jesus, Dostoevsky, so many others faced certain death by the governments of their time. That is another thing I felt born with a distrust of authority, my paternal grandfather had faced persecution by the communist party.
Psychic ability
I believe I have some latent psychic ability: telepathy and precognition, but I'm not very confident in this self-assessment, perhaps most humans do to some degree. In just one example from last year, I wrote a long diary entry about someone I loved, and she contacted me about two weeks later, after years of cutting her off, even not replying to her previously. There are other examples, which may be too esoteric to discuss. Mostly I am overwhelmed with a feeling of sensing how things will turn out but being powerless to change things.
A weird thing which I think I can do, without being aware of it, is transmitting and receiving thoughts. I had a conversation with a pastor recently in which I just simply thought of a bank, and the pastor used the bank I was thinking of in telling a parable to me. He told me that he can't pay for my debts since he himself is in debt, but Jesus can. I noticed it immediately in the moment, surprising myself, but I couldn't say anything.
G.A.T.E.
So this leads back to the G.A.T.E. program, what else do I have in common with people who attended?
- First-born child through Caesarian section; I was overdue, perhaps I didn't want to enter this world.
- Aspie behavior like preferring solitary activities, most often playing with Lego and using the PC.
- Liked puzzles and mazes, especially Chip's Challenge.
- Memories of drowning, but I had also learned how to swim at a very young age.
- Strong sense of morality and ethics.
- Early drug experimentation in high school and college.
I have had an irrational fear of government since I was a child, I think that I interpreted what I had learned about the world in a mature manner, and also had hereditary memory of oppression. Why I'm writing about this now, has to do not only with the state of the world, but there is a very personal nature to it which I can't discuss here.
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. ― Fyodor Dostoevsky
I understand that most conspiracy theories are implausible at face value, but it's quite different when one experiences it firsthand. Someone who hasn't been through G.A.T.E. can't gaslight me about my own lived experience. I will speculate that the program had a few goals:
- Identify the psychically gifted, particularly those who can manifest their power to see the unseen, and defy all probability.
- Those who showed promise would be subject to further experimentation and military applications, these people would continue to be used and lied to.
- Nullify and suppress individuals who can resist the rulers and authorities of this dark world and spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12).