--- title: "The Retired Vaccine Chimps Got Their Check-Ups. One Has A CIA Radio In Her Skull." dek: "A 61-year-old chimpanzee at a Louisiana sanctuary was X-rayed under sedation in July. Three electrode tracks and a coil showed up behind her ear. Her 1974 intake record says no prior use. Subproject 94 was paying her laboratory at the time." kind: investigation (Investigation) desk: The Body author: Loretta Sung and June Halloway (fictional) published: 2026-09-06T09:50:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/one-has-a-radio-in-her-skull tags: MK-Ultra, Subproject 94, chimpanzees, stimoceiver, Louisiana, sanctuary genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The Retired Vaccine Chimps Got Their Check-Ups. One Has A CIA Radio In Her Skull. *A 61-year-old chimpanzee at a Louisiana sanctuary was X-rayed under sedation in July. Three electrode tracks and a coil showed up behind her ear. Her 1974 intake record says no prior use. Subproject 94 was paying her laboratory at the time.* On 14 July, under sedation for an abscessed tooth, a 61-year-old chimpanzee at a sanctuary in Louisiana had a lateral radiograph of her skull. Behind her left ear, on the plate, are three thin tracks running through bone into the brain, and above them, under the scalp, a flat coil about the size of a coin. Her file says she came to the sanctuary in 2015 from a vaccine laboratory, and to the vaccine laboratory in 1974 from a primate contractor in New Mexico, and that her prior use before 1974 was none. The coil is a receiver. It has no battery. It was put there before 1972, and five receipts in a reading room in Maryland say who was paying for her cage at the time. > **Figure:** One animal, 1965 to 2026 — see https://theyburied.com/article/one-has-a-radio-in-her-skull ## The peg The sanctuary's annual health checks were on the wire this weekend as a story about long-term care: forty-one animals retired from federal vaccine research, sedated in turn, teeth cleaned, hearts listened to. That story is true and this newspaper has nothing to add to it. This story is about one plate from one of those checks, and where one number on the animal's file leads. ## What is on the plate Dr. Benedikt Oyinlola-Sørensen reads animal radiographs for a living and was given these with no history. Three electrode tracks, parallel, entering the skull through drilled holes that have long since remodelled, terminating at depths he puts at 28, 31 and 35 millimetres. A subcutaneous induction coil, single-layer, connected to the tracks by a lead that runs under the scalp. No power source anywhere on the plate. "That is a stimoceiver," he said. "A radio-controlled brain stimulator. The design with an external coil and no implanted battery is early. By 1972 everybody had gone to an implanted pack. This is before that." He will not say what it did, because a plate cannot tell him. ## The number Her sanctuary file carries one number from before 1974: PV-118, the tag she arrived at the vaccine laboratory wearing. June Halloway asked the laboratory's federal funder, under the Freedom of Information Act, for the 1974 transfer manifest. It came in 61 days with one column blacked out, headed *source*. Every other column is legible. Nineteen animals, from the Pecos Valley Primate Laboratory, a contractor outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, that closed in 1974. Each has a PV number, a sex, an estimated age, and a column headed *prior protocols*, and in all nineteen rows that column reads *closed*. PV-118 is on the manifest. The vaccine laboratory's own intake sheet for her, clipped to it, reads *prior use: none*. Closed is not none. One says something was done and finished. The other says nothing was done. A clerk in 1974 turned the first into the second, and every study run on her for the next thirty years was designed on the second. ## The receipts This newspaper has read the surviving MK-Ultra vouchers before. The substantive files were burned in January 1973 and the finance series was in a different building and was not. Subproject 94 appears in the 1977 Senate hearing by its title, *remote directional control of activities of selected species of animals*, and by nothing else. In the vouchers it appears five times, in fiscal years 1966 through 1971. Payee: Pecos Valley Primate Laboratory. Line: *animal maintenance, 24 head*. Total: $41,200. That is the whole of the paper. Five receipts, one laboratory, twenty-four animals, and a subproject whose title is the only description of it that survived. > Her intake record says prior use: none. Somebody typed that in 1974 with a wire in her head. > > — Dr. Odalys Marchetti-Nwosu ## Eleven studies, no baseline Between 1979 and 2004 the vaccine laboratory ran eleven protocols on PV-118, hepatitis B and then HIV, all published, all cited. Dr. Marchetti-Nwosu has read every one. None mentions a skull radiograph, because none was taken, because the file said there was no reason to take one. The sanctuary did not take one either, in 2015, for the same reason. It took one in July because a tooth was bad and a jaw was open. ## The other eighteen She is the last of the nineteen alive. Twelve were necropsied at the vaccine laboratory between 1981 and 2009. The reports are held by its successor institution, which has not answered two letters from this newspaper. If those twelve skulls were examined, the answer to whether PV-118 is one animal or one of twenty-four is in a filing cabinet in Maryland. If they were not, it is in the ground. ## What this desk takes from it A programme whose files were burned in 1973 has one living subject, and she is a chimpanzee in Louisiana who does not like the new male. She will not be operated on, and this newspaper agrees with the woman who decided that. Her next scan will happen when her own health requires one, and we will print it then. What can be read now is a column on a form. *Closed* became *none* in March 1974, and thirty years of science were built on the word that was typed rather than the word that was true. The radio is the story the headline tells. The form is the story the veterinarian tells, at the foot of this page, and she is right about which matters more. ## Sources (invented) - Dr. Odalys Marchetti-Nwosu, Attending veterinarian, Cane River Chimpanzee Sanctuary — Interviewed in person twice and by telephone four times; supplied the July radiographs and the animal's full record with the sanctuary's consent (July–September 2026) - Dr. Benedikt Oyinlola-Sørensen, Veterinary radiologist, a college of veterinary medicine in Texas — Given the radiographs and nothing else; asked to describe what he saw; interviewed twice (August 2026) - Transfer manifest, 19 chimpanzees, Pecos Valley Primate Laboratory to a federally funded vaccine laboratory, March 1974, Four pages, with the receiving laboratory's intake sheets — Obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by June Halloway from the federal funder; released in 61 days, one column redacted (August 2026) - MK-Ultra payment vouchers, Subproject 94, fiscal years 1966 to 1971, Five vouchers in the finance series this newspaper has read before — Read in the reading room at College Park; photographed; published with this story (August 2026) - Cane River Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Executive director and board — Written questions with the full draft and the radiographs (28 August 2026) ## What we could not confirm - What the device did. Three tracks and a coil are a stimoceiver by design. Whether it ever received a signal, and what a signal made her do, is in files that were destroyed in January 1973, and the radiologist who dated it will not go one word past the plate. - The other eighteen. Nineteen animals came off the Pecos Valley manifest in 1974. She is the only one alive. Twelve were necropsied at the vaccine laboratory between 1981 and 2009, and the necropsy reports are held by its successor, which has not answered two letters. - That Subproject 94 is why she has the device. Five vouchers pay a laboratory to keep 24 animals. They do not name her, and they do not say what was done to any of the 24. She was there, the money was there, and the wire is in her head. That is a correspondence. This newspaper is not going to call it more. ## Right of reply **Dr. Odalys Marchetti-Nwosu, attending veterinarian, Cane River Chimpanzee Sanctuary** (Asked that her reply run whole rather than as a quote. Printed unedited.): > I found the device, so I am not going to argue with you about whether it is there. It is there. I have looked at that plate more times than I have looked at any plate in twenty-two years of practice, and I have stopped being surprised by it and started being angry, and I want to be careful about who I am angry at, because it is not you and it is not her. > > Here is what I need your readers to understand. Beatrix is sixty-one years old. That is very old for a chimpanzee. She has arthritis in both hips, a heart murmur I have been watching for four years, and kidney values that mean I do not sedate her unless I have to. The check in July was the first time in three years I had put her under, and I did it because a tooth was abscessed, and I took the skull film because I take a skull film when I have a chimpanzee's jaw open and may not get another chance. > > You have asked me, politely and more than once, whether the device can be removed and examined. No. It has been in her head for sixty years. The tracks are through bone that has grown around them. Taking it out is cranial surgery on a geriatric animal with a bad heart, and the only thing anybody would learn from it is something about 1967. She is not your evidence. She is my patient. I would say that to a federal agency and I am saying it to a newspaper. > > You have also asked whether she can be scanned. A CT would mean sedating her again, and moving her, and I have told you what her kidneys are doing. When I next have to put her under for her own sake I will scan her then, and you will have the images, and you will have them because I want them too. > > Now the part where I agree with you. Her intake record says prior use: none. Somebody typed that in 1974 with a wire in her head, and then eleven vaccine protocols were run on an animal whose baseline nobody had, and every one of those studies was published, and I have read them all, and not one of them mentions a skull film. That is the finding in your story that I would put in the headline, if it were my headline. It is not about a radio. It is about a form. > > She is fine, by the way. She likes the outdoor enclosure in the morning and she does not like the new male, and she took the antibiotic in a banana without noticing. I mention it because nobody from any newspaper has asked. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.