The Origin of "Bluebird"

"Have you the grass here that sings, or the bird that is blue?"- The Blue Bird, Maurice Maeterlinck.

Project Bluebird, created on April 20, 1950 by the first CIA director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter. We all know that this infamous little project went on to mutate into the monstrous MKULTRA.

Where did this title come from? It is said that Allen Dulles changed the project name from Bluebird to Artichoke simply because he was fond of the vegetable. So it would seem that the names of projects were at the whim of their creators. So where did Hillenkoetter get his inspiration?

It would seem that his inspiration drew from the play that gave us the term The Blue Bird of Happiness.

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), the Belgian playwright and poet. Student of the Occult and Symbolist movement (the forerunner to the Surrealist movement) first saw his play The Blue Bird performed in Moscow in 1908.

Tytyl and his sister Mytyl set out on a quest to find the Blue Bird of Happiness.

Mytyl (Shirley Temple), the bratty daughter of a woodcutter, finds a unique bird in the Royal Forest and selfishly refuses to give it to her sick friend. That night she is visited in a dream by a fairy named Berylune who sends her and her brother Tytyl to search for the blue bird of happiness. To accompany them, the fairy magically transforms their dog Tylo, cat Tylette (Gale Sondergaard), and (lantern) Light (Helen Ericson) into human form. The children have a number of adventures including a visit with their (deceased) grandparents in the Land of the Past, a stay in The Land of Luxury, an attack by angry trees and lightning in a forest fire, and a meeting with Father Time, young Abraham Lincoln, and their future sister in The Land of Tomorrow (unborn children). The dream journey makes the previously unhappy and selfish Mytyl awake as a kinder girl who has learned to appreciate all the comforts and joy of her home and family.

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The play is essentially an occult psychodrama (interestingly it was also the template for The Wizard of Oz) aimed at children. What with Tytyl's magic hat with the diamond in the center (3rd eye) that allows him to see "The Soul of Things" as well as seeing into the past and the future.

The search for the Blue Bird leads the children through The Palace of the Night, A Graveyard, The Enchanted Forest and, The Land of Memory.

The Land of Memory... Exactly where the BLUEBIRD Project desired to invade.

Many think that sorcery is a dead art.

Do not be lulled into believing that just because the deadening American city of dreadful night is so utterly devoid of mystery, so thoroughly flat footed, sterile and infantile, so burdened with the illusory gloss of baseball-hot dogs-and-Chevrolet, that it exists outside the psycho-sexual domain. The eternal pagan psychodrama is escalated under these so-called modern conditions precisely because sorcery is not what "20th century man" can accept as real. -James Shelby Downard

[edit on 11/11/2006 by Beelzebubba]