Eric Michaelson

Eric Michaelson writes about the gap between what powerful systems promise and what they actually do to the people caught inside them. His speculative fiction explores artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the evolving relationship between humans and technology, blending hard science fiction with philosophical questions about what it means to be human when the boundaries of humanity are shifting.

MKULTRA: The Frank Olson Files is his first work of narrative nonfiction. It will not be his last. The same questions that run through his fiction, about institutions, about power, about the humans inside systems that were never designed with their wellbeing in mind, turn out to have answers in the documented historical record that are stranger and darker than anything he invented.

He is currently working on a series of narrative investigations into the documented strangeness at the edges of the official record. Signals that have been broadcasting from somewhere in Russia for fifty years with no explanation. Nine experienced hikers who walked into the Ural Mountains in 1959 and did not walk out. A radio transmission from deep space that lasted seventy two seconds and has never been heard again. A pilot who radioed that something was flying alongside him and then vanished from radar. Lights over a Norwegian valley that have been observed and photographed and studied for decades and remain unexplained.

He is interested in the cases that were closed before they were solved. He lives in Ottawa and he is still looking.