At this same time in 1967, Jim Garrison's conspiracy probe was getting underway in New Orleans. Arcega, who knew little about the Kennedy assassination but enough to realize the implication of Castillo's words, obtained a list of Garrison's suspects from a newspaper and fed some of them to Castillo under hypnosis. As Arcega recorded in his summary of these sessions:

David Ferrie. Upon mention of this name, the subject suffered the usual stomach pain, the spinning of the head, and weight on the legs. While such a reaction is significant, the point was temporarily abandoned for later exploration, to avoid breaking the trance depth…

Lee Harvey Oswald. The subject knew his name well. But when confronted with the newspaper clipping, he said the man did not look like Oswald at all. (Awake, after trance, the subject recognized Oswald from the same picture.)

There were other, less familiar names, many recalled by Castillo without any prompting, including that of the woman in the hotel room who "controlled the subject's work and life like a nightmare." There was also mention of meetings in Chicago, and a "strip of airfield not far away from the Bay of Pigs."

Ferdinand Marcos (Library of Congress)The most frightening aspect was Arcega's gradual unraveling of a pattern of key words—seemingly innocuous words like "sand" and "flowers"—that would set Castillo walking through a "zombie" state that always ended with his firing an imaginary gun, first at someone else and then into his own head. Beneath the elaborate cover of identities, Castillo had come to the Philippines apparently to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos at the nation's Independence Day celebration on June 12. Hearing about this, Marcos himself once came to get a look at his potential assailant, through the barred windows of the Veterans Memorial Hospital where Arcega had Castillo transferred for tighter security.

As Independence Day approached, Arcega wrote: "Special attention was given to the subject's mental states and behavior in relation to June 12 at 12 o'clock noon. As this date and hour neared, he was discovered to have been marking his detention-cell wall with such things as '44 hours to go,' '43,' '42,' canceling one for the other. Counting down to '0,' the zero hour was found to be 12 o'clock of Independence Day…."

Arcega went on to relate how, at precisely noon, Castillo went into a spontaneous "zombie" state lasting for two hours and culminating in a suicide attempt. At the parade grounds, there was the tightest security in Philippine history. That evening, "during the interrogation from 4 to 11 p.m., the subject disclosed operational data as CIA."