mk ultra experiments

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: August 21, 2018 | Original: June 16, 2017

MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture. Though Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.

The Cold War and Project MK-Ultra

In the 1950s and 1960s—the height of the Cold War —the United States government feared that Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea.

In response, Allan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), approved Project MK-Ultra in 1953. The covert operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.

The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy. Sometimes the test subjects knew they were participating in a study—but at other times, they had no idea, even when the hallucinogens started taking effect.

Many of the tests were conducted at universities, hospitals or prisons in the United States and Canada. Most of these took place between 1953 and 1964, but it’s not clear how many people were involved in the tests—the agency kept notoriously poor records and destroyed most MK-Ultra documents when the program was officially halted in 1973.

LSD and Sidney Gottlieb

The CIA began to experiment with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. He believed the agency could harness the drug’s mind-altering properties for brainwashing or psychological torture.

Under the auspices of Project MK-Ultra, the CIA began to fund studies at Columbia University, Stanford University and other colleges on the effects of the drug. After a series of tests, the drug was deemed too unpredictable for use in counterintelligence.

MK-Ultra also included experiments with MDMA (ecstasy), mescaline, heroin , barbiturates, methamphetamine and psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”).

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Operation Midnight Climax

Operation Midnight Climax was an MK-Ultra project in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA “safe houses” where drug experiments took place.

The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then—while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror—watched the drug’s effects on the men’s behavior. Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes’ rooms, disguised as electrical outlets.

Most of the Operation Midnight Climax experiments took place in San Francisco and Marin County, California , and in New York City. The program had little oversight and the CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling, party-like atmosphere prevailed.

An agent named George White wrote to Gottlieb in 1971: “Of course I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

The Death of Frank Olson

Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA. At a 1953 CIA retreat, Olson drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD.

A few days later, on November 28, 1953, Olson tumbled to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide.

The CIA's Appalling Human Experiments With Mind Control

During the Cold War, the CIA explored the unchartered world of 'brain warfare,' using LSD.

The family of Frank Olson decided to have a second autopsy performed in 1994. A forensics team found injuries on the body that had likely occurred before the fall. The findings sparked conspiracy theories that Olson might have been assassinated by the CIA.

After prolonged legal proceedings, Olson’s family was awarded a settlement of $750,000, and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then-CIA Director William Colby.

Ken Kesey and Other MK-Ultra Participants

Ken Kesey, author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , volunteered for MK-Ultra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.

Kesey later went on to promote the drug, hosting LSD-fueled parties that he called “Acid Tests.”

Acid Tests combined drug use with musical performances by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights. These parties influenced the early development of hippie culture and kick-started the 1960s psychedelic drug scene.

Other notable people who reportedly volunteered for CIA-backed experiments with LSD include Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist; Ted Kaczynski , better known as the “Unabomber”; and James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger , the notorious Boston mobster.

Church Committee

In 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on U.S. citizens. His report started the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MK-Ultra to light.

The following year, President Ford—in the wake of the Watergate scandal and amid growing distrust of the U.S. government—set up the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States to investigate illegal CIA activities, including Project MK-Ultra and other experiments on unsuspecting citizens.

The Commission was led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.

The Church Committee—helmed by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church—was a larger investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies during and after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon .

The Church Committee delved into plots to assassinate foreign leaders, including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. It also uncovered thousands of documents related to MK-Ultra.

These revelations resulted in Ford’s 1976 Executive Order on Intelligence Activities that prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”

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The CIA's Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A 'Poisoner In Chief'

Terry Gross

Journalist Stephen Kinzer reveals how the CIA worked in the 1950s and early '60s to develop mind control drugs and deadly toxins that could be used against enemies. Originally broadcast Sept. 9, 2019.

Hear The Original Interview

Author Interviews

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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• Copy story information for sharing Brainwashed: The echoes of MK-ULTRA: During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded mind control experiments on unwitting Canadians in a program codenamed MK Ultra. The experiments laid the groundwork for modern day torture techniques. And victims and their families are still seeking recognition and justice.

Brainwashed: The echoes of MK-ULTRA

During the Cold War, the CIA secretly funded mind-control experiments on unwitting Canadians in a program codenamed MK-ULTRA. The experiments laid the groundwork for modern-day torture techniques. And victims and their families are still seeking recognition and justice.

By Michelle Shephard, Lisa Ellenwood and Chris Oke

October 21, 2020

The following story is based on material from the CBC podcast Brainwashed , a six-part series co-produced with The Fifth Estate that investigates the CIA's covert mind-control experiments — from the Cold War and MK-ULTRA to the so-called U.S. war on terror . The series is available on CBC Listen , Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts .

When Lloyd Schrier tells his story, it sounds more like a conspiracy than his family's tragic past.

But many of the details are laid out in a thick file of documents, correspondences and reports. He has news articles and pictures spanning decades, all describing what his family went through. And he has his mother's heartwrenching medical report that is still hard for him to comprehend.

"She had her 30th and last day of sleep on March 24th," Schrier said as he read from the 1960 hospital record.

"They gave her all the drugs … about four or five barbiturates and amphetamines at a time."

Esther Schrier received electroshock therapy, massive amounts of drugs and so-called psychiatric treatments that sound as if they were lifted from the pages of George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four .

She was a patient at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute in the 1960s. She had gone to "the Allan," as the hospital is known, to seek treatment for what today would be considered anxiety or postpartum depression.

But once she walked through those hospital doors and into the care of a psychiatrist named Dr. Ewen Cameron, she became an unwitting experiment subject for a massive CIA brainwashing operation codenamed MK-ULTRA.

And Schrier was part of this clandestine program, too, because his mother was pregnant with him at the time.

"It's crazy," said Schrier. "I don't think it was fair to do that to a developing fetus."

Schrier is now 60 years old, semi-retired, living in Toronto and still fighting to be recognized as an experiment victim.

Hundreds of relatives whose loved ones were experimented upon by Cameron are now demanding compensation for family members and an apology from the Canadian government.

Canada has never provided a list of the victims of the experiments that took place during Cameron's tenure from 1943 to 1964. In the decades since, no government has ever admitted liability, let alone apologized — despite the fact that part of the experiments in Montreal were funded not only by the CIA, but also by the Canadian government.

"I think eventually they should come out with the truth. I think after all this time I don't know what they're trying to prove, who they're trying to protect. I don't think it's right," said Schrier. "I think they should come out and just, you know, deal with it."

To "deal with it" means acknowledging the legacy of a dark period that still reverberates today.

The idea of mind control has been constantly revisited by governments in periods of fear and uncertainty.

For Schrier and other relatives who have launched two separate lawsuits against the Canadian government and others, their mission is personal. They say their lives were irrevocably damaged by what happened. Families split up. Children were placed in foster homes. The trauma has been generational.

But the story of MK-ULTRA isn't just relegated to Cold War history.

The idea of mind control — the theory that breaking a person down will make them do something against their will — has been constantly revisited by governments during other periods of fear and uncertainty, when the military and medicine collide.

What happened at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute laid the groundwork for torture spanning decades to follow.

• Listen to Episode 1 | Psychiatric patients treated as human guinea pigs:

Lloyd Schrier's mother, Esther, had a difficult childhood, losing both her parents at an early age. In 1936, when she was four years old, her father died. Slightly more than a year later, her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour and given a lobotomy. Unable to look after her children, she was committed to a psychiatric institution.

Esther and her older brother were moved around from the care of relatives and to foster homes, and suffered wherever they went.

But she was resilient and smart. In her late teens, she trained as a nurse and got a job at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. She met her future husband, Haskell Schrier, on a blind date. After they married in 1955, the couple became a fixture in Montreal's Jewish social scene.

Three years later, after an uneventful pregnancy, she gave birth to their first child, a baby girl they named Lynn Carole. But the baby died of a staph infection when she was just three weeks old, and Esther struggled with her grief. Medical records show she felt she was responsible for her daughter's death.

When she was pregnant again, two years later, she was still struggling with this guilt. Part of her "condition" identified in her medical records when she was admitted to the Allan was her anxiety over possibly losing another baby.

Haskell Schrier had read an article about Cameron and was impressed by the Allan's reputation for offering cutting edge psychiatric care.

"Oh, 'He was God-like,' they would say," said Lloyd Schrier. "I think he was head of the Canadian and the American psychiatric associations. And even the World Psychiatric Association."

Cameron, a Scottish-born American psychiatrist, did hold all those titles at various points in his career, and he was the first director of the Allan.

What wasn't known, until many years later, was that Cameron's reputation also came to the attention of the CIA. They were interested in his psychiatric research that involved extreme sensory deprivation, drugs, and an intense repetition of recorded messages.

Three years after the CIA launched MK-ULTRA, they approached Cameron through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a research foundation and one of their front organizations through which they funnelled money. They encouraged him to apply for a grant, which he did, and quickly received. From January 1957 to September 1960, the CIA gave Cameron $60,000 US, equivalent to slightly more than $500,000 today.

Esther Schrier entered the hospital in February 1960 to receive what her family thought was the best care money could buy.

But her medical notes show disregard for her well-being and that of her unborn child right from the start.

She spent 30 days in what was called the "sleep room," a place where patients were put in a drug-induced coma and roused only for three feedings and bathroom breaks per day. She lost 13 pounds that month. Her records show she couldn't stand up because she was too weak.

She also underwent a treatment called "depatterning."

Cameron believed that breaking down a patient's minds to a childlike state — through drugs and electroshock therapy — would allow him to work from a clean slate, whereby he could then reprogram the patients. Part of his reprogramming regime would involve what he dubbed "psychic driving," which meant playing recorded messages to the patients for up to 20 hours a day, whether they were asleep or awake.

These voices were played through headphones, helmets or speakers, sometimes installed right inside a patient's pillow. Records show some patients would hear these messages up to half a million times.

By March 12, 1960, Esther Schrier's medical records state that she was "considered completely depatterned." She was incontinent, mute and had trouble swallowing.

"That's crazy, to do that to a pregnant woman," said her son. "When she woke from the sleep room, she didn't know who my father was. She didn't know it was her husband. I guess she didn't know anything. You know, she used to tell me she had to relearn everything."

Lloyd Schrier remembers his mother telling him that among the many things she forgot was how to boil water.

Several times during her treatments, she developed gynecological symptoms. Her records indicate she started to bleed and they brought in an obstetrician to treat her.

They would let her rest for four or five days and then resume treatments. Cameron's notes say that on Aug. 17, 1960, six months after she entered the Allan, she had 29 electroshock treatments, with most of them of the extreme variety he was using. But because she was "now in her eighth month of pregnancy," the treatments stopped.

On Sept. 27, 1960, Lloyd was born, and Esther Schrier said she felt helpless. She couldn't remember basic life functions, let alone how to take care of a newborn.

Years later, in a 2004 BBC Scotland interview, Esther Schrier recalled how lost she had been.

"I had a new baby, and I didn't know what to do with the baby. I had help, a baby nurse, but she had to have a day off and she left me a book, and I'll just give you a little example [from the book]: 'When you hear the baby cry, go to the room. Pick up baby and step by step how to feed the baby,' and that was very frightening."

Esther and Haskell Schrier are now deceased. She died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 84 and despite all she went through and what she lost, her son said she managed to live a full life and they remained close.

And he feels he was fortunate despite having lived under the dark shadow of what happened to his mother and uncertainty of how it impacted his health.

Many patients of Cameron emerged from the Allan completely broken, unable to find their way back to the lives they once lived. Relatives from across Canada have reached out to the CBC, describing the ongoing trauma the experiments have caused. Families were ripped apart by divorce or children were taken to foster homes. The grief rippled outward and spanned generations.

"I think I was lucky. I think the only side-effects that I know of, I guess in school, I was a bit slow in the beginning," said Lloyd Schrier.

"But I ended up going through high school, and I went, we have in Montreal CEGEP, I did the two years, and then I went on to McGill, and I did a bachelor of commerce. So … I was able to get my degrees and everything." But, he said, "I will never know what I could have been."

• Listen to Episode 2 | Dr. Ewen Cameron's experiments.

While MK-ULTRA officially ended in 1963, the mind-control experiments continued to echo into the early years of the 21s century, reaching from one amorphously named war to another: the Cold War to the U.S. war on terror.

Hundreds of captives who were rounded up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks ended up the U.S. offshore prison on the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But the CIA was also holding those they considered "high-value detainees" in a network of secret prisons around the world that were collectively known as black sites.

These men were considered prized captives and their interrogators believed they might have information about impending attacks. They wanted answers, and they wanted them fast.

In 2002, in a secret CIA prison in Thailand, the FBI interrogated a prisoner named Abu Zubaydah. He had been shot and captured during a raid in Pakistan. The FBI had used traditional interrogation techniques, including what they termed "rapport-building," to try to earn his trust.

But the CIA didn’t think they were getting the answers they needed from him, so the agency turned to two psychologist contractors they had paid more than $80 million US to develop a new interrogation regime. It had been euphemistically named "enhanced interrogation techniques" and Abu Zubaydah was the first test case.

• Listen to Episode 3| The shocking truth behind MK-ULTRA.

The "techniques" that psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen devised included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement boxes, shackling and exposing detainees to extreme temperatures, sounds and pain.

The details of what happened to Abu Zubaydah are contained in the 6,700-page U.S. Senate intelligence committee report on torture , which was released in 2014, although only a 549-page executive summary has been declassified.

An excerpt: "After Abu Zubaydah had been in complete isolation for 47 days, the most aggressive interrogation phase began.… Security personnel entered the cell, shackled and hooded Abu Zubaydah.… The interrogators then removed the hood, performed an attention grab, and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor."

• Listen to Episode 4 | How do you sue one of the most powerful agencies in the world?

The Senate report goes on to describe in detail how over 19 days of torture, on a "near 24-hour-per-day basis," he was waterboarded 83 times, placed in the coffin-like wooden box, held naked and his body contorted into stress positions.

The report states: "After the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques ended, CIA personnel at the detention site concluded that Abu Zubaydah had been truthful and that he did not possess any new terrorist threat information."

At least 118 detainees were subjected to this type of tortured interrogation.

"I think it's important [to note] that Mitchell and Jessen really were not the wizards that designed and imagined the program," said retired U.S. army general and psychiatrist Stephen Xenakis. "I do think that they were used by authorities above them in the agency and probably the White House to come up with something like that."

Xenakis specializes in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and has worked extensively with soldiers and veterans, as well as Guantanamo detainees and former captives from the CIA black sites.

"I think that essentially what they based their understanding on was bad science, completely not validated in any way," he said. "There’s no reason to think that it would have any positive effect to be useful."

And that "bad science" reaches all the way back to Cameron's work at the Allan.

WATCH | In 1980, The Fifth Estate interviewed two Canadians who went through the MK-ULTRA program :

As Kinzer notes in his book, even after MK-ULTRA was shut down, the CIA’s fascination about mind control continued. In the early 1960s, some of the experiments from MK-ULTRA were detailed in the CIA’s Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual.

Over 128 pages, the Kubark manual suggests interrogation methods, including "deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, pain, hypnosis and narcosis," and long sections devoted to sensory deprivation, which was drawn from "a number of experiments at McGill University."

Kubark relies directly on Cameron's work at McGill University, which the Allen is part of, and his theory that to make a mind malleable, you need to break it down to an infantile state.

By the 1980s, the CIA had devised the Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (HRE), which was essentially an updated version of Kubark. As a Baltimore Sun investigation revealed in 1997, Honduran military forces accused of kidnapping, torture and murder had been trained by the CIA and were using the HRE.

Then came the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

"The idea that people were going to produce truthful information, valid information, in those states of mind had never, ever been established," said Xenakis.

"We knew from lots of records of PoWs – I, in fact in the '70s, interviewed a number of PoWs coming out of Vietnam – that they didn't produce good information when they were under high duress, when they were tortured. They just said what they needed to say to stop it."

• Listen to Episode 5 | The torturous experiments were supposed to end in the 1960s. They didn't.

Only twice in the years since Cameron experimented on psychiatric patients has their suffering been officially acknowledged. For the victims and their families, both times fell short of what they were seeking.

Nine patients of Cameron sued the CIA in the U.S. in the 1980s for their treatment as part of MK-ULTRA. It became a landmark case when it was settled out of court in 1988, and they received compensation, but the CIA did not accept any liability.

Esther Schrier could have been the 10th complainant but was too embarrassed to have people know about her mental health challenges.

WATCH | Bob Logie describes the experimental treatments he was given:

During the trial, it was exposed that the Canadian government had provided even more funding to Cameron, and for a longer period, than the CIA.

Eventually, in 1994, almost 20 years after the experiments were first publicly exposed, the Canadian government offered compensation for people who were experimented upon by Cameron from 1950 to 1965 (even though some believe Cameron started his experiments in the late 1940s). The patients had to prove they had experienced "full or substantial depatterning," to be eligible.

Seventy-seven former patients received $100,000 each. They were known as ex gratia payments, which essentially means giving compensation without the admission of liability.

Esther Schrier received a payment, but her son was rejected. Even after taking the case to the Federal Court of Canada in 1996, Lloyd Schrier was denied, with a judge upholding previous decisions saying that he was not a patient.

He received a letter from Allan Rock, who was the minister of justice and attorney general of Canada at the time.

"Payments under this plan are made on compassionate and humanitarian grounds to former patients," the letter said. "As the Government of Canada does not accept any liability or negligence for the treatment given to patients of Dr. Cameron, we have limited this payment to former patients. The government can only do so much and, therefore, limiting payments was necessary."

WATCH | How experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute affected a family:

Lloyd Schrier can’t see why he wouldn’t be eligible.

"When you look at the order it says they’re giving it on humanitarian grounds and I cannot see why I wouldn’t be included in that," he said.

"No one's taking any responsibility and I think they should."

Schrier is just one of hundreds of relatives who say they bear the emotional scars of those who were unwitting human experiment subjects of Cameron. They’ve recently found each other and came together after a 2017 story by the CBC's The Fifth Estate . Through two lawsuits against multiple defendants, including McGill University Health Centre, Royal Victoria Hospital and the attorney general of Canada, they are hoping to force the Canadian government into apologizing for its support of the experiments at the Allan.

But the Canadian government appears to have not changed its position. A spokesperson from the Department of Justice responded to an email from CBC, saying that Canada has already "taken action to provide assistance to those affected."

And McGill University seems to be trying to erase this history from its past. In the Allan Memorial Institute, a portrait of Cameron, who was the hospital's first director and leader for 21 years, still hangs in the halls alongside other past directors. But his name has been removed.

There is also no mention of this history on the university's official website. CBC asked the university why, and while a spokesperson did not answer the question directly, they wrote that they are "truly empathetic to those who were impacted."

• Listen to Episode 6 | How MK-ULTRA entered mainstream pop culture.

WATCH | The 2017 Fifth Estate documentary about MK-ULTRA:

Related stories

What Was MK-Ultra, The CIA’s Top-Secret Cold War Research Program?

During the 1950s and '60s, the cia used brainwashing, hypnosis, and torture on thousands of subjects brutalized by the infamous project mk-ultra experiments..

Though they may sound like science fiction and though the CIA tried to deny them for years, the mind-control experiments of project MK-Ultra were all too real. For more than a decade at the height of the Cold War, CIA researchers abused helpless subjects in some of the most disturbing experiments in history.

Convinced that the Soviet Union had developed mind-control capabilities, the CIA tried to do the same with MK-Ultra starting in 1953. What followed was an expansive program undertaken across 80 institutions, universities, and hospitals. Each one carried out torturous experiments, including electrocution, verbal and sexual abuse, and dosing subjects with massive quantities of LSD.

Getty Images A doctor squirts LSD into the mouth of another doctor as part of project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments.

What’s more, these experiments often used unwitting subjects who were left with permanent psychological damage.

Unsurprisingly, the CIA conducted the project with the utmost secrecy, even giving it multiple code names. And when it finally ended in the 1970s, most of the records pertaining to it were destroyed on the orders of the director of the CIA himself — that is, all but a small misfiled cache accidentally left intact.

Eventually, those documents and several government investigations helped bring the project to light. Today, the public even has access to some 20,000 documents concerning project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments.

But even this provides only a small window into what is perhaps one of the largest and most heinous government programs and cover-ups in American history.

The Birth Of Project MK-Ultra At The Height Of The Cold War

Wikimedia Commons The MK-Ultra program also operated under the cryptonyms MKNAOMI and MKDELTA. The “MK” indicated that the project was sponsored by the Technical Services Staff of the CIA and “Ultra” was a nod to the codename that had been used for classified documents during World War II.

As the Cold War moved into its peak era in the early 1950s, the American intelligence community grew increasingly obsessed with the growing technological advancements of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. government feared, in particular, that it was already falling behind the Soviet Union in regard to novel interrogation techniques. Reports during the Korean War (which later proved erroneous) suggested that North Korean and Soviet forces had developed mind-control capabilities and the U.S. couldn’t let them have that advantage.

Thus, on April 13, 1953, then-director of the nascent CIA Allen Welsh Dulles sanctioned project MK-Ultra. The program was quickly headed by chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb, who was known in covert circles as the “Black Sorcerer.”

One of Gottlieb’s original goals was to create a truth serum that could be used against Soviet spies and prisoners of war in order to gain intelligence.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, generating a truth serum proved difficult. Instead, researchers believed that a kind of mind control could be achieved by placing the subject in a heavily altered mental state — typically with the help of wildly experimental drugs.

According to journalist Stephen Kinzer , Gottlieb realized that in order to control the mind, he’d have to wipe it first. “Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void,” Kinzer explained. “We didn’t get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one.”

In Gottlieb’s own words, project MK-Ultra’s mind experiments extensively researched extensively how drugs could “enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion,” as well as “produce amnesia, shock and confusion.”

A declassified document from 1955 added that MK-Ultra sought to observe “materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity” and “substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.”

With these goals in mind, project MK-Ultra scientists began devising mind-altering experiments with insidious goals — and disastrous results.

How Did MK-Ultra’s Mind-Control Experiments Work?

CIA Sidney Gottlieb, the man who oversaw all of the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments.

From the beginning, MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments were conducted with great secrecy in part because the CIA was well aware of the dubious ethics involved. For secrecy’s sake, the program’s 162 experiments were spread out across multiple cities, college campuses, prisons, and hospitals. In total, 185 researchers were involved — and many of them didn’t even know that their work was meant for the CIA.

In all of these dozens of settings, the primary experimental method often involved administering large quantities of various mind-altering substances in hopes of wiping the human mind in the way Gottlieb wanted to.

Subjects were dosed with LSD, opioids, THC, and the synthetic government-created super hallucinogen BZ, as well as widely available substances such as alcohol. Researchers would also sometimes administer two drugs with opposite effects (such as a barbiturate and an amphetamine) simultaneously and observe their subjects’ reactions, or give subjects already under the influence of alcohol a dose of another drug like LSD.

Aside from drugs, researchers also used hypnosis, often in an effort to create fear in subjects that could then be exploited to gain information. Researchers went on to investigate the effects of hypnosis on the results of polygraph tests and its implications for memory loss.

Wikimedia Commons Donald E. Cameron, who had been present at the Nuremberg Trials as a psychiatric evaluator for leading Nazi Rudolf Hess, was one of the lead researchers in MK-Ultra’s mind experiments.

MK-Ultra participants were also subjected to experimentation involving electroconvulsive therapy, aural stimulation, and paralytic drugs.

Meanwhile, experimenter Donald Cameron (the first chairman of the World Psychiatric Association and the president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations) drugged patients and repeatedly played tapes of noises or suggestions while they were comatose for long periods of time, hoping to correct schizophrenia by erasing memories in order to reprogram subjects’ minds.

In reality, these tests left his subjects comatose for months at a time and permanently suffering from incontinence and amnesia.

John C. Lilly, a noted animal behaviorist, was also involved in the experiments. For his research in human communication with dolphins, he created the first sensory deprivation flotation tank. MK-Ultra scientists commissioned the tank to create a sensory-free environment for their subjects to experience their acid trips without the stimuli of the outside world.

With such an arsenal of tools at their disposal, the project MK-Ultra mind-control experiments succeeded in severely disrupting the human mind, but at great cost to its unwitting subjects.

Who Were The Subjects Of These Ghastly Experiments?

Wikimedia Commons An electroconvulsive machine used during the experiments.

Due to the classified nature of the program, many of the test subjects were unaware of their involvement and Gottlieb admitted that his team targeted “people who could not fight back.” These included drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers, and both mental and terminal cancer patients.

Some of the subjects of MK-Ultra were volunteers or paid students. Others were addicts who were bribed with the promise of more drugs if they participated.

Though many of MK-Ultra’s records were destroyed, there are a few notable documented subjects, including: Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ; Robert Hunter, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead; and James “Whitey” Bulger , a notorious Boston mob boss.

Some participants were voluntarily vocal about their involvement. Kesey, for example, was an early volunteer and joined the project while he was a student at Stanford University to be observed while taking LSD and other psychedelic drugs.

Hulton-Deutsch/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images Ken Kesey’s experience with MK-Ultra in part inspired the writing of his seminal work, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

His experience was, according to him, a positive one and he went on to publicly promote the drug. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was also, in part, inspired by his experiences.

Unlike Kesey, however, some participants did not have such positive experiences.

The Horrors Experienced By The Participants

Untold numbers of MK-ULtra subjects were subjected to chilling abuses in the name of science. In one experiment, an unwitting mental patient in Kentucky was given a dose of LSD every day for 174 consecutive days. Elsewhere, Whitey Bulger reported that he would be dosed with LSD, monitored by a physician, and repeatedly asked leading questions like: “Would you ever kill anyone?” He later suggested that his murderous career as a crime lord was partially brought on by his participation in MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments.

Internet Archive Alleged MK-Ultra subject Ted Kaczynski in prison, 1999.

Unabomber Ted Kaczynski may also have been involved as a subject in the MK-Ultra mind experiments conducted at Harvard in the early 1960s.

Another undocumented but suspected participant was the infamous Charles Manson , convicted of ordering a string of brutal Los Angeles murders that shocked the nation in 1969.

According to author Tom O’Neill in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties , Manson not only had people in his circle later connected to the CIA, but the way in which he ran his cult, by doping his followers with a constant flow of LSD, was oddly similar to the kinds of experiments carried out by MK-Ultra.

Wikimedia Commons Charles Manson’s 1968 mugshot.

The unsuspecting subjects of MK-Ultra weren’t all civilians, though; some of them were CIA operatives themselves. Gottlieb claimed that he wanted to study the effects of LSD in “normal” settings — and so he began to administer LSD to CIA officials without warning.

The experiments continued for over a decade even after an Army scientist, Dr. Frank Olson, began to suffer from drug-induced depression and jumped out a 13th-story window right at the project’s outset in 1953.

For those who survived, the fallout of the experiments included things like depression, anterograde and retrograde amnesia, paralysis, withdrawal, confusion, disorientation, pain, insomnia, and schizophrenic-like mental states as a result of the experiments. Long-term effects like these largely went untreated and unreported to authorities.

How MK-Ultra’s Mind-Control Experiments Finally Came To Light

Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images CIA Director Richard Helms.

In early 1973, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MK-Ultra files destroyed. He feared that all government agencies would be investigated and he would not risk a breach of information on such a controversial topic. But in 1975, President Gerald R. Ford commissioned an investigation into CIA activities, hoping to eradicate conspiracies within the organization. Two committees spawned from the investigation: the Church Committee of the U.S. Congress and the Rockefeller Commission.

The overall investigation revealed that Helms had destroyed most of the evidence regarding MK-Ultra, but that same year, a collection of 8,000 documents were discovered in a financial records building and later released under a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977.

When the remaining documents were made available to the public, the Senate launched a collection of hearings on the ethics of the project later that year. Survivors soon filed lawsuits against the CIA and the federal government regarding informed consent laws. In 1992, 77 form MK-Ultra participants were awarded a settlement, though many more were denied any retribution because of how difficult it was for them to prove definitively that these secret experiments caused their mental anguish.

In 2018, the families of a group of ex-patients filed a class-action lawsuit against the provincial and federal governments of Canada for the experiments Dr. Cameron ran on their loved ones in the 1960s.

Since the documents were revealed, countless shows and movies have been inspired by project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments, most notably The Men Who Stare at Goats , the Jason Bourne series, and Stranger Things .

The government does not deny that the MK-Ultra experiments took place — but most of what transpired remains a mystery. It has admitted that the experiments took place across 80 institutions and often on unwitting subjects. But most of the discussion surrounding the experiments today comes from conspiracy theorists. The CIA is adamant that the experiments ceased in 1963 and that all related experiments were abandoned. Due to the destruction of records, the secrecy surrounding the project, and its various, ever-changing code names, conspiracy theorists aren’t so sure.

Some of them even believe that the experiments are still taking place today. There is, of course, no way to be sure.

After learning about project MK-Ultra’s mind-control experiments, read up on the CIA’s remote viewing experiments . Then, learn about other terrifying science experiments throughout history.

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History of Now

The True Story of Brainwashing and How It Shaped America

Fears of Communism during the Cold War spurred psychological research, pop culture hits, and unethical experiments in the CIA

Lorraine Boissoneault

Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm. “Brain-washing Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party,” blared his headline in the Miami Daily News in September 1950. In the article, and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong’s Red Army used terrifying ancient techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless, Communist automatons. He called this hypnotic process “brainwashing,” a word-for-word translation from xi-nao, the Mandarin words for wash ( xi ) and brain ( nao ), and warned about the dangerous applications it could have. The process was meant to “ change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet—a human robot—without the atrocity being visible from the outside.”

It wasn’t the first time fears of Communism and mind control had seeped into the American public. In 1946 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was so worried about the spread of Communism that it proposed removing liberals, socialists and communists from places like schools, libraries, newspapers and entertainment. Hunter’s inflammatory rhetoric didn’t immediately have a huge impact—until three years into the Korean War, when American prisoners of war began confessing to outlandish crimes.

When he was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, Colonel Frank Schwable was the highest ranking military officer to meet that fate, and by February 1953, he and other prisoners of war had falsely confessed to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked, and grew even more so when 5,000 of the 7,200 POWs either petitioned the U.S. government to end the war, or signed confessions of their alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation.

Suddenly the threat of brainwashing was very real, and it was everywhere. The U.S. military denied the charges made in the soldiers’ “confessions,” but couldn’t explain how they’d been coerced to make them. What could explain the behavior of the soldiers besides brainwashing? The idea of mind control flourished in pop culture, with movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Manchurian Candidate showing people whose minds were wiped and controlled by outside forces. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover referred to thought-control repeatedly in his book Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It . By 1980 even the American Psychiatric Association had given it credence, including brainwashing under “dissociative disorders” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-III. Had Chinese and Soviet Communists really uncovered a machine or method to rewrite men’s minds and supplant their free will?

The short answer is no—but that didn’t stop the U.S. from pouring resources into combatting it.

“The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State . “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.”

The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured.

Robert Jay Lifton, one of the psychiatrists who worked with the veterans and later studied doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, listed eight criteria for thought reform (the term for brainwashing used by Mao Zedong's communist government). They included things like “milieu control” (having absolute power over the individual’s surroundings) and “confession” (in which individuals are forced to confess to crimes repeatedly, even if they aren’t true). For the American soldiers trapped in the Korean prison camps, brainwashing meant forced standing, deprivation of food and sleep, solitary confinement, and repeated exposure to Communist propaganda.

“There was concern on the part of [the American military] about what had actually happened to [the POWs] and whether they had been manipulated to be [what would later be known as] a ‘Manchurian candidate,’” says Marcia Holmes, a science historian at the University of London’s “ Hidden Persuaders ” project. “They’re not sleeper agents, they’re just extremely traumatized.”

The early 1950s marked the debut of the military’s studies into psychological torture, and instead of concluding the American soldiers needed rehabilitation, military directors came to a more ominous conclusion: that the men were simply weak. “They became less interested in the fantasy of brainwashing and became worried our men couldn’t stand up to torture,” Holmes says. This resulted in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program (SERE), meant to inoculate men against future attempts at psychological torture by using those same torture techniques in their training.

Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing .

Psychiatrists, as well as writers like Aldous Huxley, were aided by the dominant theory of the human mind at the time, known as “behaviorism”. Think of Ivan Pavlov’s slobbering dogs, trained to salivate upon hearing a bell, even if they weren’t tempted with food. The basic assumption of behaviorism was that the human mind is a blank slate at birth, and is shaped through social conditioning throughout life. Where Russia had Pavlov, the U.S. had B.F. Skinner , who suggested psychology could help predict and control behavior. Little wonder, then, that the public and the military alike couldn’t let go of brainwashing as a concept for social control.  

With this fear of a mind-control weapon still haunting the American psyche, CIA director Allen Dulles authorized a series of psychological experiments using hallucinogens (like LSD) and biological manipulation (like sleep deprivation) to see if brainwashing were possible. The research could then, theoretically, be used in both defensive and offensive programs against the Soviet Union. Project MK-ULTRA began in 1953 and continued in various forms for more than 10 years. When the Watergate scandal broke, fear of discovery led the CIA to destroy most of the evidence of the program. But 20,000 documents were recovered through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977 , filed during a Senate investigation into Project MK-ULTRA. The files revealed the experiments tested drugs (like LSD), sensory deprivation, hypnotism and electroshock on everyone from agency operatives to prostitutes, recovering drug addicts and prisoners—often without their consent.

Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay .

“Here, then, is the brief history of brainwashing,” Melley writes in a 2011 paper for Grey Room . “The concept began as an [O]rientalist propaganda fiction created by the CIA to mobilize domestic support for a massive military build-up. This fiction proved so effective that the CIA’s operations directorate believed it and began a furious search for a real mind control weapon. The search resulted not in a miraculous new weapon but a program of simulated brainwashing designed as a prophylactic against enemy mistreatment. This simulation in turn became the real basis for interrogating detainees in the war on terror.”

While few people take seriously the notion of hypnosis-like brainwashing (outside Hollywood films like Zoolander ), there are still plenty who see danger in certain kinds of control. Consider the conversations about ISIS and radicalization, in which young people are essentially portrayed as being brainwashed. “Can You Turn a Terrorist Back Into a Citizen? A controversial new program aims to reform homegrown ISIS recruits back into normal young Americans,” proclaims one article in Wired . Or there’s the more provocative headline from Vice : “ Inside the Mind-Control Methods the Islamic State Uses to Recruit Teenagers .”

“I think a program of isolation and rigorous conversion still does have a life in our concept of radicalization,” Melley says. But outside those cases related to terrorism it’s mostly used facetiously, he adds.  

“The notion of brainwashing, no less than radicalization, often obscure[s] far more than it reveal[s],” write Sarah Marks and Daniel Pick of the Hidden Persuaders project. “Both terms could be a lazy way of refusing to inquire further into individual histories, inviting the assumption that the way people act can be known in advance.”

For now, the only examples of “perfect” brainwashing remain in science-fiction rather than fact. At least until researchers find a way to hack into the network of synapses that comprise the brain .

Editor's note, May 25, 2017: The article previously misstated that Robert Jay Lifton studied Nazi doctors' war crimes before studying American prisoners of war, and that he coined the term "thought reform." 

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Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle's Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/

MKUltra: Inside the CIA's Cold War mind control experiments

Thousands of Americans were unknowing test subjects for psychological warfare research

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Forty years ago, a Freedom of Information request revealed the terrifying scope of Project MKUltra, a CIA programme which used human subjects to experiment with mind control for more than ten years.

Although the majority of documentation relating to the project had been destroyed by 1977, enough remained that - along with witness testimony - two congressional investigations were able to build an eye-opening picture of the programme.

Over eleven years, thousands of Americans were subjects of unethical and often illegal experiments to test mind control techniques, from subliminal messaging to sensory deprivation to the use of hallucinogenic drugs.

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What was it for?

Project MKUltra, launched at the height of the Cold War, was intended to give the US the edge over the Soviet Union in psychological warfare - by any means necessary.

In 1977, CIA director Stansfield Turner testified that MKUltra was set up to investigate "the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior".

This included experiments designed to "render the induction of hypnosis easier", "enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion" and "produce amnesia, shock and confusion", says Smithsonian Magazine .

The mass destruction of documents relating to MKUltra means that we may never know the full extent of the project, making it a rich source of conspiracy theories and speculation.

Who were the test subjects?

According to the hearing report , 86 institutions - including universities, mental hospitals and prisons - participated in CIA-sponsored experiments on human subjects.

Vulnerable people were among the unwitting subjects of the top-secret experiments, many of them conducted by doctors, scientists and academics secretly under contract to the intelligence agency.

Chemical tests were even conducted on terminal cancer patients, "presumably because the experiments were anticipated to have long-lasting detrimental, if not lethal, effects," says Gizmodo .

Ethical standards and medical safeguarding were often non-existent. One of MKUltra's subprojects was to "observe the behaviour of unwitting persons being questioned after having been given a drug", according to the 1977 congressional hearing.

One such unwitting test subject, military scientist Dr Frank Olson, fell to his death from a New York hotel window nine days after CIA agents spiked his drink with LSD, provoking a nervous breakdown.

Among the most high profile suspected victims was Ted Kaczynski, who would become infamous as the Unabomber.

In his second year as a student at Harvard University, 17-year-old maths prodigy Kaczynski volunteered for a psychological study run by Dr Henry Murray, a Harvard professor who was secretly employed by the CIA.

For three years, the volunteers were subjected to aggressive, traumatising sessions in which their most cherished beliefs were torn apart, as part of research into emotional responses to extreme stress under interrogation.

Following the experiment, Kaczynski became increasingly withdrawn and eventually dropped out of society altogether. From a remote backwoods cabin in Montana, he developed a nihilistic, anti-capitalist, anti-technology political philosophy.

Eventually, he would turn to violence to further his agenda, justifying his deadly letter bomb campaign in a rambling manifesto which, according to expert witnesses for the defence at his murder trial, showed the influences of the traumatic Harvard experiment.

The mass destruction of records means that we may never know for sure whether or not the Murray experiment was an official part of MKUltra, Kaczynski's brother, David, wrote in 2010.

Either way, Kaczynski was one of thousands of victims of "a scientific culture that failed to learn and recoil from the grotesquely unethical conduct of Nazi scientists who treated human subjects with no more empathy than they would have treated an inanimate object".

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C.I.A. mind control experiments and the man behind them

In the 1950’s, the cia began a secret mind control program called mk-ultra and they hired chemist sidney gottlieb who was given free rein to experiment on unwitting subjects..

From 1955, artist William Millarc takes part in an LSD experiment alleged to have been part of the MK-ULTRA program.

Guest: Stephen Kinzer

Back in the 1950’s as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was heating up, the C.I.A. became convinced that the country that could control the mind would dominate the world. It began a top secret program that came to be known as MK-ULTRA and they hired a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb who was given free rein to experiment on unwitting subjects such as prisoners, patients, addicts, even johns. They administered LSD and harsh interrogation techniques, which were essentially psychological torture techniques. Our guest STEPHEN KINZER details this shocking and sordid story in his new book, Poisoner in Chief . We’ll hear about the origins of the intelligence community’s psychological experiments, how it affected the lives of its subjects, and how some of these tactics have been implemented in more recent history.

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What was Project MKUltra? Inside the CIA’s mind-control program

The CIA is a goldmine for conspiracy theorists and may hold the dubious honor of being the source of most of the conspiracy theories that end up being true. While some of the conspiracy theories that revolve around the CIA are wild speculation, a few of them are very real and well documented. Among them is a project with little scientific merit and significant ethical concerns called Project MKUltra.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the CIA experimented with LSD on American citizens.

Project MKUltra was the code name for a series of investigations into mind-bending substances, techniques, and medical procedures . The goal was to develop truth serums, mind-control drugs, and determine what chemicals and methods had potential use for torture, disorientation, and espionage. The experiments started in 1953 and were slowly reduced in scope over the next 20 years before being halted in 1973.

What did the CIA do?

A variety of experiments were undertaken to understand the effects of powerful drugs on unsuspecting subjects. These were often done in conjunction with hospitals and universities who claimed later they were not told what the goal of the experimentation was. At least 86 “universities or institutions” were involved in the acquisition of test subjects and administration of the experiments .

In one set of experiments, aptly named operation midnight climax , prostitutes on the CIA payroll would lure clients back to a safehouse where they would drug them with LSD. The effect the drug had on the unsuspecting victim would be observed behind one-way glass by intelligence agents and recorded.

CIA agents also had a habit of drugging one another both at work and at weekend retreats to the point where random LSD trips became a workplace hazard to see what the effect of the drug was on unsuspecting subjects. However, this resulted in at least one death when a subject developed severe psychotic behaviors after being drugged. While that death is often considered a suicide or an accident, the possibility that it was a murder is often brought up .

Other experiments were also undertaken with sensory deprivation, hypnosis, psychological abuse, MDMA, salvia, psilocybin, and the mixing of barbiturates with amphetamines to sedate a subject before giving them a massive hit of speed in hopes of making them spill their secrets.

Who was experimented on?

Subjects included student volunteers, patients at mental hospitals, prisoners who both did and didn’t volunteer, drug addicts who were paid in more drugs, and the occasional random person in addition to CIA agents who got unlucky.

The author Ken Kesey volunteered for the experiments while he was a student at Stanford. He later worked the experiences into his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and was so attracted to the use of psychedelics that he went on to host “Acid Tests” at his home, bringing LSD to the counterculture.

It has also been speculated that Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, was experimented on as part of MKUltra when he participated in a series of experiments at Harvard in which he was verbally abused and had his personal beliefs belittled by an attorney. It must be repeated that this is mostly conjecture, though several sources point out the likelihood of it.

Did any of it work?

Some of it worked, but most of it didn’t. 

While some of the drugs were found to make the test subjects more suggestible or pliable, none of them were the truth serums or reliable torture aids that the CIA wanted. Complicating matters, the research was highly unscientific at times, and a great deal of the data was of limited use.

In many ways, it might have been counterproductive. The counterculture was given access to LSD through the experiments and they proceeded to run in the opposite direction with it. John Lennon went so far as to mock the CIA in an interview, noting “We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That’s what people forget. They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.”

The head of the project, Sidney Gottlieb, would also go on to say that his entire effort was “useless”, suggesting that the project failed to satisfy anybody. However, some elements of the program have gone on to be used in recent torture regimens with a focus on psychological torment.

How do we know about this?

In 1973, then-CIA-director Richard Helms ordered all documents relating to MKUltra destroyed. However, 20,000 pages of documents were misfiled and survived the purge. In 1977, Congress organized the Church Committee and examined the records. As a result of the findings, Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan issued orders banning all future human experimentation without consent by government agencies, and some remittances were paid to those harmed by the tests.

How illegal was this?

The project violated the Nuremberg codes, agreed to by the United States after the trials of Nazi war criminals, by administering drugs without informed consent. At least two people, Frank Olson and Harold Blauer , died as a result of being drugged without their knowledge. The true extent of psychological damage and death toll is impossible to know, as the records were mostly burned and the unscientific nature of many tests would make it impossible to determine what later events (for example, suicide) were attributable to the tests.

So, there you have it. The CIA did use mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting civilian populations and those too weak to fight back and then tried to cover it up. While most conspiracy theories are far-fetched and debunkable with two minutes of thought, some of them are entirely true.

MKUltra was a conspiracy between the government and many institutions to drug people without their knowledge and use anything learned from it for espionage purposes. Modern research into psychedelic drugs is increasingly benign, but we must remember that a great deal of what we know about them was discovered for the sake of making them weapons. A sobering reminder of what science can do without guidance. 

Project Mkultra: One of the Most Shocking CIA Programs of All Time

When the extent of the U.S. government’s domestic spying program was revealed this past summer, many were surprised and outraged: how could a government which so prizes liberty of its citizens covertly collect data on its own people?

Suggested Reading

Yet, sadly, this is not the first time Uncle Sam, without permission or notice, secretly gathered information on its people and wasn’t even close to the greatest atrocity. For that, there are numerous other examples such as when the government intentionally poisoned certain alcohol supplies they knew people would drink, killing over 10,000 American citizens and sickening many thousands others . (Despite this, the program continued for some time, though it was hotly debated in Congress when the death tolls started rolling in.)

One other such “interesting” program, was from 1953 to 1964, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted dozens of experiments on the effects of biological and chemical agents on American citizens without their knowledge in Project MKUltra. These covert tests included subjecting the unwitting subjects to hallucinogenic drugs and other chemicals, among other things.

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It is difficult to find official documents about this program; however, in 1976 and 1977, the U.S. Senate conducted investigations and even held a joint committee hearing on Project MKUltra, then published much of what was discovered; you will not believe what they found out.

MKULtra’s Purpose

According to the hearing report , the project was intended to “develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials.” [1] The motivation was also defensive, in that many were afraid during the Cold War that the Russians and Chinese had already developed weapons in this area. As the project’s proponents noted:

The development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy’s theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are. [2]

Officially authorized in 1953, by 1955, project creep had expanded the CIA’s authority under MKUltra to include the following:

Discovery of the following materials and methods [including those]:

• which will promote the intoxicating affect of alcohol;
• which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness;
• which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so called “brain-washing;”
• which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use;
• [which will produce] shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use; and
• which will produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc. [3]

LSD experiments

Senator Edward Kennedy dominated the hearing. In his opening remarks, he noted there was:

an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to “unwitting subjects in social situations.” [4]

For many of these drug tests, especially early on, there were “no medical personnel on hand either to administer the drugs or observe their effects.” Often, the randomly selected subjects had “become ill for hours or days, including hospitalization in at least one case.” [5]

Even more troubling, some of the tests proved lethal , but that did not stop the CIA from continuing their experimentation:

The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects. . . . The fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate fundamental disregard for the value of human life. [6]

One of these lives belonged to Dr. Frank Olson, himself a researcher with the U.S. Army who studied “developing techniques for offensive use of biological weapons . . . [and] biological research for the CIA.” [7]

Along with a group of 9 other such scientists, he attended a conference in a cabin at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland in November 1953. Once there, ironically, CIA operatives spiked the researchers’ Cointreau with LSD. Only after the scientists had finished their drinks were they informed that they had been drugged. [8]

Most of the researchers handled the experience well and had no aftereffects, but not Dr. Olson. He never recovered from the ordeal and shortly after the experiment, began to show “symptoms of paranoia and schizophrenia.” [9]

Dr. Olson’s superior and the CIA who ran the experiment arranged for him to get treatment in New York City. While spending the night in a hotel room with the CIA officer, and after requesting a wake-up call for the next morning, Dr. Olson somehow managed to fall to his death. As the CIA officer (Lashbrook) reported:

At approximately 2:30 a.m. Saturday, November 28, Lashbrook was awakened by a loud “crash of glass.” . . . . Olson “had crashed through the closed window blind and the closed window and he fell to his death from the window of our room on the 10 th floor.” [10]

There is no indication that any investigation of foul play, particularly by the CIA officer (who was both responsible for the experiment and alone in the hotel room with Olson) was ever conducted.

Universities, Prisons and Hospitals Conducted Experiments

In the hearing, Senator Kennedy noted that many otherwise respectable institutions were fraudulently incorporated into MKUltra projects:

What we are basically talking about is . . . the perversion and corruption of many of our outstanding research centers in this country, with CIA funds, where some of our top researchers were unwittingly involved in research sponsored by the Agency in which they had no knowledge of the background or the support for [11]

According to the hearing report , “eighty-six universities or institutions were involved,” [12] and “185 non-government researchers and assistants” worked on these projects. [13] “Physicians, toxicologists, and other specialists in mental [and] narcotics” were lured into MKUltra through the provision of grants that were “made under ostensible research foundation auspices, thereby concealing the CIA’s interest from the specialist’s institution.” [14]

For some of the 12 hospitals that participated in Project MKUltra, tests were conducted on terminal cancer patients – presumably because the experiments were anticipated to have long-lasting detrimental, if not lethal, effects. [15]

Sadly, to get the hospitals (and perhaps the patients) to agree to these experiments, the CIA often paid the institution. For example, Subproject 23, authorized in August 1955, worked as follows:

The project engineer . . . authorized the contractor to pay the hospital’s expenses of certain persons suffering from incurable cancer for the privilege of studying the effects of these chemicals during their terminal illnesses. [16]

Likewise, many of the experiments conducted at the three prisons were done secretly: “We also know now that some unwitting testing took place on criminal sexual psychopaths.” [17]

Not all testing was done unwittingly, although that did not make it any more ethical. For example, in a prison experiment conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health Addiction Research Center at the Lexington Rehabilitation Center (a prison for convicted drug addicts), prisoners who volunteered to participate in a hallucinogenic drug experiment were promised (and received) doses of “the drug of their addiction.” [18]

Miscellaneous Other Experiments

An unknown number of other experiments in “such areas as effects of electro-shock, harassment techniques for offensive use . . [and] gas propelled sprays and aerosols” to be used as “assassination delivery systems” were also being conducted. [19]

In addition, MKUltra scientists were authorized to research “additional avenues to the control of human behavior” including “radiation . . .[and] paramilitary devices and materials.” [20]

Heinous Covert Experiments: By the Numbers

Project MKUltra consisted of 149 subprojects “many of which appear to have some connection with research into behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing or administering drugs surreptitiously,” [21] including as follows:

• “6 subprojects involving tests on unwitting subjects were conducted.”
• 8 subprojects involving hypnosis, including 2 that also used drugs were performed.
• 7 subprojects included the use of drugs or chemicals.
• 4 subprojects used “magician’s art . . . e.g., surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials.”
• 9 subprojects studied sleep research (read: deprivation) and psychotherapy’s influence on behavior.
• 6 subprojects studied the effects on human tissue of “exotic pathogens and the capability to incorporate them in effective delivery systems.” [22]

The CIA Lost or Destroyed All Records of Project MKUltra

Sadly, but not surprisingly, almost no records remain of the 10 years of covert activity. As Senator Kennedy noted:

Perhaps most disturbing of all was the fact that the extent of experimentation on human subjects was unknown. The records of all these activities were destroyed in 1973, at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms. [23]

Notably, however, some records were overlooked during the CIA’s destruction because new records were found in 1977, as noted by Senator Kennedy:

We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records . . . . The records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had previously been thought. [24]

Nonetheless, these records still leave an incomplete record of the program.

No Accountability

Two lawsuits arising out of MKUltra activities made it to the Supreme Court, but both protected the government over citizen’s rights:

In 1985, the Court held in CIA vs. Simms that the names of the institutions and researchers who participated in Project MKUltra were exempt from revelation under the Freedom of Information Act due to the CIA’s need to protect its “intelligence sources.”

In 1987, in United States v. Stanley , the Court held that a serviceman who had volunteered for a chemical weapons experiment, but who was actually tested with LSD, was barred from bringing a claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

Melissa writes for the wildly popular interesting fact website TodayIFoundOut.com . To subscribe to Today I Found Out's “Daily Knowledge” newsletter, click here or like them on Facebook here .

This post has been republished with permission from TodayIFoundOut.com .

U.S. argues for immunity in MK-ULTRA mind control case before Quebec Court of Appeal

Proposed class-action suit seeks damages for montreal brainwashing experiments.

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A proposed class-action lawsuit over infamous brainwashing experiments at a Montreal psychiatric hospital was before Quebec's highest court Thursday, as victims attempted to remove immunity granted to the United States government.

The U.S. government successfully argued in Quebec Superior Court last August that the country couldn't be sued for the project known as MK-ULTRA, allegedly funded by the Canadian government and the CIA.

U.S. lawyers argued that foreign states had absolute immunity from lawsuits in Canada between the 1940s and 1960s, when the program took place.

But survivors (and their families) of the experiments at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute — which included experimental drugs, rounds of electroshocks and sleep deprivation — appealed that decision.

On Thursday, a lawyer representing the United States government told the Quebec Court of Appeal that the country should be immune from prosecution and that any lawsuit against the U.S. government should be filed in that country.

The court case stems from a class-action lawsuit filed against McGill University — which was affiliated to the psychiatric hospital — Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital and the Canadian and U.S. governments after Montrealers allegedly had their memories erased and were reduced to childlike states.

• Class action suit by families of those brainwashed in Montreal medical experiments gets go-ahead

Class-action lawyer Jeff Orenstein said Thursday he believes Canada's 1982 State Immunity Act, which outlines how foreign states can be sued in the country, is retroactive and can apply in this case.

He said the 1982 act allows foreign states to be sued in cases of bodily injury.

"But this took place in the 1950s and '60s," Orenstein told reporters, regarding the psychological experiments. "And so the exception had not been in effect during that period so (the U.S.) argued that the old law would prevail and the old law was absolute immunity."

"What we're claiming is the law is retrospective, that you can look back even before the act was passed and apply it today," Orenstein said.

He noted there were also exemptions during the 1950s and 1960s for commercial-activity lawsuits, adding that the Montreal experiments involved a funding arrangement between private parties.

"Even under the old law, you would be able to pursue in Canadian courts," Orenstein said.

He also said the case could be heard in Quebec. "We don't think that Canadian citizens who are injured on Canadian soil are required to go to the United States to sue."

The Court of Appeal will render a decision at a later date.

Lasting impact of MK-ULTRA 

The class-action request, filed in January 2019, alleges that the government of Canada funded psychiatric treatments by Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute between 1948 and 1964 that were allegedly part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program of covert mind-control. It has not been authorized yet by a judge.

Julie Tanny, the lead plaintiff in the case, was among several dozen who protested Thursday outside the Court of Appeal building and attended the hearing. She said as many as 300 families could be affected by the class action and many lives were left in disarray due to the experimental treatments.

She said her father had been sent to the Allan in 1957 for facial pain and was put in Cameron's program, spending two 30-day stints of chemically induced sleep in the hospital, allegedly with a tape recorder under his pillow. At the end of this time there, his medical records noted, "this is as far as we can take him," Tanny said.

• How the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments laid the groundwork for torture methods used today

"Where they wanted him to go, I don't exactly know, but I do know when visiting him, he was like a child, in diapers, giggling like a three-year-old," she said, adding he didn't recognize his own children.

"Most of his life vanished; he was never the same man he started off as," Tanny said. He died in 1992.

She hopes for accountability at the end of the legal process and to shed light on a dark chapter for many families.

"It's sad to think about what could have been," Tanny said. "It was a waste of a life for my father, terrible for my mother and a giant loss and a void for the kids."

Related Stories

• Federal government quietly compensates daughter of brainwashing experiments victim
• FIFTH ESTATE Trudeau government gag order in CIA brainwashing case silences victims, lawyer says
• 'She went away, hoping to get better': Family remembers Winnipeg woman put through CIA-funded brainwashing

RS Recommends: ‘Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties’

By Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Elisabeth Garber-Paul

It’s hard to explain Tom O’Neill’s new book Chaos: Charles Manson , the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties without sounding like a conspiracy theorist down a rabbit hole —  you try telling your friends that a reporter spent two decades researching the links between one of America’s most notorious criminals and the government’s super-secretive mind-control program MKULTRA without getting a few snickers.

Of course, imagine being the journalist writing it, and you find yourself in an even more uncomfortable position; that’s exactly why it took O’Neill two decades to finally get it published. It started as a story for the now-long-defunct Premiere magazine as a way to cover the infamous murders’ 30th anniversary in 1999. O’Neill originally began looking into the Hollywood connections, retreading a story that, even at that point, had been told countless times.

But when he began to dig into holes in Helter Skelter — the best-selling true-crime tome written by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, which has become the questionable, if de facto, account of the case — O’Neill began pulling strings that raised some very uncomfortable questions: What was the real relationship between Manson and Terry Melcher, the record producer who’d previously lived in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered? Why did Manson keep getting lucky breaks with the law when he was arrested, despite the fact that he was almost perpetually on parole? What really happened during the Summer of Love, when Manson put his family together in San Francisco? What explains the similarities between government funded, LSD-fueled mind-control experiments, and Manson’s techniques? And why were there so many people in his orbit who seemed to have ties to the CIA?

Written as a reporter’s journey, Chaos traces O’Neill’s path from a celebrity interviewer assigned a fluffy anniversary piece to an investigative journalist on the hunt for a long-evaporated truth. He painstakingly details his emotional attachment to the case, and how that eventually drove him to multiple book deals and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. Of course, don’t expect a clean resolution — this book is more about asking questions of the motive than it is pinning down clear answers . But for anyone who feels like they’ve heard the Manson story a million times and still can’t stop listening, Chaos offers a slew of newly reported information that proves one thing: There’s more to it than we thought. The question is, will we ever really know why the murders happened?

[ Find the Book Here ]

Correction: This article previously stated that the initial assignment came from  Parade magazine. It was  Premiere magazine. 

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2 Dark Stranger Things Season 5 Theories Get A Big Boost From Set Photos

Stranger things season 5's potential eddie munson return gets promising response from star, stranger things season 5 set photos shows the gang back together on their bikes (with 1 new member).

Is Stranger Things based on a true story? While some may immediately think the Silent Hill, Dungeons and Dragons, and Stephen King-inspired Stranger Things is purely fiction, the truth isn't quite as it seems. Here's the true story behind Project MKUltra, a CIA operation that serves as a subplot in Stranger Things . The sci-fi series, created by the Duffer Brothers, first debuted in 2016. After emerging as a sleeper hit, the viewership grew, making it one of Netflix's most popular series in the streamer's history. The fourth season was heavily delayed due to the COVID pandemic, but both parts landed with thundering success, bringing Stranger Things ' world of secret government science projects back into the public eye.

When Stranger Things began, the story was set in 1983 and followed the disappearance of a young boy named Will Byers. At the center of the series, however, was Eleven's story and powerful abilities . As time went on, more about Eleven's past was uncovered, including her connection to a local lab partaking in dangerous experiments. Their actions would go on to open a breach, threatening the lives of the town's residents for years to come. Later seasons then delved further into Eleven's history, with season 4 fully opening up the history of Hawkins Labs, the mysterious organization responsible for experimenting on children and opening the portal to Stranger Things ' infamous Upside Down.

Related: Stranger Things: The Ultimate Guide To The Expanded Universe

The Duffer Brothers may have taken a fictional approach with Stranger Things , but there are certain aspects of history mixed into the narrative. Aside from the supernatural elements, Stranger Things ' Soviet Russia storyline is a key element of the show alongside the U.S. government cover-ups. The presence of Project MKUltra might be the most compelling historical element interweaved in the plot. Even though the operation might seem bizarre, it has very real connections to the CIA and some of the government's biggest secrets. But is Stranger Things based on a true story, or is it fictionalizing pure conspiracy? Here's everything to know about MKUltra, the notorious CIA mind control project, and how it influenced Stranger Things.

Project MKUltra Explained

Project MKUltra, or MK-Ultra, was essentially a secret mind control program conducted by the CIA. The covert operation started in 1953 as a way to develop techniques for getting the upper hand on enemies during the Cold War. Through human experimentation (not unlike Hawkins Labs although without the interdimensional portals), the CIA was trying to find ways to weaken enemies in order to force out information through mind control methods. Many aspects of Project MKUltra were illegal including the use of unwitting test subjects from the U.S. and Canada. The experimentation was done at over 80 institutions across the country including universities, hospitals, and prisons. Some of the operation's files were destroyed by the CIA director during Watergate, but key information was made public by 2001.

Project MKUltra was a continuation of experiments that first started during WWII in Japanese institutions and Nazi concentration camps . According to CIA documents, the operation focused on chemical, biological, and radiological methods of mind control. To test the subjects' mental states and brain functions, they were exposed to high doses of psychoactive drugs like LSD. Many participants were even dosed without their knowledge and then interrogated to see whether they would reveal secrets. The test subjects also went through sensory deprivation, hypnosis, electroshock, abuse, and other forms of torture. Widespread drug experimentation carried special code names such as Project Bluebird and Operation Midnight Climax.

How MKUltra Fits Into Stranger Things

Project MKUltra lasted decades, allowing the secret operation to be a major focus of Stranger Things and the show's tie-in novels and comic books. Hawkins National Laboratory was one of the institutions that took part in the project under the leadership of Dr. Martin Brenner . Based on flashbacks in the series, Eleven's mother, Terry Ives, volunteered to participate in Project MKUltra. During the experimentation, Terry was subjected to psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation, just like the real-life members of the program. She was unknowingly pregnant at the time, but Dr. Brenner kidnapped her child, and the birth was covered up.

Related: Stranger Things Theory: Eleven Gets Her Powers Back Thanks To Dr. Brenner

The child, Jane, was born with telepathic and telekinetic abilities due to her mother's exposure to LSD. Jane was renamed "011" (Eleven) and became a member of a new operation, Project Indigo. Dr. Brenner took full control over the children born from Project MKUltra test subjects, like Stranger Things ' Eleven , to train them with the special abilities they exhibited. These other test subjects were also exposed to a sensory deprivation tank and other forms of abuse. At one point, Jane returned to the lab to retrieve her daughter, but the woman was put through electroshock therapy, leaving her in a catatonic state.

During Eleven's training, she came into contact with the Demogorgon. Her experimentation ended up opening the Gate to the Upside Down, bringing the Demogorgon into the human dimension. Like Stranger Things ' other test subjects, Eleven managed to escape, but the Upside Down and its denizens hang over the entire Hawkins population in Stranger Things .

What Happened To MKUltra

The real MKUltra didn't mess around with the Upside Down (that's pure fiction, hopefully), but its end is just as fascinating. Project MKUltra lasted 20 years before officially coming to an end in 1973. Aspects of the operation were made public two years later, but with so many documents destroyed, it was impossible to learn the full scope of the project. The existence of Project MKUltra became the focus of a Senate hearing in 1977 when the CIA uncovered nearly 20,000 pages of documents that weren't destroyed. The documents revealed financial information, but there were few details regarding the actual project.

During the height of Project MKUltra, thousands of people were used for experimentation. Some of them died as a result, but the CIA reportedly covered up any types of connections. Due to the lack of record-keeping and follow-up research, it was never known how many people may have died following their participation ( Granite Flats, another Netflix Original , also explored this). Even though the project halted in the early '70s, some investigators that the CIA continued their mind control efforts under a new program. There's even some belief that similar experiments continue to this day.

Related: Stranger Things Theory: Why The Demogorgon Took Will

The Montauk Project Also Inspired Stranger Things

When developing Stranger Things , the Duffer Brothers used a handful of real conspiracy theories and secret government experiments as inspiration. Other than Project MKUltra, the duo did a lot of research on the Montauk Project, a conspiracy theory suggesting that certain government projects took place in Montauk, New York. The projects were meant to develop psychological warfare methods and research into time travel, teleportation, and mind control. Specifically, the test subjects in the Montauk Project were children. According to the conspiracy, the US Government periodically abducted kids in the Montauk area to run experiments, and the way Montauk inspired Stranger Things is clear.

When Stranger Things ' original plan was taking shape, the working title was Montauk . Rather than fictional Hawkins, Indiana, the series was going to be set in Montauk with a focus on supernatural elements in 1980. The creators later altered their setting but kept the main theme intact with their heavy inclusion of questionable scientific experimentation.

Did The CIA Really Experiment On Children?

Project Montauk is a conspiracy, but MKUltra's existence is now public record, even though full details aren't known for two main reasons. Firstly, MKUltra is still mired in conspiratorial rumors despite being proven true, so there's a lot of false information that can take a while to debunk. Secondly, a lot of the records from MKUltra were subsequently destroyed or are still hidden behind black tape. Many people claim to be child victims of real-life CIA experimentation , but this can't be proven beyond their testimony.

Also, MKUltra almost definitely didn't involve the fatally dangerous experimentation shown in Stranger Things . Most MKUltra participants were adults who signed on for what they believed were medical trials, and the CIA used various legitimate institutions and research centers to conduct their experiments. Ultimately, there can be no definitive answer, and there are many who claim to have been abducted for experimentation in their childhood. MKUltra will forever be a stain on the US Intelligence community's history and a lesson in ethics that's since informed many Government decisions, but it's a far cry from Stranger Things despite serving as the Netflix show's direct inspiration.

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10 Real Victims Of The CIA’s MK-ULTRA Program

MK-Ultra is one of the most famous undertakings relating to the CIA’s efforts toward mass mind control . There were many different tests conducted as a part of the project, including some conducted on volunteers, inmates, and unsuspecting targets. The project involved several different drugs— most famously LSD —and the participants involved had very different reactions to the testing, with some being inspired by it and others becoming terrified of just the notion of any possible future exposure.

Some fatalities even stemmed from Project MK-Ultra, and what follows are 10 of the most interesting figures to have involvement with this CIA-sponsored testing. This is MK-Ultra and its real victims.

SEE ALSO: 10 Conspiracy Theories About MK-ULTRA You May Not Know

10. Ken Kesey

Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a source of inspiration in the counterculture movement, was first exposed to LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a part of the MKUltra project while still a graduate student at Stanford University. He came to be involved in the study almost by accident, as a neighbor of Kesey’s—a psychologist—signed up for the project but had to back out at the last minute. An outstanding athlete and a straitlaced individual up to that point, Kesey had never done any sort of drug and had never even tasted alcohol. At the time of the experiments, Kesey was in training for the 1960 Olympics , as he had earned a place on the wrestling team as an alternate.

Despite Allen Ginsberg’s insistence, Kesey did not believe that the project was sponsored by the CIA, and not until decades later did Kesey discover the program’s true intent: “[The testing] wasn’t being done to try to cure insane people, which is what we thought. It was being done to try to make people insane—to weaken people, and to be able to put them under the control of interrogators.”

Of course, the resulting effect of the LSD did not weaken Kesey, as psychedelics came to be a tool of enlightenment for the author and cultural icon. Kesey noted that the CIA experimentation helped in evoking the kind of epiphanies that ultimately served as the foundation for the counterculture movement that would soon follow.

“We suddenly realized that there’s a lot more to this world than we previously thought,” Kesey recalled. “One of the things that I think came out of it is this, is that there’s room. We don’t all have to be the same. We don’t have to have Baptists coast to coast. We can throw in some Buddhists and some Christians, and people who are just thinking these totally strange thoughts about the Irish leprechauns—that there is room, spiritually, for everybody in this universe.”

While still undergoing the CIA testing, Kesey took a job at the project facility, noting that his status as an employee gave him access to several experimental drugs. While Kesey’s friends and many others were able to make LSD on their own after the testing, Kesey acknowledged that the government had the best LSD around, saying, “[The homemade LSD] never was anywhere as good as that good government stuff. That’s the government—the CIA always has the best stuff.”

9. Whitey Bulger

An infamous gangster who evaded capture for decades before finally being arrested in 2011, Bulger was exposed to LSD testing while in a federal prison in Atlanta in exchange for a lighter sentence. For 18 months, Bulger and other inmates were subjected to drug testing, which Bulger described in his notebook as “horrible LSD experiences followed by thoughts of suicide and deep depression.” He was so deeply and negatively affected by the project that Bulger compared the program’s doctor to Josef Mengele , the Nazi doctor responsible for the horrific human experimentation conducted at concentration camps .

Bulger’s anxiety was compounded by his inability to ask for help or disclose what he was experiencing, as he feared that telling anyone of his visual and auditory hallucinations would lead to lifelong commitment in an insane asylum. The effects of the LSD on Bulger were such that the mobster reflected on the irony of his situation in his notebook, writing, “I was in prison for committing a crime and feel they committed a worse crime on me.”

The gangster was apparently so enraged after learning of the program’s intent and the effects it had on other that he strongly considered tracking down Dr. Carl Pfeiffer, the pharmacologist who oversaw the program, with the goal of assassination .

8. Robert Hunter

Robert Hunter, a lyricist and longtime collaborator with the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, was exposed to the same testing as Kesey, though he had no idea that it was a part of the MK-Ultra project until many years later. Hunter had a very different experience from Bulger, saying the following in an interview with Reuters in 2013:

“I couldn’t figure out why they were paying me to take these psychedelics. What they wanted to do was to check if I was more hypnotizable when I was on them. It was hard to pay attention to what the hell they were talking about, much less be hypnotized. It was the first time I had had any of this stuff, and the drugs in themselves were rather spectacular. Nobody had had my experiences, and it was at least two years before those drugs started getting out on the street. It was like a secret club of one .”

As a songwriter, Hunter is responsible for some of the most cherished songs in the Dead’s expansive catalog, including “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Dark Star,” and “Box of Rain,” and his talents were honored in the summer of 2015 when he is scheduled for enshrinement into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, joining the likes of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Through the CIA testing, Hunter was the first of his social circle to try LSD by a few years, so when Garcia took LSD for the first time, it was Hunter who advised him, “Go home, put on a Ravi Shankar record, just listen to the music .”

7. Harold Blauer

Harold Blauer was a professional tennis player who competed against the likes of Bill Tilden, widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Following a bout with depression that was at least partially caused by his recent divorce, Blauer checked himself into the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where he was diagnosed as a “pseudo-neurotic schizophrenic.” He checked in during early December 1952, and he would be dead just over a month later.

Though he was improving and was scheduled for release from the institute, doctors began “treating” Blauer with a series of injections that, as it turned out, were a derivative of mescaline. These injections were administered though some of the doctors had no idea what they were injecting, with Dr. James Cattell later telling investigators, “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.”

Dr. Cattell was acting on a classified agreement between the institute and the Army Chemical Corps to test various chemicals for potential use in warfare, and one of the injections given to Blauer ultimately killed him. There was an extensive cover-up , and not until 1975 did the government finally admit to Blauer’s family that it had injected him with the mescaline derivative that caused his death. In 1987, the family sued the government for its involvement and the subsequent cover-up, winning a $700,000 judgment.

While Blauer was tested as part of an agreement made with the Army Chemical Corps, the principal researcher at the New York State Psychiatric Institute was Dr. Paul Hoch, a CIA consultant on the MK-Ultra project. Though the Army technically funded the experimentation conducted by the institute, Blauer’s death is often considered one of the casualties of MK-Ultra due to the involvement of Dr. Hoch, a driving force behind the project who eventually rose to the position of commissioner of mental hygiene for the state of New York.

6. James Stanley

James Stanley seemed to have a very promising military career in front of him before he volunteered for an experiment that involved testing gas masks and protective clothing. He enlisted at the age of 15 and became a master sergeant at just 20 years old, making him one of the youngest in the military to hold such a rank.

His career took a turn after he volunteered to test the gas masks, and Stanley claims that his rapid decline was the result of being exposed to LSD that had been put in the subjects’ drinking water . He did not learn that he was exposed to LSD until 1975, when the Army followed up the experiment by contacting him. He then realized that his odd behavior and feelings of confusion were the result of chemical testing that he had not agreed to.

He sued the Army for the testing but initially lost his case for troubling reasons. According to the Supreme Court, it didn’t matter whether his allegations were true. He lacked standing to sue because military personnel can’t sue the government or their superiors for damages, no matter how severe or even unconstitutional they may be.

This rationale irked Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan greatly, and his dissent ultimately led Congress to pass a bill ensuring that Stanley could be compensated. In 1996, 18 years after he initially filed suit and nine years after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Stanley was finally awarded $400,577 , the maximum amount allowed under the Congressional bill.

SEE ALSO: 10 Intriguing Mysteries Involving The CIA’s Dark Deeds

5. Wayne Ritchie

A deputy US marshal and a veteran of the Marine Corps , Wayne Ritchie claims that he was unknowingly dosed while at a holiday party with other federal officers in December 1957. In a sworn deposition given as part of the lawsuit Ritchie later filed, Ira Feldman, a CIA agent involved in the MK-Ultra program, explained the manner in which he observed the unknowing citizens he had drugged with LSD: “You just sit back away and let them worry, like this nitwit, Ritchie,” he said, before going on to acknowledge that Ritchie’s dosage was “a full head” and that Ritchie was targeted because he “ deserved to suffer .”

The evening he was exposed to LSD, Ritchie began to act erratically and felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety and worthlessness. After having an argument with his girlfriend in which she said she wanted to move away from San Francisco, Ritchie armed himself with his government-issued service revolvers and tried to get the money for a plane ticket by robbing a bar in the Fillmore District. During the robbery attempt, someone at the bar knocked Ritchie out, and by the time he regained consciousness, police officers were already there to arrest him.

Though he pleaded guilty to attempted armed robbery , Ritchie was sentenced to just five years of probation and a fine of $500. He was also forced to resign from the US Marshals, and he went on to paint houses as his primary source of income. More than 40 years after the incident, Ritchie learned of the CIA’s program and that it had tested LSD and other drugs on unwitting citizens in the San Francisco area. He filed suit, and while it was dismissed, the court acknowledged that it was “quite possible” that Ritchie was drugged by the CIA, but his behavior was more likely the result of “some undiagnosed organic condition” that was probably exacerbated by his consumption of alcohol.

As for the seemingly damning testimony of Feldman, the court held that Ritchie’s lawyer should have worked to elicit a more precise response, noting in its ruling, “Although Feldman made several comments in his depositions suggesting that he was involved in drugging Ritchie, the district court’s determination that Ritchie did not prove Feldman’s involvement is not clearly erroneous. Feldman may have been lying to provoke defense counsel, trying to be funny , or simply speaking imprecisely when he made the purported admissions. Ritchie’s lawyer asked no follow-up questions that might have elicited more detail about Feldman’s vague assertions.”

4. Ruth Kelley

A singer and a waitress at a San Francisco bar, Ruth Kelley was unknowingly given LSD before performing on stage. George H. White, a veteran of the US Bureau of Narcotics who headed up a part of the MK-Ultra program called Operation Midnight Climax, found Kelley attractive but resistant to his advances , so either he or one of his men dosed her with LSD before her performance.

According to a deposition by a CIA investigator, “The LSD definitely took some effect during her act.” She was able to finish her set but rushed off to the hospital immediately afterward. Kelley was released when the effects of the LSD eventually wore off.

Liz Evans, a San Francisco prostitute who worked with White as a part of Operation Climax, corroborated the story, saying that White drugged “a really pretty, blond-haired waitress at the Black Sheep Bar. Her name was Ruth, and George wanted her to take part in things , but she had no interest.”

Those things Evans referred to included the use of prostitutes to lure johns into a CIA safe house on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Once there, the prostitutes dosed their clients, while CIA agents observed the effects of the drug through a two-way mirror. The house was recently renovated, and construction crews found microphones hidden in the walls and other recording equipment that had been disguised as electrical outlets.

3. Dr. Robert Hyde

Though Dr. Albert Hoffman first discovered LSD in 1943, it did not arrive in the United States from Switzerland until 1949. It was at this time that Robert Hyde, one of the top psychiatrists at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, was convinced to become perhaps the first American subjected to LSD testing. This was after a visit from Otto Kauders, a Viennese doctor who had lectured on LSD’s use at inducing psychosis. After meeting with Kauders, the doctors at Boston Psychopathic believed that if LSD could indeed induce a psychosis similar to schizophrenia, there was a strong possibility of finding an antidote to the condition as well.

Hyde’s experience with LSD did not yield much in the way of clear psychosis, but the doctors at the hospital noticed that their colleague was acting strangely after taking 100 micrograms of the substance. During his rounds, he became “quite paranoiac, saying that we had not given him anything. He also berated us and said the company had cheated us, given us plain water. That was not Dr. Hyde’s normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man.”

While Hyde’s LSD encounter was hardly of note aside from his possible status as the first test subject, the doctor ultimately went on to accept government funding through the CIA to test LSD on patients. Whether Dr. Hyde was aware of the CIA’s intent with regard to the testing is a matter for debate, but he was receiving annual funds of $40,000 to test the effects of LSD on patients at the various facilities with which he was associated.

2. Technical Services Staff (TSS) Agents

The CIA had multiple units working on MK-Ultra-related testing, including the Office of Security and the Technical Services Staff (TSS). These units worked under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who approved clandestine LSD testing on unwitting citizens. Gottlieb was interested in the effects of LSD as it related to interrogation, but he also believed that dosing public figures without their knowledge could serve several purposes, including discrediting someone in a position of power by making them appear foolish in a very public setting.

Before subjecting the public to these tests, TSS agents first tested LSD in-house, experimenting on themselves in controlled settings to observe the effects of the drug. Gottlieb recognized, however, that a controlled setting was not the same as a public setting, so he allowed agents in the TSS to begin dosing each other at the office. The targeted agent would have no prior knowledge, though they would be informed after the dose had been successfully administered so agents could prepare for the effects that were about to set in.

This sort of testing quickly expanded. Other agents at the CIA were dosed by their fellow agents, and the surreptitious dosing was ultimately considered an occupational hazard among operatives. Security personnel became concerned that agents in TSS were becoming unhinged due to their frequent LSD use, and matters came to a head when a plot to spike the punch bowl at the annual CIA Christmas party was revealed. In a memo, officials made it clear that LSD could very well “produce serious insanity for periods of 8 to 18 hours and possibly for longer” and that CIA officials strongly opposed any sort of LSD “testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.”

1. George H. White

The TSS agents were not the only CIA operatives to get carried away with the use of LSD, as George H. White, the aforementioned head of Operation Midnight Climax and an agent with the US Bureau of Narcotics, did far more than just experiment with the LSD and other drugs he had at his disposal. Though White was a “ real hard head ” whose subordinates “were pretty much afraid to do anything without his full approval,” White got pretty loose during his time operating the CIA safe house in San Francisco .

Neighbors frequently complained about the activities that were going on at the safe house, as there were frequent scenes in which “men with guns in shoulder straps [were] chasing after women in various states of undress.” White acknowledged that his use of LSD had an effect on his ability to conduct himself in a professional manner, saying, ” ‘clear thinking’ was nonexistent while under the influence of any of these drugs. I did feel at times like I was having a ‘mind-expanding experience,’ but this vanished like a dream immediately after the session.”

White later made his appalling intentions clear with regard to Operation Midnight Climax and his other professional pursuits in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, saying, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun . Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?”

SEE ALSO: 10 Secret CIA Prisons You Do Not Want To Visit

J. Francis Wolfe is a freelance writer and a noted dreamer of dreams. When he’s not writing, he is most likely waiting for “just one more wave,” or quietly reading under a shady tree.

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