Project MKUltra: Secret CIA program, experiment with mind control

Although these experiments sound like science fiction, and although the CIA has tried to deny them for years, the mind control experiments of project MKUltra are all too real. During more than a decade at the height of the Cold War, CIA researchers carried out a series of illegal and "shockingly brutal" experiments on human subjects. Humans were put on the laboratory table, turned into reluctant "white mice".

Conf , universities and hospitals. The victims were forced to participate in torture experiments, including electric shock, verbal and sexual abuse, giving subjects large doses of LSD, tranquilizers, hypnotherapy, and biological agents. and radioactive.

A doctor sprays LSD into another doctor's mouth as part of project MKUltra's mind control experiments.

Furthermore, these experiments often used subjects who had unintentionally suffered permanent psychological damage.

Unsurprisingly, the CIA conducted the project with utmost secrecy, even giving it various codenames. And when it ended in the 1970s, most of the files related to it were destroyed at the behest of the director of the CIA himself - all documents related to the project were destroyed, except for one memory. The small cache that was mistakenly saved was accidentally kept, but not intact.

Ultimately, those documents and several government investigations helped bring the project to light. Today, the public even has access to some 20,000 documents related to the MKUltra project's mind control experiments.

But even this provides only a minuscule amount of information on what is perhaps one of the largest and worst government programs and cover-ups in American history.

The birth of the MKUltra project at the height of the Cold War

The MKUltra program also operates under various codenames such as MKNAOMI and MKDELTA. 'MK' indicates that the project was funded by the CIA's Technical Services Officer, and 'Ultra' was the codename used for classified documents during World War II.

As the Cold War reached its height in the early 1950s, the American intelligence community became increasingly obsessed with the increasing technological advances of the Soviet Union.

In particular, the US government was concerned that it had fallen behind the Soviet Union in terms of new interrogation techniques. Reports during the Korean War (which were later proven to be false) suggested that Soviet and Korean forces had developed mind control and that the United States did not want to be outdone.

So, on April 13, 1953, then-CIA director Allen Welsh Dulles approved the MKUltra project. The program was quickly headed up by chemist and toxicologist Sidney Gottlieb, who became known by the codename "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 to gather intelligence.

Perhaps, it is not surprising that creating such a serum is extremely difficult. Therefore, the researchers believe that a kind of mind control can be achieved by placing the subject in a heavily altered mental state. They want to produce drugs to control, interfere with human mind control to fight the faction led by the Soviet Union.

According to journalist Stephen Kinzer, Gottlieb realized that in order to control the mind, it was necessary first to erase it, the mind experiments of the MKUltra project have extensively studied the creation of drugs that can "increase the mind." strengthen individuals' ability to resist torture and coercion", as well as "inducing amnesia, shock and confusion".

A declassified document from 1955 adds that MKUltra sought to observe "substances that may cause victims to age faster/slower in adulthood" and "substances that will promote thought so illogical and impulsive that the recipient will be discredited in public."

With these goals in mind, the scientists of the MKUltra project began to devise mind-altering experiments with victims.

How do Project MKUltra's mind control experiments work?

Sidney Gottlieb, who oversaw all the mind control experiments of the MKUltra project.

From the very beginning, MKUltra's mind control experiments were carried out with absolute secrecy in part because the CIA was well aware of its morality. For the sake of secrecy, the program's 162 experiments were spread across multiple cities, university campuses, prisons, and hospitals. In total, 185 researchers were involved - and many of them didn't even know that their work was for the CIA.

In all these dozens of contexts, the primary method of experimentation usually involves administering large amounts of various mind-altering substances in the hope of wiping out the human mind the way Gottlieb wanted.

Subjects were injected with LSD, opioids, THC, and the government-created synthetic super-psychedelic BZ, as well as given widespread use of substances such as alcohol. Researchers sometimes also administer two drugs with opposite effects (such as barbiturates and amphetamines) and observe how subjects respond, or give subjects already affected by alcohol a dose of a drug. other than LSD.

In addition to drugs, researchers also use hypnosis, often to create fear in subjects that can then be used to gather information. The researchers continued to investigate the effects of hypnosis on the results of multi-graph tests and its impact on memory loss.

Donald E. Cameron, who was at the Nuremberg Trials as a psychiatric assessor for leading Nazi Rudolf Hess, was one of the principal researchers in MKUltra's mind experiments.

MKUltra participants were also tested in relation to electroconvulsive therapy, nerve stimulation, and paralytic drugs.

Meanwhile, experimenter Donald Cameron (first President of the World Psychiatric Association and President of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Association) drugged the patient and repeatedly played audio tapes. or cue while they are in a coma for a long time, in the hope of correcting schizophrenia by erasing memories to reprogram the subject's mind.

In fact, these tests put his subjects in a coma for months and permanently suffering from loss of control and memory loss.

With an arsenal of tools at his disposal, the MKUltra project's mind control experiments have succeeded in seriously disrupting the human mind.

Who is MKUltra's audience?

An electric shock machine was used in the experiments.

Due to the categorical nature of the program, many test subjects were unaware of their participation, and Gottlieb admitted that his team targeted "people who couldn't fight back". These include drug addicts, sex workers, and terminal cancer and psychiatric patients.

Some of the subjects of MKUltra are volunteers or salaried students. Others are addicts bribed with the promise of more drugs if they join.

Although many of MKUltra's records have been destroyed, there are a number of notable subjects noted, including: Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Robert Hunter, lyricist for The Grateful Dead; and James 'Whitey' Bulger, a notorious gang boss in Boston.

Some participants volunteered to speak up about their participation. Kesey, for example, was an early volunteer and joined the project as a student at Stanford University to be given LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs.

How Project MKUltra's mind control experiments came to light

In 1955, a confidential document related to this project was revealed, which listed a series of methods applied in the project. People could not help but be horrified to learn that the CIA used about 17 different tricks to affect the mind such as causing the feeling of near drowning, electric shock, starving or thirsty, preventing sleep, breaking or crooked hips, suffocation, or forced pregnancy, using artificial methods to cause disorder. To conceal public opinion, in 1964, the project was renamed MK-SEARCH and in 1973 by order of the Director CIA Richard Helms at that time, all related files were destroyed. Although the CIA confirmed that it was no longer carrying out these experiments, public opinion said that the project was going secret and Monarch became the successor of the aforementioned 'MK-ULTRA' project.

In early 1973, after the Watergate scandal, CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MKUltra documents. He feared the program would be investigated by all government agencies. But in 1975, President Gerald R. Ford commissioned an investigation into CIA activities, hoping to root out the organization's conspiracies and set up two investigative committees: The Church Committee of the United States Congress and the Rockefeller Commission.

The overall investigation found that Helms destroyed most of the evidence related to MKUltra, but that same year, a file of 8,000 documents was discovered in a financial records building and subsequently released. required by the Freedom of Information Act of 1977. According to investigative data, the CIA spent about $10 million (about $80 million at current prices) on the project, but the results were disastrous.

When the documents were made public, the Senate held a set of hearings on the project's ethics issues later that year. The survivors of the tests later filed lawsuits against the CIA and the federal government. In 1992, 77 cases of participants in the trials of the MKUltra program were resolved.

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

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

The government doesn't deny that the MKUltra experiments took place - but most of what took place remains a mystery. It acknowledged that experiments took place on more than 80 facilities and often on unwitting subjects. But most of the discussion around experiments these days comes from conspiracy theorists. The CIA was adamant that the experiments were discontinued in 1963 and that all related experiments were abandoned. Since most of the records have been destroyed, and the secrecy surrounding the project and its various codenames, has led some to believe that the experiments are still going on today.