The CIA's Horrifying Mind Control Experiments

Stanley Glickman was a talented young man. Even as a child, he was a gifted artist, ambitious, he won awards for his art. At twenty five, Stanley Glickman moved from New York City to France. In Paris, he studied art under some of the biggest names. Nineteen fifty two, when he turned twenty six, he opened his own art studio. He worked in it all day and in the evenings he hung out at Cafe Don. It was a life many could only dream of, but it wouldn't last. One evening in nineteen fifty two, Stanley went into Cafe Don like he always did. He met up with old friends, though there were a couple of men he didn't recognize sitting with them. Somehow, politics came up in conversation. Things got heated. Stanley stormed out, but one of the men followed after him. The man begged Stanley to return to the cafe for an apology, t to calm his nerves. Stanley agreed. This was the last normal moment in Stanley's life. Halfway through his tea, he felt strange. Things looked different, everything was distorted. The group of men surrounding Stanley seemed to be observing him studying him. Stanley ran out, fearing he had been poisoned. Shadow figures followed him on his way home. He hallucinated through the streets of Paris for two weeks until he passed out and found himself in the American Hospital of Paris. His medical records don't say this, but in Naffi David, he claims to have received electroshock therapy via catheter and more hellocynogenic drugs. He escaped, but found himself back in the hospital again. He remained there for seven days, during which he received more shock therapy and more drugs. After this, life was never the same for Stanley. He never held a job, never had another girlfriend. He barely left his apartment. He never painted again. This may seem straight out of a sci fi horror movie, this was real. Stanley Glickman was one of the potentially thousands affected by the CIA's MK Ultra program. My name is Edwin, and here it's a horror story. Now. I know that this sounds like a conspiracy theory you might find on Facebook somewhere, but this was real. I went straight to the source and found that on December fourteenth, twenty eighteen, a document was released by the CIA about mk Ultra. That document is available for all of us to read. It was a human experimentation program created by the CIA. Its purpose was quote the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment and clandestine operations to control human behavior. That's a mouthful basically to say it was a search for a mind controlled drug. Now, this stuff was kept secret for a long time and it has fueled some wild conspiracy theories. I wanted to try and find the parts of mk Ultra that are not fiction. But to even understand how mk Ultra came to be, we have to go back a bit. At the end of World War Two, the enemy had changed. Instead of Nazi Germany and Japan, it was Communism. There had been growing rumors of communist regimes possessing tools that would change the way war was waged forever. There was talk of experimentation with drugs that could control minds. Now this may seem far fetched today, but with the discovery of concentration camps, Japan's Unit seven thirty one, the threat of communism, it was not hard to make the leap of mind control being a thing in nineteen fifty three hundred soldiers were released from enemy prisons. Should have been a celebration, but instead the country was shocked. Many of the prisoners had written statements criticizing the United States and praising communism. Many had confessed to war crimes. Twenty one of the seventy two hundred prisoners chose to stay in communist countries. Two of the release prisoners were pilots who had confessed to dropping biological weapons from their warplanes. These confessions were in direct contradiction to the United States government, who stated they have never deployed these weapons. On top of that, the Special Operations Division of the CIA received a memo from an intelligence officer. The memo read, interrogations of the individuals who have come out of North Korea across the Soviet Union recently had apparently a blank period or period of disorientation while passing through a special zone in Manchuria. This had occurred to all individuals in the party after they had their first full meal and first coffee. Drugging was indicated. What could possess these men to betray their country? CIA director Alan Dulles believed that only mind control could explain this behavior. He was convinced that communist had discovered a way to control human minds and that the United States was already behind because enemy countries were already doing it. The end justified its means. CIA was above the law and was not subject to morals. These were the foundations that would lead to mk Ultra. Two CIA operations came first, Operation paper Clip and Project Bluebird, which later became Project Artichoke. MK Ultra would eventually absorb Project Artichoke. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi officers and scientists were put on trial for the atrocities they committed. The human experimentation that was take place in the concentration camps really came to light during the trials. It was revealed that these experiments were more akin to torture than science, like the use of the hellucinogenic drug mescaline at docom. This is exactly the kind of work the CIA wanted to further explore. Instead of letting Nazis scientists face justice for these crimes, the CIA hired them. Operation Paperclip was a program that brought over Nazi doctors and scientists to work not only in the CIA, but other agencies like NASA too. These scientists and doctors were brought to work on the already existing Project Bluebird, named after its primary goal quote make prisoners sing like a bird. Operation Bluebird was conducted domestically and internationally. CIA safehouses were set up across Germany and Berlin, Mannheim, Munich, Stuttgart. These were called black sites, and the first one was located just outside of Kronberg, Germany, the former secret Nazi base. This black site was called Villa Schuster. A team of CIA agents who probably called themselves the Rough Boys, worked under the medical supervision of Doc Fisher. Doc Fisher was really General Walter Schreiber, former Surgeon General of Nazi Germany. He personally approved experiments across different concentration camps which involved freezing inmates to death, the injection of drugs like mescaline, and cutting inmates to see how gangreen progressed. The Rough Boys and other CIA agents interrogated their subjects without any regard for US law. The Rough Boys, with the medical supervision of Walter Schreiber, carried out special interrogations that included injecting prisoners with hypnotic depressants like sodium amidol, then stimulants like benzuri, korymine, and picrotoxin. Each drug effect to different parts of the body. While prisoners were weakened due to all the injected drugs, they were subjected to electroshock, excruciating heat, and more. Sometimes they put subject to sleep, then waking them up again and again until the subject was in a state of confusion. They would coerce the subject into reliving a terrible experience from their past. This was not enough for the CIA. One memo read Bluebird is not fully satisfied with the results to date, but believes with continued work and study, remarkable results can be obtained. Bluebird's general problem is to get up, conduct and carry out research practical not theoretical in this direction. This was when Alan Dullis decided that the CIA needed an expert chemist, one that would willingly ignore laws and morals in the name of national security. Alan Dulles hired Sidney Gottlieb, a chem an eager researcher. Sydney was made chief of Chemical Division, and its first move was to expand Project Bluebird and merge it into a bigger and more secretive program, Project Artichoke. Project Artichoke would take the same experiments that Project Bluebird was already doing and expand them. The CIA wanted to find a truth drug. They were sure it existed and they were going to find it at any cost. This led them to test even more drugs. First, they tried an active ingredient found in marijuana, even code named it Truth drug, but they found it to be unreliable and that it brought on a sense of humor, so it was useless during interrogations. They tested cocaine and found it to be unreliable too. Heroin was next in line, and the CIA funded research at the University of Rochester where they had students ingest a drug and be observed. It was found useless for interrogation. They then continued the work of Nazi scientists and tested out mescaline, but it was also found to be unusable. Sidney Gottlieb brought in doctors to use some of the drugs for CIA research. One of these doctors was Paul Hoag, who worked at the New York Psychiatric Institute. Paul agreed to test mescaline on his patients without letting any of them know. One of his test subjects was Harold Blauer, professional tennis coach Harold was seeking care for depression. He was newly divorced and not doing well. Paul Hoag had his assistant injected Harold with mescaline without explaining what would happen or even telling Harold what he was receiving. He did this for one month. Harold complained that he was having hallucinations and headaches. Harold wanted to stop this treatment, but Paul Hoag did not listen. On January eighth, nineteen fifty three, Harold was given a dose of masculine that was fourteen times stronger than usual. Less than three hours later, he was dead. To Sydney Gottlieb, his direct boss Richard Helms, and director Alan Dulis, this was all part of the process and was necessary. But after months of these types of experiments, Sydney was starting to think there was no truth drug. He was reading all these reports and that's when he had a thought, what about LSD. He wanted to see if LSD showed any promise, but not before trying it himself. He had his first supervised trip and said it was illuminating. He quickly increased LSD experiments, first with volunteers and soon without consent. He wanted more funding for Project Artichoke to grow just as Bluebird had. He proposed a new project to Alan Dulis, one that would do just the mostly redacted memo with this proposal reads, we intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible, non toxic a barrant mental state. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information and party suggestion, and other forms of mental control. On April thirteenth, nineteen fifty three, this new project was officially approved by Alan Dullis and it was named MK Ultra. It operated through subprojects. By the end there were more than one hundred and fifty of them. One of these involved safe houses across the United States where subjects were drugged with LSD without their knowledge. A former narcotics detective, George Hunter White, was hired to run one of these safe houses in Greenwich Village, New York. This was MK Ultra Subproject threeis. George White would lure unsuspecting victims into a safe house, especially young women. One woman stumbled her way to Lenox Hospital after being lured and claimed to have been drugged, but then she was told by the new York Police Department. She was probably mistaken. George White was protected by the CIA and free to do as he wished in a safe house. To solve their supply problem, the CIA ended up purchasing the entire world supply of LSD. Sidney Gautlieb then hired American pharmaceutical company L. E. Lilly to recreate LSD under sub project number six. Subproject five would explore hypnosis and subproject four would bring magic to the CIA. After thinking of sub products four and five, Sydney thought hypnosis, drugs and sensory deprivation would be another promising combination to explore. He hired doctor Lewis Joylon West was already beginning to explore this type of research, and Subproject forty three was a result. One of doctor West's experiments included shooting an elephant with a dart that contained three hundred thousand micrograms of LSD TUSCO. The elephant collapsed and was dead within two hours. Doctor West still desired to test LSDR on humans and proposed to Sydney that his subjects would be basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and local stockade. Doctor West had access to a wide range of quote test subjects. Due to a split time between Lachland Air Force Base and the Psychiatry Department of the University of Oklahoma. Mk Ultra's work was already pretty dark, but doctor West's work in the project really gets conspiracy theorists going. He's tied to a very suspicious case in Lachland Base and his mind controlled projects after mk Ultra tied him to try Charles Manson and the family. That's the one with the infamous Tate Loblanca murders that happened in nineteen sixty nine in Los Angeles. If you're a true crime fan, you have already heard of it. In nineteen fifty two, twenty nine year old airman Jimmy Shaver was arrested for the brutal murder of three year old share Joe Horton. She had been missing, and in less than an hour the search party found a car next to a gravel pit. Shaver came wandering out of the nearby bushes and appeared to be in a trance. He was bloody, full of scratches, and shirtless and didn't know what was going on. Cher was tragically found in the gravel pit. Her neck had been broken and she had been assaulted. Something seemed off with Shaver. He just wasn't quite there. He was booked and had no recollection of the alleged crime. He maintained, saying that another man was responsible and he did not recognize his wife. Two months passed and Shaver's memory did not return. That's when Lacknan's base commander ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and this was conducted by none other than doctor West himself. Doctor West tried to bring back Shaver's memory for two weeks through a Truth Sarah. The transcript of the Truth Sarah interview was read in court. The middle part is missing, and when the transcript starts again, he stated that Jimmy Shaver had been crying. And when doctor West states, now you remember it, don't you, Jimmy, he replies yes. Doctor West maintained that Jimmy Shaver had suffered temporary insanity on the night of the murder, but was sane now. To reporters and everyone at the trial, Jimmy Shaver didn't seem sane. He still appeared to be in some sort of trance, not prayer. Doctor West's testimony was taken seriously, but no one had lugged into his involvement with mk Ultra. No one had been made aware that Jimmy Shaper had been put into an experimental program at Lackland he had joined due to debilitating migranes. The doctor that worked in this experiment is not named, and though all the files are well recorded, according to the Basis Archivist, the file for the last names beginning with SA through st had vanished. This had led some to believe that the unnamed doctor was Jolly West, the program that Jimmy Shaper had been a part of. Many speculated that it was mk ultra. Doctor West's work was one of many subproducts. Most mk ultra's most nefarious work was done far away from the offices of Camp Deetrick and mostly done by doctors like Jolly West. At least eighty universities, prisons, and psychiatric clinics appear in the recovered mk ultra documents. People like Ted Kazinski, the Unibomber, nineteen fifties mobster Whitey Boulger, Grateful Dead's Ken Casey were all part of mk Ultra's many victims. The CIA didn't just conduct these experiments on US citizens. Some of the most horrifying experiments took place in Canada as part of the sub project involving doctor Ewan Cameron. At the time the CIA approached doctor Cameron, he was president of both the American and Canadian Psychological Association. He was a director of the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada, and a chairman in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. He had been working on the type of experimenting the CIA was interested in for years. He believed talch therapy took too long. He used methods like exposing his patients to extreme heat, electroshock therapy, intense lights, and more. He believed he could create new brain pathways that would reshape the mind and pure mental illness. Most of his patients were seeking help for anxiety, postpartum depression, and when they were done with his treatment, they were never the same. Doctor Cameron started his patients with drugs that put them into a semi comatose state. This was different for every patient. For some it was ten days, for others it was three months, and anything in between. He called this the deep patterning phase. After the patterning his patients, he then used a technique he developed and perfected. It was called psychic driving. This involved electroshock that was forty times stronger than the regular dose. Then he moved his patient to a solitary war and fed them LSD with only a little bit of food. He also plays football helmets equipped with earphones on his patients and played the same messages again and again, messages like my mother hates me. These messages were repeated thousands of times. He probably wrote that he successfully destroyed minds, but he still didn't know how to replace a destroyed mind with a new one. This type of research was exactly what the CIA wanted, and they created Subprojects sixty eight. The detailed instructions for the Subproject sixty eight had four steps. Step one the breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient's behavior by means of particularly intensive electro shocks also known as depatterning. Step two, the intensive repetition of the pre arranged verbal signals that was sixteen hours a day for six to seven days. Step three. During the period of intensive repetition, the patient is kept in partial sensory isolation. Step four, repression of the driving period is carried out by putting the patients to continuous sleep for seven to ten days. The CIA gave doctor Cameron sixty nine thousand dollars to work on his research. A number of patients that were severely affected by his experiments is unknown, but it is at least one hundred. It was later discovered that after CIA funding stopped, the Canadian government continued to fund Doctor Cameron received at least five hundred thousand dollars in funding from the Canadian government. After the birth of her daughter, Velmont Orlacal suffered from postpartum depression. After unsuccessful treatment in Winnipeg, she sought care at the Alley Institute. She was under the care of doctor Cameron from nineteen fifty six to nineteen sixty four. She was given LSD at least fourteen times. During her time at the institute. She kept the journal and her granddaughter Sarah Ann Johnson read it to CBC News during an interview. She told CBC quote she said that made her feel like her bones were melting. She would say, I don't want these. The doctors and nurses would say to her, you're a bad wife, You're a bad mother. If you wanted to get better, you would do this for your family. Think about your daughter, Belma Orlikow was never the same after a treatment. She could not remember how to be a person. She needed detailed instructions on how to care for her child. She had a book with instructions like if you hear the baby cry, pick it up, hug it, check if the baby Hungary. Sarah and Johnson remembers that her grandmother would randomly repeat phrases, and she believes there were the phrases that Velma was subjected to for sixteen hours at a time. Velma was never able to read again, and reading had been one of her favorite hobbies. Velma died in nineteen ninety and the Orlicow family learned of a settlement that was brought on to the Canadian government by other victims. They were not eligible for compensation because of Velma's passing, but they, along with eight other victims, sued the CIA in nineteen eighty eight, and one victims are still seeking a formal apology from the Canadian and American governments. Mk Ulter was extremely secretive, and what we do know only came to light due to a Freedom of Information Act request by journalist John Marx. After Watergate, senators looked into suspicions of CIA behavior and uncover alarming details. This brought on the Church Committee, which investigated the CIA. When reviewing these documents, John Marx requested documentation on mk Ultra, and after some back and forth with the CIA, he obtained twenty thousand documents, but the rest were missing. After Watergate, Richard Helms ordered the destruction of mk Ultra documentation, and Sidney Gottlieb complied they thought that destroyed everything, but files were accidentally stored in the financial office and these were the twenty thousand documents that John Marx received. Using this information, he wrote the book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. This book shocked the country and it led to Senate hearings of nineteen seventy seven. Sidney Gottlieb worked in the shadows of the CIA, and until the Senate hearings, he remained anonymous. During the hearings, he stated he felt victimized because the documents named him several times and did not name any other agents. Most of his answers included a variation of I don't remember, and he received immunity for his testimony. When the Olecow family sued the CIA, Sydney was once again called to testify, and his answers were pretty much the same. I don't remember, my memory is hazy. I'm having a mental block. Sidney Gottlieb found himself in court again when the family of Stanley Glickmann sued him for what happened in France. Just as it seemed like Sidney was going to face charges, the trial was postponed and the case was dismissed. Sidney died in nineteen ninety nine, never having faced any justice for MK Ultra. Since the revelation of MK Ultra, it has been the subject of many conspiracy theories. Every time a celebrity pauses during an interview, videos go viral, usually with a caption like Cardi b is the latest Ultra agent. It's also the inspiration behind a lot of movies and shows. The latest appearance of MK Ultra and pop culture is a Netflix show Stranger Things. Just a couple of years ago, another four thousand financial documents were discovered through another Freedom of Information Act request. These are the details that we do know about MK Ultra, but the missing documents will forever fuel more questions and more theories. May the victims of these horrific acts and their families find peace. Follow to get next week's episode of Horror Story. Up next, check out True Scary Story, where people share the most terrifying encounters with the paranormal. If you have ideas for an upcoming story, or if you want to get in touch, I'll leave my information in the descript of this episode. Thank you very much for listening, See you soon.