Secret Project MK-ULTRA

 The 50's. Reports of the CIA's drug experiments are not the only domain of conspiracy theories. In 1953, the MK-Ultra project was launched, which was to prepare the American intelligence for the possibility of using psychoactive substances by the USSR and China. As a result, unsuspecting US citizens are being investigated for the use of heroin, LSD, and even electrical torture.

On November 28, 1953, under the influence of hallucinations and severe depression, Dr. Frank Olson jumped from the tenth floor of a hotel in New York. This American bacteriologist was a long-time employee of a secret military institution - the Chemical Team of the Special Operations Department - a military cell that ran one of the MK-Ultra projects. His death was the result of one of the experiments.

A few days earlier, Olson had attended a meeting chaired by the head of the CIA's psychochemical weapons research facility, Sidney Gottlieb. The latter, in turn, decided to secretly test the effects of LSD on the audience. He dissolved a considerable amount of the substance in a bottle of a French liqueur, then poured it into the glasses of the three gathered men and waited calmly for the effects.

Olson began to act as if he was suffering from psychosis. The other men also complained that they suffered from severe emotional disorders for several days after the meeting. They had nightmares and hallucinations. But Olson felt the worst. The measure drove him completely insane. Between depression and panic attacks, he screamed that he saw dangerous creatures everywhere. He finally broke and jumped out of the window in the middle of the night. Sidney Gottlieb tried to cover up the matter, and the circumstances of Olson's death for 20 years were among the Agency's most carefully kept secrets.

At stake in this game was the CIA's top-secret program: MK-ULTRA. 150 separate projects were combined at 80 laboratory sites in the US and Canada. They had one common goal: to "find ways to control people's minds" by using chemicals. Heroin, marijuana, and LSD were involved, as also electrical stimuli, brain wave analysis, and subliminal activity trials. The research, often brutal and with tragic consequences, was carried out on US citizens who were completely unaware of their purpose.

MK-Ultra was never supposed to see the light of day. Therefore, in 1973, the then CIA director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all documents marked with the mark of a secret project.

However, not everything was destroyed. A year later, the New York Times wrote about MK-Ultra. Shortly after its publication, the program was subject to investigation by journalists and government committees alike. The investigation revealed shocking facts.

For twenty years, the Central Intelligence Agency checked which methods of influencing the human brain were the most effective. Everything was aimed at making people who had previously been brainwashed unaware of their role as spies, killers, and saboteurs.

One of the most shocking discoveries was a project at the Kentucky Toxicomania Research Center. The head of the facility, Dr. Harris Isabel, asked by the CIA to develop new synthetic drugs, began experimenting on his patients - people who are addicted to drugs. He gave them enormous doses of LSD, mescaline, marijuana, scopolamine, and other unexplored hallucinogens. He watched their action by playing with the doses, he examined the influence on the mind, behavior, and mental condition.

The actions of the Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewan Cameron, who tried to take control of the mind, putting his patients into a coma, even for a period of 3 months, were also considered sensational. As a result, some of them lost their memory and even the ability to speak.