Let's talk about Project MKUltra

[Cudi]

So recently I've been watching Stranger Things, which brought back MKUltra to my attention. I've looked up some stuff on it in the past, but does anyone know all the different types of experiments they did with people and their intentions? I know most of their intentions were for war tactics, like having LSD be a truth serum and also believing LSD might allow someone to perform telepathy and read minds. How extreme were some of these experiments? I think MKUltra is one of the scariest most bizarre things our government has ever pulled off. It really makes you wonder what else our government has done or is still doing to this day.

Also, while on the topic, does anyone have first hand experience in a sensory deprivation tank while on LSD? This is done in the show Stranger Things, and I'm really curious to hear about it if someone has actually done it.

 

[spacejunk]

I think a lot of tthe mk ultra files were destroyed, so i doubt that we'll ever know too much about what the CIA were up to.

Some interesting things have come out in the last ten years or so, though - the dosing of a whole french town (Pont-Saint-Esprit) with LSD in 1951; when i started reading about this stuff, there were still theories that it was an outbreak of ergot contaminarion that dosed everyone - but the US has since owned up to it just being a bit of "harmless experimentation" (which, y'know - killed people and ruined many lives).

One such life was that of Frank Olson, a germ warfare expert who was (i believe) working as a CIA contractor with a security clearance (though i could have that wrong).
The US Government finally apologised to his family a few years ago - he was thrown out of a manhattan skyscraper in 1953 (i think) and it was only after Olson's family sued the government and they exhumed his body that the CIA owned up to killing him. The theory is that he had a major breakdown after what he was part of in France (dosing a whole town) and started to talk about his highly classified work, and was killed by the agency.

The thing with studying mk ultra is that it can be easy to end up down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole, because it is all such a far fetched sounding story.
Like, for instance, there are some really poorly argued theories about the whole hippie movement being a psy-ops experiment that got out of control (which in itself may not be far from the truth) and that people like frank zappa, the byrds and jim morrison were CIA plants put into positions of influe ce to discredit the anti-war movement (which is total bullshit).

I think the truth is that mk ultra was trying to do all sorts of fucked up things with various psychoactive agents, from mind control and testing the effects of torture ans interrogation under the influence of various drugs to - well, god knows what unspeakable crimes against humanity.
We'll never really know, because as i understand it, most of the files were destroyed decades ago.
Another reason i think we are unlikely to find out much more is that (it is speculated) that some of this research is attached to ongoing research, biological warfare and psy-ops programs.
Fascinating topic though!

Have you read Acid Dreams? If not, i thoroughly recommend you do

 

[Achten]

Can't help much on the mk ultra topic but I did use a sensory deprivation thank after a bit of homemade cannabis oil. Interesting experience ! The first part I felt myself hurdling through space at lightspeed, although I knew I was lying perfectly still in the tank. After that it was meditative. This was my first time in a thank. Next time I will have some LSD or another psychedelic when I go in.

Haven't seen Stranger Things but I remember the first episode of Fringe having the same setup ?

 

[Hodor]

I think a lot of tthe mk ultra files were destroyed, so i doubt that we'll ever know too much about what the CIA were up to.

Some interesting things have come out in the last ten years or so, though - the dosing of a whole french town (Pont-Saint-Esprit) with LSD in 1951; when i started reading about this stuff, there were still theories that it was an outbreak of ergot contaminarion that dosed everyone - but the US has since owned up to it just being a bit of "harmless experimentation" (which, y'know - killed people and ruined many lives).

I can't find anything on the US "owning up" to the Point Saint-Esprit incident.
Personally, I do not consider the CIA the most likely culprit. Not because the CIA would have had moral reservations against it, but because it would be far more convenient for them to just test it on African-Americans.

But more importantly, the symptoms described by the villagers don't really match up with those of LSD, coming across as more deliriant than hallucinogenic (granted, you could argue that at a high enough dose and with the "right" set and setting it could effectively cause mass psychosis akin to delirium, but still).
The historian Steven Kaplan argues that the more likely culprit is a flour bleaching agent: Nitrogen trichloride can oxidize the amino acids in the flour to the point where they become powerful inhibitors of the enzymes that convert glutamate and ammonia into glutamine, and catalyze the production of the antioxidant glutathione. Flour bleached with NCl3 has been known to cause "running fits" and convulsions in dogs (which is why it had been banned shortly before the incident, although it was still being used illegally), and studies also suggest similar effects in man.

Extremely high brain glutamate levels could certainly explain the deliriant symptoms, to say nothing of the neurotoxicity of excess brain ammonia and glutathione deficiency.

The thing with studying mk ultra is that it can be easy to end up down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole, because it is all such a far fetched sounding story.

THIS. The CIA certainly did plenty of highly immoral things, and even if we try to apply Occam's Razor to eliminate overly contrived schemes (ex.: "why dose a village in a foreign country with LSD when you've got plenty of perfectly good villages full of Black or Native Americans that "nobody" gives a shit about?") we can only discount so many of these, since the CIA did plenty of things that were fucked up both from a moral *and* a rational standpoint.

 

[spacejunk]

Interesting.
Apologies for sloppiness - that CIA LSD explanation was so widely reported at the time that i assumed it was credible, and that the mystery was laid to rest; seems i was wrong.
It's been ages since i've read about it, and i should've checked my sources first, obviously...

Here's an interesting article about that;

Did the CIA Really Dose a French Village With LSD?


Telegraph says the Agency caused madness, many say "rot"


On Thursday, the Telegraph ran an incredible story: back in the '50s, an entire French village suddenly went mad. This was not, as previously thought, due to an ergot (fungus) contamination of the village baker's bread, says investigative journalist H P Albarelli Jr., who published a book on the subject. Instead, it was part of the CIA's secret mind-control experiments with LSD. In other words, the CIA put a French village on acid. The Telegraph story by Henry Samuel reported Albarelli's argument.

Sound too fantastical for truth? It may be: some bloggers and one U.S. historian are crying foul, saying the Telegraph story was (a) slanted, (b) uncomfortably similar to other reports, and (c) bizarrely old--Albarelli's book was published in 2008, so it's hardly breaking news. What's going on? Here's the debate:

'Harebrained' France 24's Christophe Josset runs the CIA idea by Cornell historian Steven Kaplan, who specializes in French bread history and has written his own book about the village insanity incident. "It's clinically incoherent," Kaplan responds.
LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhabitants showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive ailments or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople. ... As for pulverising it [for ingestion through the air], that technology was not even possible at that time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.
Plagiarized? Global Dashboard's David Steven wonders why the Telegraph story didn't even bother to cite Kaplan's competing book on the subject. He also digs up what looks like some startling similarities: "parts of [the Telegraph article] bear an extremely suspicious resemblance" to a New York Times review of Kaplan's book back in 2008, while another section almost looks like a direct translation of a French blog post from this past Monday. He lays the quotes side by side for comparison.
Chemically Laughable The Awl's Alex Balk (whose primary reaction is "really?") digs up a post by a chemist in the pharmaceutical industry, Derek Lowe. Lowe says the Telegraph story is hogwash. He's particularly skeptical of a passage saying the village went crazy because of "diethylamide, the D in LSD." Diethylamide "isn't a separate compound," and "LSD isn't some sort of three-component mixture," Lowe scoffs: "I'd like to hear this guy explain to me what the 'S' stands for." Furthermore, diethylamides don't provoke hallucination. It's clear to him that "neither the author of this new book, nor the people at the Telegraph, nor the supposed scientific 'source' of this quote, know anything about chemistry." He's not dismissing this wild story out of hand, but he doesn't think this particular narrative makes sense:
Now, there most certainly were secret LSD experiments during the 1950s and 1960s. (The book Storming Heaven has a good account of them, as well as of the history of LSD in general). But it's rather hard to see why the CIA should decide to dose some village in the Auvergne, especially when the symptoms (burning sensations in the extremities as well as hallucinations) seem to match ergotism quite well.

Link

 

[The Shadow Self]

If you go looking, like, really hard, you can find out a lot about what the CIA and co. was up to back then, since then, and now. There is a lot of interesting info on "the LSD Revolution" out there.

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

It's pretty hard to know what actually happened back then. I was at ground zero of it back in the 1960's and I would have never thought it possible, but who really knows? I wouldn't put it past the CIA to attempt some sort of subversion to the LSD/hippie movement, but it's origins were unanticipated by the CIA IMHO.

When all the MK Ultra reveals came out, it gave me enough pause to question my own POV of the situation. I still haven't sorted it all out.

 

[mirrored_cookie]

Probably still going on, when the government dumps millions into black projects they don't tend to let go of them too easily.

 

[The Shadow Self]

Oh, if people only knew what was actually going on behind all the stage-craft and state-craft, their minds would be blown...

 

[spacejunk]

^ i agree - but we might not be talking about the same things, i don't know.

i think there are a lot of fanciful conspiracy theories just feed off the state-sanctioned barbarism of mk-ultra - but i think a lot of the time they miss the real conspiracies that are actually right out there in the open.
i suspect 'the powers that be' moved on from the madness of randomly drugging people, and now have a vast array of other techniques to manipulate public consciousness.
they may not be as wild as the naive acid madness of mk-ultra, but i'd be surprised if it is any less shocking in its implications.

it's a very interesting topic, and i'm sure there are other threads on bluelight from years ago on the subject.

 

[Moxious]

While I agree that it's likely they've moved on from "randomly drugging people", what's known suggests that these projects were quite deep and widespread. MK-Ultra was just one of many MK-projects, I think MK-Delta has the most information about it.

What is truly disconcerting to me is that supposedly MK Ultra was a coverup for an even more sinister Project Artichoke. Not much is known about it though and I'm sure it sounds like I'm halfway down the conspiracy rabbit hole already but I'm fairly certain there are docs out there to corroborate what I'm saying.

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

I don't want to dump everything I know on the subject as a lot of it isn't well sourced but the CIA was very into LSD back during the heyday. It was common practice to dose each other unknowingly as a joke at the pentagon and they were into finding and using anything to break the mind. The idea was to incapacitate an army with substances like LSD but once the value of that was discredited and better things were found (deliriants) for that purpose attention was turned to using them on the general population. This back fired for them in a lot of ways (use of LSD woke a lot of people up) and they moved on to other drugs that were more effective.

One only has to look at the modern culture: Want to discredit someone? Megadose them on a substance and turn them lose on a unsuspecting public. Want to control a population? Give them TV and subtlety get them addicted to things you've put in the food/water and blast them with radio waves. Still not effective? Tell them they're sick and give them pills or make a common thing illegal and lock up half your population. As crazy as it sounds at first you'll discover it's all true if you read the right things and explore a bit for yourself. Just don't expect anyone to believe you or care because they're too tied up in day to day life.

Psyops are perhaps the most important thing in the Government's agenda since the end of WW2. Right now they're attempting to reign in free expression on the internet because it's outside of their direct control unlike television/print. Anyone that doesn't get a long gets two to the back of the head or thrown from very tall buildings. Loose ends of are begin closed as I type thing. Compared to a decade or two ago the internet is so centralized it isn't even the same thing anymore. You have to go on encrypted networks to find a little of what it once was and even those are compromised by default.

A lot of you were around for the culture of the 60s and saw it subverted and die. I had to the same thing happen to the sub-culture I belonged to. I watched as a culture that valued free expression, helping each other, and didn't care about race/politics turn into constant in-fighting. I was contributing to several large projects as a child because no one knew I was that young in the late 90s. These days such a thing wouldn't even be possible because by default anonymous contributors are ousted and everyone is required to hand over their real identity and follow retarded CoC documents that just inject politics into a space where we got a long fine with out them. The so-called hacker culture is basically dead and the values it instilled in me no longer apply. To borrow a term from festival culture: it's all candy kids now with a few hanger-ons sprinkled in there among them. The prevalence of this behavior really took off after the Snowden leaks and most people fled to safe places or stopped coming to talk all together. They were all afraid of incarceration and/or death for simply exploring systems/networks as they'd been doing since the 70s. In other words they were too smart for their own good. The general consciousness is that the internet is so compromised at this point if you value your privacy it's best not to use it at all. When you've got back doors in CPUs directly from the factory you know you've lost the war.

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

So much truth there, Headphones, so much truth...

 

[spacejunk]

Yep, divide and conquer is a very effective technique. It doesn't take much to infiltrate and totally destroy activist groups.
Look at the "spy cops" in the UK - some of these guys even had long term intimate relationships (for years) with environmental activists to help subvert them for the state.

I think the things we hear about are the tip of a very disturbing iceberg...

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

I think the things we hear about are the tip of a very disturbing iceberg...

I grew up on a farm, we kept cattle. I notice the similarities between cows and people on a daily basis. It's easy to control people and we live in a society where it has become so routine. People are opposed to security cameras for example but they're everywhere now and any place not covered by them has cell phones there are all times. Would you willingly carry a tracking device so the Government could keep up with where you go? Most people would balk at the idea, but give them a shiny new cell phone that does the same thing and they'll run out to upgrade it every year just for the bigger screen. It not only tracks you, it listens to everything and it sees everything you do through the use of two cameras. Or look at Black Friday: people rush out to buy a bigger screen for their wall because the smaller screen they own now told them to. They willingly put something dangerous for the mind in their home and sit their kids in front of it.

When I try to explain this to people IRL they just laugh, call me retarded, and make comments like "ohhh I'm so scared of you are you Russian?". It's just a big joke.

At this point I'm convinced most of the population is so retarded they aren't worth my time. I try to stay out of the mind state but it's frustrating. They'll call you smart and seek advice but once you drop truth they just laugh at you. Why did they even ask questions if they don't want the answers? I've been told I should be more subtle and work at this over a long period of time but I don't have the time for that.

As for what the final agenda is it's written on stones in Georgia of all places if you care to find it. Short version; reduce population to a stable number of slaves that serve a power class that will live forever through the use of technology. If you want to go into religion; they fear death because they can't take the power they have here with them so they prefer to stay and don't care how many people they kill in the pursuit of that goal. Also, if you want to get into ET theory they could just be keeping us all around for food or something, who knows. I'd love to get access to certain databases to see for myself but anyone that gets close just stops talking and/or dies. I do know they keep all metadata stored forever and I'm pretty sure the Government is so far ahead of us in general computing power that they can sort it effectively. A lot of folks say we already have biocomputers but the existence of them is held back from the general population.

I swear I don't wear a tin-foil hat. There is a lot of stuff out there to discredit what I say. I see people pushing stuff like flat earth theory every day to paint folks like me as crazy. I don't believe everything by default but when you've seen the same patterns all your life you start to connect dots. Even if a prophecy isn't real it doesn't mean some nut job won't take it as gospel and attempt to fulfill it. Also, I know I'm just rehashing a lot of stuff here. A lot of this was prevalent in media I watched as a kid (see: Serial Experiments Lain for a good example).