Cosmic Junkyard #4: What the hell was MK-Ultra?

When the CIA dosed unwitting test subjects with LSD... and whether this is still happening today

The US government has done some unfathomable things.

But one of the straight-up weirdest — and this is critical: that we know of — things it’s ever masterminded might be MK-Ultra, the top-secret government project that ran from around 1953 to 1963. In short, this initiative involved using drugs including LSD in order to see if mind control and brainwashing could become actual weapons of mass destruction.

The whole mess was one of the many messy byproducts of America’s frosty war against the Soviets. Terrified that the Communists had perfected some kind of mind control drug, the US set out to do the same, and CIA director Allen Dulles approved MK-Ultra in 1953.

Under the direction of poison and drug expert Sidney Gottlieb, who purchased the world’s entire supply of LSD in the early 1950s for $240,000, the CIA launched a series of experiments involving LSD, MDMA, meth, and magic mushrooms, among other substances.

From the start, things did not go well.

A Terrible Accident, and Many Other Terrible Non-Accidents

In 1953, a doctor named Frank Olson attended a CIA retreat and was covertly given LSD. Unfortunately, he wound up dying after falling or jumping out of a hotel window…but this was just the beginning.

A particularly weird iteration of these experiments, called Operation Midnight Climax, took place in San Francisco, Marin County, and New York City (all places I’ve spent a lot of time, coincidentally or not) between 1955 and 1965.

As part of this project, prostitutes were encouraged to bring unwitting subjects back to secretive “safehouses,” where the johns would be dosed with LSD and monitored from behind one-way glass windows.

CIA agents would often sip martinis while watching the prostitutes had sex with their clueless johns, and afterwards the prostitutes would be encouraged to ask their clients questions. Some were even instructed to give them subliminal messages.

Apparently the CIA was curious about whether sex or drugs or a particular combination of both could get people to confess their secrets or fall prey to mind control tactics. Anyhow, after nearly a decade of complete chaos, the project was shut down in 1965.

Not all of the test subjects were entirely unaware of what was going on. Author Ken Kesey volunteered to take LSD as part of an MK-Ultra study, as did Grateful Dead member Robert Hunter. Ted Kaczynski, AKA the Unabomber, also took part. Even Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary got their LSD from a Stanford University experiment helmed by Sydney Gottlieb.

In short, MK-Ultra arguably helped kickstart the LSD and psychedelic craze in America, though later on the US government would go on to criminalize and prosecute the very drugs it helped spread.

How MK-Ultra Tried to Engineer Mind Control

Gottlieb’s main recipe for mind-control was a two-parter: First, obliterate a person’s mind, and then find a way to engineer a new mind within that mind.

He went all in on the former, embarking on a series of covert torture programs and even hiring Nazi doctors who had been doing research on mind control in concentration camps to come consult with him.

Under Gottlieb, the CIA established secret mind control testing centers across Europe and Asia, and forced prisoners to undergo horrors like electro-shock therapy, sensory isolation, extreme temperatures, and the like. They used mescaline and heroin and of course, LSD in order to shatter minds and break down walls.

A prisoner named Whitey Bulger took part in a study he thought was meant to help cure his schizophrenia, but it turned out that he was being dosed with LSD — and he later became a homicidal crime boss. He was just one of many prisoners dosed with LSD against their will during those years.

But, from the sounds of things, no real successful revelations about mind control came out of all this. Eventually CIA Inspector John Vance discovered the unethical nature of the experiments and shut down the program in 1963, and in 1974, a New York Times exposé revealed some of the CIA’s gnarlier experiments to the public.

Unfortunately, the CIA destroyed most of its records, making it hard to find tangible information and facts about what actually went down during this unspeakably odd chapter of American history.

Gottlieb is a pretty fascinating character. He lived in a cabin in the woods, practiced Buddhism and took LSD hundreds of times himself. He was also a Jew who worked with Nazi torturers. I’m sure he had some sort of greater good rationale ringing in his head the whole time, thinking if he could only find a way to manipulate or control the brains of evil world leaders, he could save so many people. But he definitely lost the plot along the way.

Is MK-Ultra … Still Happening?

One has to wonder, though, if MK-Ultra did continue in some form — or if it’s still continuing. Soon after drafting this piece, I stumbled upon an insane Reddit thread (or was it planted on my feed by a black ops anarchist anti-government hacker collective?) that argued that MK-Ultra is still very much in action today.

Among this poster’s theories: the government (or maybe Hollywood, or maybe both?) has figured out how to completely wipe out people’s minds by subjecting them to horrifically traumatizing experiences, often as children. Then they implement new personalities, called alters. This apparently is a mandatory process for CIA agents, and this is also apparently why (according to this poster) so many Hollywood celebrities develop alter egos — and why so many have breakdowns around the age of 27 when they start remembering what actually happened to them. Monarch butterflies and white rabbits appear frequently around these conspiracy theories, and Project Monarch is apparently a method of turning impressionable young women into clueless sex kittens.

It’s easy to see how this bleeds into Q-Anon madness, which I think is just pure lunacy — yes the government is screwing us, but not by orchestrating secret pizza-related cabals; they’re doing it right in front of our noses by letting us all go into massive medical and educational debt, allowing the planet to melt, and giving corporations human rights, but I digress.

Then again, MK-Ultra definitely did happen and yes it really was that bizarre and horrifying. While I don’t really believe in the whole Project Monarch thing, I do think that it’s very likely that MK-Ultra does live on in some way, shape, or form.

Anyways, I have been feeling rather strange since I began writing this article. Maybe I’m being dosed with LSD through the air vents right now. If I’ve brushed a bit too close to the truth and this is the last you hear from me… Then don’t forget me… And to the US government… I know what you did…