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The CIA claims MKULTRA, its infamous mind-control program, ended in 1974.
But what if that couldn’t be further from the truth?
What if MKULTRA didn’t end at all? What if the research simply evolved?
And what if the explosion of “cults” that began appearing across America and around the world provided the perfect environment to take decades of mind-control research out of the laboratory and experiment on entire groups of people?
As we discussed in my Jonestown investigation, Jim Jones supposedly convinced more than 900 people to kill themselves. But the evidence I presented tells a very different story: Jonestown was a mass murder, not a mass suicide.
There were CIA agents and people with intelligence connections on the ground and the conditions inside Jonestown looked disturbingly similar to those created for human test subjects under government mind-control programs.
Hundreds of vulnerable people were isolated from the outside world in the middle of the Guyanese jungle. Their food, sleep, work, movement and communication were controlled. They were subjected to psychoactive drugs, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, forced labor, humiliation, physical and sexual abuse and relentless psychological pressure.
And all of this was happening just a few years after the CIA supposedly “ended” MKULTRA.
If you know the true story behind Charles Manson and his “Family,” then this idea shouldn’t sound foreign to you. After all, Manson was also a federal informant and his “Family” was another MKULTRA experiment.
So what if MKULTRA didn’t disappear? What if the laboratory simply changed?
That is what sent me down this rabbit hole.
Because MKULTRA was never just about LSD. The government spent decades studying hypnosis, isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, behavior modification, psychological conditioning and methods for manipulating human behavior, often using prisoners, psychiatric patients and other vulnerable people as test subjects.
Then similar methods began appearing outside traditional laboratories, inside prisons, psychiatric institutions, schools and federally funded rehabilitation programs.
And then there were the cults.
If decades of research into controlling human behavior really ended in the 1970s, what happened to everything they learned?
Did it disappear?
Or did it move somewhere else?
To understand why I’m asking that question, we need to go back to the beginning.
Who Were They Targeting?
There’s another piece of this that I don’t think gets nearly enough attention.
Who were they experimenting on?
The CIA wasn’t exactly grabbing wealthy, powerful Americans and secretly turning them into human guinea pigs. Again and again, these experiments were carried out on people who were already vulnerable: prisoners, psychiatric patients, people living inside institutions and others who had very little power to begin with.
Now look at who cults recruit.
Jim Jones specifically sought out many of these same populations. He recruited from prisons. He recruited people who had spent time in mental institutions. He targeted poor and marginalized communities and people who were already looking for somewhere to belong.
And Jones wasn’t unique in that respect.
Cults have historically preyed on people who are vulnerable, isolated, struggling or desperate for some kind of community. Those are also the easiest people to separate from the outside world and make dependent on the group.
So when you start comparing the people targeted in government mind-control experiments with the people being recruited into these cults, how many of these similarities are we supposed to write off as pure “coincidence”?
Or were some of these so-called “cult leaders” actually federal assets, being supplied with the information, resources and protection they needed to carry out these experiments on behalf of the U.S. government?
Note: This could also be true of the “serial killers” who began sprouting up around this same time. If you look into their backgrounds, many of them were part of these CIA experiments.
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CIA and Mind Control
The CIA’s interest in mind control goes all the way back to the agency’s founding in 1947. From the beginning, developing methods to control and manipulate the human mind was a priority.
Experiments involving hypnosis, drugs, isolation and other methods of mind control had already been conducted by the FBI and the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA. The CIA took that research and pushed it further under a program called Project BLUEBIRD.
Then, in 1951, the CIA joined forces with the military and created Project ARTICHOKE.
And ARTICHOKE wasn’t some vague study into human psychology. The goal was to figure out whether a person’s mind and personality could actually be controlled or altered. They were interested in using these methods for interrogation and counterespionage, inducing amnesia, and other forms of what they called “psychic reorganization.”
That same year, in 1951, Americans were introduced to a word that would eventually become part of our everyday vocabulary: “brainwashing.”
The term was popularized by “journalist” Edward Hunter, who worked for the CIA, and it quickly became wrapped up in the growing fear of the communist “Red Menace.”
Americans were told that the Soviets, Chinese and Koreans had developed sophisticated demonic methods of mind control that could be used against their own citizens and prisoners of war. Horror stories of communist brainwashing flooded the American media, helping create the image of communist societies as enormous prisons where the government could reach inside a person’s mind and fundamentally change them.
Some went so far as to portray socialism itself as one giant system of mind control.
And while Americans were being warned about what communist governments were supposedly doing to the human mind, our own government was quietly conducting mind-control experiments of its own.
Then, in 1953, came MKULTRA.
The scope of MKULTRA went far beyond simply trying to understand how enemy governments might brainwash American prisoners.
The CIA was determined to leave virtually nothing unexplored in its search for ways to control the human mind. Drugs, chemicals, hypnosis and other methods of manipulating human behavior were all investigated and the ambitions extended beyond controlling individual people. Researchers were also interested in whether these techniques could eventually be used against groups and even entire populations.
The research explored the use of chemical and biological substances in covert military operations; whether assassins or so-called “Manchurian candidates” could be programmed to carry out missions, whether agents could be made resistant to interrogation, and whether individuals or larger populations could be mentally disoriented or incapacitated.
This was no longer simply about learning how the human mind worked. The CIA wanted to know how far the human mind could be manipulated, altered and ultimately controlled.
MKULTRA
It is difficult to even comprehend the full scope of MKULTRA. And according to the CIA itself, the documents that have been made public represent only the tip of the iceberg.
What those documents do show is just how enormous this operation became. For decades, the control of human behavior and the human mind, not only of individuals but of groups and entire populations, was a major priority of U.S. intelligence agencies.
MKULTRA alone coordinated 149 projects involving thousands of experiments and “operations” on prisoners, psychiatric patients and other people in the United States and abroad.
Tens of thousands of people were used as experimental subjects without their knowledge or consent.
The research of hundreds of scientists was also secretly coordinated through CIA front organizations, in some cases without the scientists themselves knowing that the CIA was behind the work.
MKULTRA investigated the behavioral and psychological effects of drugs, hypnosis, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, psychotherapy, group processes, behavior modification, biological agents and the implantation of electrodes. Researchers explored everything from highly sophisticated methods of torture to far more subtle forms of psychological influence and group hypnosis.
Virtually every technique they could think of for influencing or controlling people without their knowledge or against their will was investigated and tested.
The LSD experiments are probably the most well-known part of MKULTRA. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were used as unwitting human guinea pigs, given LSD without their knowledge or consent in experiments that left behind ruined lives, suicides and mysterious deaths.
The CIA was also looking for ways to secretly administer these drugs without the person ever knowing they had been drugged.
Researchers experimented with methods involving swizzle sticks, aerosols and even substances that could be absorbed through skin contact.
And as disturbing as all of that is, the LSD experiments and the search for covert ways to drug people represent just one tiny corner of what MKULTRA was doing during the 1950s.
None of this research should have been happening in the first place. It was entirely illegal. It violated the CIA’s own charter, the U.S. Constitution, basic medical ethics and international standards established under agreements like the Nuremberg Code.
And yet the CIA still managed to recruit pharmaceutical companies, state hospitals and police departments to help carry out these drug experiments.
But throughout the 1950s, the program had a problem.
The experiments were being conducted under such extreme secrecy that carrying them out under properly controlled scientific conditions was incredibly difficult. The surviving documents make clear just how seriously the CIA took that secrecy, and how far it was willing to go to prevent the program from being exposed, including murder being acceptable to keep these operations hidden.
That created an obvious obstacle. If researchers wanted to take these experiments further, they needed environments where people and conditions could be more tightly controlled without setting off the moral and legal alarm bells that this kind of human experimentation should have triggered.
They needed more control over the experiments without the public realizing what was happening.
And that is when MKULTRA shifted gears.
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Enter: Dr. Edgar Schein
Schein was a psychologist who specialized in brainwashing.
In 1961, he appeared before a meeting of top prison officials and called for what amounted to a campaign of brainwashing, behavior modification and personality alteration within the American prison population.
His argument was pretty incredible. Criminals, he believed, did not have a right to keep their existing personalities intact. In the interest of society, and once again under the banner of protecting the “American Way of Life,” prisoners should be subjected to mind-control and behavior-modification techniques.
You might expect prison officials to have been skeptical of a psychologist showing up and proposing that they start altering the personalities of prisoners. Instead, Schein’s proposal was received with enormous enthusiasm and the significance of that reception would become much clearer over the next 25 years.
But there was one very important detail about Dr. Schein that makes this entire proposal a heck of a lot more interesting.
He was working for the CIA.
Mind Control Experiments In U.S. Prisons and Schools
By the late 1960s, behavior-control and drug experimentation programs had been extensively implemented inside federal and state prisons across the United States.
Prisoners were subjected to experiments involving an assortment of mind-altering drugs and drugs used for torture, along with psychosurgery, electrodes implanted directly into the brain, electroshock, aversive conditioning, sensory and sleep deprivation, severe isolation and other methods designed to manipulate or break down human behavior.
And this experimentation wasn’t confined to American prisons.
At the same time, prisons and police stations were being equipped with ways of experimenting with mind-altering techniques in countries where the CIA had particularly strong influence, including Brazil, Uruguay and Greece, as well as Northern Ireland.
By this point, the research had moved far beyond secret experiments conducted in isolated laboratories. These techniques were being implemented inside prisons and police facilities in the United States and around the world.
And prisons weren’t the only places where these experimental behavior-control programs were being carried out. Schools and hospitals were also receiving millions of dollars in federal funding to develop similar programs.
Then, in the early 1970s, a curious program called The Seed appeared in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
The Seed was presented as a “rehabilitation” program for young people dealing with a variety of problems. Kids and teenagers ended up there after being referred by courts, schools or their own parents.
But the methods being used inside The Seed were remarkably similar to what had already been used inside the prisons.
They were subjected to humiliating “attack therapy,” intense group pressure, forced confessions and sleep deprivation. The program also developed an extensive system of spying and informing, where members were encouraged to report on one another.
And above everything else, The Seed demanded absolute loyalty to the group, even when that loyalty came into conflict with their own families.
But it wasn’t long before people started noticing something was seriously wrong.
Parents began complaining that their children had been brainwashed.
Teachers noticed that the “seedlings,” the name given to young people who successfully completed the program, came back with what they described as a hypnotized, almost robot-like demeanor. They showed extreme loyalty to the group and an alarming level of conformity.
And then there was the man running the entire operation.
The Seed’s director, Art Barker, had absolutely no credentials or professional background in treatment programs. Neither did his staff.
Apparently, that wasn’t enough to concern the federal government.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration still poured millions of dollars into The Seed over the course of several years.
But as parents and teachers in Fort Lauderdale started asking more questions about what exactly was happening inside this program, something interesting happened.
The federal funding was quietly terminated.
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So Where Did It Go From There?
Now we can finally come back to the question I asked at the beginning of this investigation.
Did MKULTRA actually end when the CIA claims it did?
Because look at the progression we just went through.
The government started by experimenting on individuals with drugs, hypnosis, isolation and sensory deprivation. Then the research expanded into behavior modification, psychological conditioning and group processes. Eventually, these methods moved beyond secret laboratories and into controlled environments like prisons, psychiatric institutions, schools and federally funded rehabilitation programs.
And the people being used remained remarkably similar: prisoners, psychiatric patients, troubled youths and others who were vulnerable, institutionalized or relatively easy to isolate and control.
By the early 1970s, programs like The Seed were already showing just how far this could go. Young people were subjected to sleep deprivation, humiliation, forced confessions, intense group pressure, surveillance and demands for absolute loyalty. Parents were literally complaining that their children had been brainwashed.
And the federal government was funding it.
Then we are told the CIA simply stopped being interested in mind control.
This is the part I have a very hard time believing.
Not because I can show you a document that says, “MKULTRA continued under this name.” I can’t.
But because everything we’ve just gone through shows a decades-long progression in the opposite direction. The experiments became more sophisticated. The environments became more controlled. The research moved from individuals toward groups. And government money was already funding programs outside traditional laboratories that were using many of the same techniques.
So where does that progression lead next?
That brings us back to the cults.
If you wanted to continue this kind of research, what better environment could you possibly ask for?
A group of people separated from their families and increasingly isolated from the outside world. A charismatic leader demanding absolute obedience. Control over sleep, food, work and communication. Group pressure. Public humiliation. Forced confessions. Drugs. Surveillance. Punishment for disobedience.
And most importantly, an environment where all of it could be blamed on one supposedly deranged “cult leader” if anything ever went wrong.
I’ love to hear your thoughts: do you believe that the cults which began sprouting up all around the world were organic, or did the CIA play a part in creating them?
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The communists ritually sacrificed the Romanov royal Russian family so now the CIA does it. Fighting fire with fire brought down the Jew twin towers.