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EVERYTHING We Know About MKULTRA — Transcript

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0:00Let me tell you about a conspiracy. A
0:03real conspiracy. Everything I'm going to
0:05say here is true. [music] The US
0:07government admitted to it. What's more,
0:09it's one of the craziest conspiracies
0:12out there. Beginning in the 1950s and
0:15continuing on into [music] at least the
0:171970s, the CIA ran a top secret project
0:21that involved some extremely [music]
0:23bizarre experiments. These included
0:26strange new torture techniques, chemical
0:29and biological weapons, [music] ESP,
0:32hypnosis, brain implants, prostitution,
0:36child abuse, new age spirituality, and a
0:39few dolphins.
0:41Why' this happen? Well, the goal [music]
0:44was appropriately, as lofty as it was,
0:47impossible. the complete and total
0:50[music] conquest of the human mind. Over
0:54its 20-year lifespan, this program went
0:56by several names. Bluebird, Artichoke,
1:00MK Naomi, MK [music] Search, but most
1:04famously
1:05MK
1:07Ultra.
1:08For those of you unfamiliar with what
1:10I'm talking about, you probably at least
1:12know the sci-fi trope where a shady
1:15government agency subjects people to
1:18strange experiments involving
1:20mindaltering drugs, behavior
1:22modifications, psychic powers, or the
1:25creation of an alternate super spy
1:27personality. And you might have thought,
1:31what's up with that? Well, that's all
1:34more or less based off of a real thing.
1:37Starting in 1950 and supposedly ending
1:40in [music] 1974,
1:42the CIA was putting a pretty sizable
1:44amount of their budget [music] into this
1:46series of programs with the goal of
1:49discovering how to control people's
1:51minds. And this wasn't some harmless
1:55fantasy. To achieve this, they carried
1:57out experiments on [music] thousands of
1:59people, the vast majority of whom were
2:01civilians and didn't know what they were
2:04participating in or even that they were
2:07being [music] experimented on at all.
2:09Many had their lives irrevocably
2:12shattered as a result. Well, I realize
2:16some of this might sound crazy. this is
2:18a confirmed fact like Epstein or that
2:22time the CIA overthrew the government of
2:24Guatemala in order to keep the price of
2:26bananas low or how the entire music
2:29industry turned against Drake because of
2:31his stance on Palestine. Oh, you didn't
2:34like that last one, did you? Hm. I just
2:36think it's interesting how Drake was one
2:38of the most high-profile celebrities to
2:40sign the artist for ceasefire petition
2:42and then a couple months later this
2:45Obama lib starts calling him a pedophile
2:48and my Torononian ass is supposed to
2:51think that that's all just a
2:52coincidence.
2:53>> I love him. I met him in Australia and
2:56um a great friend and a great uh great
2:58role model. You know, we text we just
2:59text each other the other day and he was
3:00like I miss you so much. really was a
3:02fan of one of or not a fan supported one
3:05of my teammates um at the time and
3:07because
3:07>> and this is when you're in high school.
3:09>> Yeah, in high school. So, he was a fan
3:10of women's basketball, high school
3:12basketball.
3:13>> What advice does he give you? Like what
3:14does he say
3:15>> uh about boys? He helps me.
3:17>> What?
3:17>> How old are you?
3:22>> 17. Why do you look like that? Big. Look
3:26at Look at all this.
3:29Well, I don't know if I should feel
3:31guilty or not, but I had fun. I like the
3:34way the breast feel against my chest.
3:41>> Okay, I just saw those clips for the
3:43first time and um yeah, I have to admit
3:47that um clearly the plot against Drake
3:50is far more sophisticated than I had
3:52thought. No, in all seriousness though,
3:54given that we're currently seeing that a
3:57lot of conspiracy theories were not only
3:59real, but sent from an iPad, I think
4:02that now might be a good time to return
4:04to a classic. With very few exceptions,
4:07everything I talk about in this video
4:08will be based off of completely verified
4:11sources, usually declassified documents
4:13from the CIA themselves.
4:15With that said, a big part of this story
4:18is that in an effort to cover this up,
4:21the CIA destroyed the vast majority of
4:24the documents related to MK Ultra. While
4:27we have more than enough to prove that
4:29this did in fact happen, when it comes
4:32to the question of what they actually
4:34achieved, the jury is still very much
4:37out. Because of that, I'm going to be
4:40upfront with you and say that this video
4:43won't give you a definitive answer to
4:45that question. Instead, I'm going to
4:49give you three. Basically, for the past
4:51like four or so months, I've been
4:54reading everything I can about MK Ultra.
4:56And the two things I found are that my
4:58friends and family are all very worried
5:01about me. And more importantly, that
5:03everyone who writes about this more or
5:06less argues for one of these three
5:08theories about what happened. And I
5:11don't mean this as a dig. All three
5:13genuinely have a lot of truth to them,
5:15but also shortcomings where they miss
5:18things that the others don't. And so I
5:21decide to cover all of them. Call it the
5:24MK Ultra iceberg. [snorts] And the thing
5:27is that, you know, now more than ever,
5:29it's become so hard to stay informed
5:32with stuff like this. You know, with all
5:34the biased news coverage and digital
5:36echo chambers, which is why I'm so happy
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7:32All one word, no apostrophe. Now, back
7:34to the video. Actually, though, as one
7:36final bit of housekeeping, I realize
7:39that this video is massive, so I'd
7:42encourage you to think of it as three
7:44videos, each of which is going to tell
7:46the story of MK Ultra in a different
7:48way. Also, while I do definitely have
7:52opinions about which of the theories I
7:54believe more than others, and I'm sure
7:56that I'll come out in some ways, I hope
7:59that you come to your own conclusions
8:01here. And I'm going to do my best not to
8:04put my thumb on the scale too much and
8:06present the strongest case I can for
8:08each theory. So, let's get into it.
8:12starting with.
8:18Now, regardless of any problems I may
8:21have with this theory, the reason I'm
8:23calling this the dumbass theory isn't to
8:25insult anyone who believes it, but
8:28because according to the theory, [music]
8:31MK Ultra was a complete and total
8:33failure, i.e., the CIA are dumb asses.
8:38With that said, this is the most
8:39commonly repeated theory and the
8:42official stance of the CIA. So maybe I
8:45am insulting some people who believe it.
8:47The this theory claims that the CIA
8:50didn't accomplish any of their goals
8:52despite spending an amount of money
8:54comparable to the Manhattan Project and
8:57ruining hundreds, if not thousands of
8:59lives over the course of around 20
9:01years. Come on, guys. For the same cost
9:03and in way less time, the Manhattan
9:05Project ruined so many more lives. And
9:09well, I am making it sound a bit
9:11ridiculous here, but to be fair, that
9:14truly isn't that crazy. [ __ ] up,
9:17wasting money, and harming innocent
9:19people are probably the three things the
9:22agency is best at. If you take a close
9:25look at most of their projects, it
9:27becomes clear that very often these
9:30people are completely incompetent. The
9:33reason they succeed isn't because
9:34they're great at what they do, but
9:36because they have unlimited money and
9:39zero legal or ethical constraints.
9:43MK Ultra was no exception to this. In
9:46fact, part of the reason why we know
9:47anything about it at all is because when
9:50they tried to destroy all the documents,
9:52they missed all the financial ones. When
9:55you do even a little digging, what you
9:57find is that everyone involved in this
9:59mess was either a [ __ ] a scumbag,
10:02insane, or most often all of the above.
10:06This was all laid out extremely well in
10:08Steven Kinszer's book, The Poisoner
10:10Chief, which is the main source I'll be
10:12using in this section. Now, let's get
10:15into it. From the very beginning of the
10:17CIA and even further back when it was
10:19still the Office of [music] Strategic
10:20Services, the people working there were
10:23kept awake at night by a very specific
10:26fear. They'd been receiving a steady
10:29stream of reports and footage of people
10:31acting strangely [music] compliant after
10:34spending time in communist prisons. The
10:37Soviet Union would hold highly
10:39publicized [music] show trials where
10:41priests renounce their faith and confess
10:44to bizarre crimes. The most extreme case
10:47of this was that of the Roman Catholic
10:50prelate of Hungary, Cardinal Joseph
10:53Menzanti, who in 1949 confessed to
10:57running the Hungarian black market and
11:00trying to overthrow the government in
11:02order to steal the crown. This kept
11:06happening and not just in the USSR. In
11:101952, the Korean military released a
11:12series of videos of captured American
11:15PWs confessing to dropping biological
11:19weapons.
11:20>> The germ bombs were loaded uh 15 minutes
11:22before our mission, while ordinarily our
11:25aircraft were loaded 2 hours or more
11:27before a mission. [clears throat]
11:30My germation took place on the 27th of
11:33March 1952 and uh it was a BT germation.
11:37The 7th
11:38>> 27th March. Yes. 1952. When I think of
11:41my future,
11:43when I think of someday, though I'm not
11:46married yet, I intend to be.
11:49When my son asks me what I did in Korea,
11:52how can I tell him? So, I came over here
11:54and dropped germ bombs on people,
11:57destroying and bringing death and
11:58destruction.
11:59>> Now, upon seeing this, your average she
12:02person might assume that these people
12:05had probably just been threatened and
12:07tortured and also that it wouldn't be
12:10particularly out of character if those
12:12soldiers had in fact dropped chemical
12:14and germ weapons. But the CIA was
12:17certain that something far more sinister
12:20was going on. For them, the only
12:22possible explanation was, of course,
12:26communist hypnosis.
12:29This became a major talking point and
12:31then a commonly held belief in the West.
12:33A big part of what Americans feared
12:35about the communist menace was the
12:37possibility that in their maniacal quest
12:40to eradicate all individuality, the
12:43Kremlin had developed a technique to
12:45take away free will, [music] turning
12:47their subjects into mindless automatons.
12:51A new word entered common parliament,
12:53brainwashing. The term was a literal
12:56translation of the Chinese phrase ji now
12:59meaning washing the brain. Its first
13:02English appearance was the 1951 book
13:04Brainwashing in Red China by Edward
13:07Hunter, who was naturally a CIA asset.
13:11But while they were spreading this
13:14claim, the CIA got to thinking, "Hang on
13:17now. This [music] mind control stuff we
13:20made up actually sounds like a pretty
13:22good idea." And so they began to look
13:25for a way to do it themselves. But
13:28before that, a couple other things had
13:30to happen. First up, in 1941, we saw
13:33another example of the CIA copying their
13:35enemies when during World War II, word
13:38got out that the Japanese were
13:40developing biological weapons in China.
13:44Now, in case this isn't obvious, germ
13:46warfare was and still is a major war
13:50crime explicitly banned by the 1925
13:53Geneva Protocol. Roosevelt's Secretary
13:56of War, Henry L. Stimson, put it lightly
13:59by saying in a memo that, quote,
14:01"Biological warfare is, of course, a
14:04dirty business." However, as you can
14:08probably tell from the but hanging over
14:10the end of that sentence, Stimson wasn't
14:12one to let some pesky international laws
14:15get in the way of a good atrocity and
14:18spent the rest of the memo arguing that
14:20said dirty business need to be pursued
14:22so the US could do it first. Roosevelt
14:26agreed and so a team of scientists were
14:28recruited to build America a boweapons
14:31laboratory of its very own. This turned
14:35out to be a pretty difficult project
14:37for, you know, all the reasons you might
14:39think. A meeting of the country's top
14:41biologists was held in Washington where
14:44all the scientists in attendance
14:46explained that if they were going to
14:48produce the deadliest germs known to
14:50man, it'd be impossible to safely do it
14:53on the industrial scale required. All
14:56that is except for one, a bacteriologist
14:59named Ira Baldwin, who thought that the
15:02problem could be solved relatively
15:04simply, claiming that anything that
15:06could be done in a test tube could be
15:08done just as, if not more, safely in a
15:1110,000galon tank. For his hubris,
15:14Baldwin was placed in charge of the
15:16project and soon began surveying
15:18locations. He eventually struck gold
15:21when he happened upon Camp Dedricch, an
15:23old National Guard air base outside of
15:25Frederick, Maryland that was now sitting
15:27empty since all the planes had been
15:29moved to Europe for the war. With that
15:32settled, Baldwin set to work recruiting
15:34scientists to man the camp, mostly
15:36former students of his from the
15:38University of Wisconsin. This was a
15:40pretty hard cell, though. Not only were
15:42these scientists going to have to bend
15:44their professional ethics beyond
15:46recognition, they were also being
15:48brought into one of the US military's
15:51most secret projects and therefore would
15:53have to deal with all the restrictions
15:55that came with that. Upon joining, they
15:58were forced to sign vows of secrecy that
16:00were significantly more than lifelong.
16:04In the event of my death, I authorized
16:06the commanding officer of Camp Dedricch,
16:09Maryland, to make arrangements for and
16:12conduct the proceeding of my remains and
16:15to place them in a sealed casket which
16:18shall not thereafter be opened. I
16:20authorize post-mortem examination of my
16:23remains to be made exclusively by proper
16:26army representatives in their
16:28discretion. Look, I've had some good
16:30professors who've changed my life. Shout
16:32out Nick Mound. But I don't know if even
16:35he could get me to agree to spend
16:37eternity in a hermetically sealed
16:39sarcophagus.
16:41I hope Baldwin at least wrote these guys
16:43one hell of a recommendation letter.
16:46Actually, you know what? Let's put a pin
16:48in that. While it took some doing,
16:50Baldwin eventually got the base staffed.
16:52And just like that, the chemical core
16:54was born. Once everything was up and
16:57running, the scientists there were off
16:59to the races, cultivating anthrax,
17:02botulism, and a newly developed airborne
17:05variant of the bubonic plague with a
17:07nearly 100% mortality rate. It was like
17:10Willy Wonka's chocolate factory with
17:13slightly more safety protocols. It
17:15wasn't all work, though. They also
17:16managed to have fun along the way with a
17:19couple kooky little experiments in
17:21biological warfare. These included
17:23sneaking into the Pentagon to spray the
17:26place with fake bacteria, as well as
17:28spraying the entire city of San
17:30Francisco with real bacteria, which
17:33caused 11 people to develop UTI, one of
17:36whom died. That's right, you just got
17:39bald. Needless to say that they
17:42considered both of these to be massive
17:44successes. However, as exciting as this
17:47was, the higherups in US intelligence
17:49weren't really in the business of
17:51selling cranberry juice. Yet, seeing as
17:55the military was more interested in
17:57wiping a city off the map rather than
18:00making its inhabitants burn when they
18:02pee, it's not too surprising then that
18:05the chemical corps soon had their
18:07thunder stolen by a different set of
18:09scientists working on an even more
18:12secretive project over at Los Alamos.
18:15The day they successfully cracked an
18:17atom marked the point when the
18:18biological arms race was overtaken by
18:21the nuclear one. The Chemical Corps had
18:24two options. Admit defeat and return to
18:27civilian life, never to manufacture
18:29weapons of mass destruction again, or
18:32find a new niche they could fill. I
18:36think you can guess which way they went.
18:37Camp Dedric's prayers were answered in
18:40part thanks to another scientist who was
18:42developing something pretty interesting
18:43in Ocean Away. In 1938, a Swiss
18:47scientist named Albert Hoffman was
18:49working at Sando's Pharmaceuticals where
18:51he developed a strange chemical called
18:54lysurgic acid dthylamine or LSD25,
18:59referring to the number of iterations it
19:01took to get to the recipe that we know
19:03and love today. Even though it didn't
19:06have any obvious applications, Hoffman
19:08was fascinated and spent the next 5
19:11years trying to find a use for it. After
19:14all of that time, he had his
19:15breakthrough when it finally occurred to
19:18him to test it in the dumbest way
19:20possible, drinking the stuff. On April
19:2319th, 1943, at 4:20 p.m., he dissolved
19:28250 micrograms into 10 cc's of water and
19:32proceeded to have the world's first acid
19:35trip. Hoffman described his experience
19:37as follows. I had great difficulty in
19:40speaking coherently. My field of vision
19:42swayed before me and objects appeared
19:45distorted like images and curved
19:47mirrors. As far as I remember, the
19:50following were the most outstanding
19:52symptoms. Vertigo, visual disturbances.
19:56The faces of those around me appeared as
19:58grotesque colored masks marked mtoric
20:01unrest alternating with paralysis, an
20:04intermittent heavy feeling in the body,
20:07limbs, and the entire body as if they
20:09were filled with lead. dry constricted
20:12sensation in the throat, [music] feeling
20:15of choking, queer recognition of my
20:17condition in which [music] state I
20:19sometimes observed in the manner of an
20:22independent neutral observer [music]
20:25that I shouted half insanely or babbled
20:28incoherent words. Occasionally I felt as
20:31if I were out of my body. An unending
20:34[music]
20:34series of colorful, very realistic, and
20:37fantastic images surged in upon me. At
20:40about 1:00, [music] I fell asleep and
20:42awoke next morning feeling perfectly
20:45well. The following year, the CIA caught
20:47word of Hoffman's experiment just in
20:49time for when fears of Soviet mind
20:51control had really started to percolate.
20:54And just like that, Camp Dedrich had
20:56found their new niche. Members of the
20:59chemical corps relayed Hoffman's
21:01findings to the technical director of
21:03chemical and radiological laboratories
21:05at Edgewood Arsenal, L. Wilson Green,
21:08who was instantly interested in the
21:10battlefield potential of psychedelics.
21:13He penned a report claiming that
21:15psychochemical weapons like LSD and
21:18measculine could be used to
21:19revolutionize warfare, allowing the US
21:22to conquer an enemy without the need for
21:25any death or destruction. The head of
21:27the CIA, Rosco Hilloder, agreed and in
21:301950 launched Operation Bluebird,
21:33rumored to be named in reference to its
21:35objective of making people sing like a
21:38bird. Bluebird was a covert mission to
21:40research mind control techniques run in
21:43partnership between the CIA and the
21:45Special Operations Division or SOD, an
21:49ultra secret subunit within the already
21:52incredibly secret chemical corps. That
21:54same year, the agency was also joined by
21:56a man who'd go on to shape it in his own
21:59image, Allan Dulles. Coming from about
22:03as elite of an upbringing as possible
22:05without having an airport named after
22:07him, although his brother John Foster
22:09Dulles now does, Delos's grandfather and
22:13uncle both served as Secretary of State.
22:16The two elder bellises made sure to pass
22:18on the family business to Allen and his
22:21brother who were given prominent roles
22:23fresh out of Princeton. At the age of
22:2626, Allen was representing the US at the
22:291919 Paris Peace Conference where he
22:32played an active role in redrawing the
22:34borders of Europe. But after around 10
22:38years of that, Allan got tired of all
22:40the red tape and left the State
22:42Department to join his brother at the
22:45law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which at
22:48the time was essentially a private state
22:50department, acting as the legal arm of
22:53America's robber baron class. But then
22:57during the big WW deuce, Allan found his
23:01true calling when he joined the CIA's
23:03predecessor, the OSS, which stationed
23:06him in a luxury apartment in the Swiss
23:09city of Burn, where he threw elaborate
23:12parties for diplomats and defectors,
23:14earning the most Ivy League nickname
23:17imaginable, the gentleman spy master.
23:20Also, interestingly, all of this was at
23:22the same time that Hoffman was
23:24developing LSD over in Bile, just an
23:27hour-ong train ride away from Dulles's
23:30apartment. What makes all that even
23:32crazier, though, is that as wild as that
23:34may sound, something to understand is
23:36that when Dulles joined the CIA, nothing
23:39about his resume was particularly
23:41unusual. Pretty much all of the AY's
23:44early members came from well-bred,
23:47influential families and Ivy League
23:49schools where they'd all pledged skull
23:52and bones. But unfortunately for about
23:54half of the people I'm going to name in
23:56this video, in addition to redrawing
23:58countries and killing presidents, Dulles
24:01was also keenly interested in
24:03psychology, particularly the work of
24:06Carl Young. As was the case for the
24:09other half of the people I'll name. The
24:11way that this interest manifested was in
24:14a deep obsession with controlling
24:16people's minds. He was particularly
24:19interested in the possibility of
24:21creating mindc controlled assassins. And
24:24so on January 2nd, 1951, when Alan
24:28Dulles joined the CIA as deputy director
24:30of plans, meaning that he was in charge
24:32of all covert ops, which you know is
24:35most of what the CIA does. Naturally,
24:38the plan that immediately caught his
24:40interest was Operation Bluebird. He
24:43immediately got very busy, as you can
24:45see from an early Bluebird memo from
24:481951 that listed the key questions Delos
24:52wanted answered. Can accurate
24:54information be obtained from willing or
24:57unwilling individuals? Can agency
25:00personnel or persons of interest to this
25:02agency be conditioned to prevent any
25:05outside power from obtaining information
25:08from them by any known means? Can we
25:12obtain control of the future activities,
25:15physical and mental, of any given
25:18individual, willing or unwilling, by
25:21application of special interrogation and
25:24hypnosis techniques? Can we prevent any
25:27outside power from gaining control of
25:30future activities, physical and mental,
25:33of agency personnel by any known means?
25:37Can we condition by post-hypnotic
25:40suggestion agency employees or persons
25:42of interest to this agency to prevent
25:45them from giving information to an
25:47unauthorized source or from committing
25:50any acts on behalf of a foreign or
25:53domestic enemy? Can we in a matter of an
25:56hour, 2 hours, 1 day, etc. induce a
25:59hypnotic condition in an unwilling
26:02subject to such an extent that he will
26:05perform an act for our benefit long
26:07range. Can we create by post-hypnotic
26:11control an action contrary to an
26:14individual's basic moral principles? Can
26:17we seize a subject and in the space of
26:20an hour or two by post-hypnotic control
26:22have him crash an airplane, wreck a
26:25train, etc. short immediate activity.
26:29Can we by special interrogation and
26:31hypnotic techniques force a subject
26:34unwilling or otherwise to travel long
26:36distances, commit specific acts, and
26:39return to us or bring documents or
26:41materials? Can a person acting under
26:44post- hypnotic control successfully
26:46travel long distances? Can we alter a
26:49person's personality? How long will it
26:52hold? Can we devise a system for making
26:55unwilling subjects into willing agents
26:58and then transfer that control to
27:00untrained agency agents in the field by
27:04use of codes or identifying signs or
27:06credentials?
27:08Can we devise a standard simple
27:11relatively fast technique for inducing
27:13special interrogation and hypnotic
27:16conditions that can be used by untrained
27:19agents with or without drugs?
27:22Is it possible to find a gas that can be
27:24used to gain special interrogation
27:27control from a gas pencil, odorless,
27:30colorless, one shot, etc.? What are full
27:33details on sleep inducing machine? I
27:37like that his very first question was if
27:40accurate information can be obtained
27:42from willing individuals. Like I feel
27:45like you should answer that before you
27:46start abducting people and trying to
27:49control their minds.
27:51To get these answers, they decided that
27:54they needed fresh eyes. Someone with
27:56scientific knowledge from outside the
27:58agency who could handle all the CIA's
28:01mind control research. Dulles turned to
28:04the Chemical Corps, who then turned to
28:05Ira Baldwin, who despite being retired
28:08by then, still held tremendous sway.
28:11Baldwin knew just the man for the job. a
28:13U ofW alum who he'd been something of a
28:16mentor to. Enter Sydney Gotautle. As a
28:20Jew from the Bronx and the son of a
28:22humble sweat shop owner, it's fair to
28:25say that Gotautle's background set him
28:27pretty far apart from the blueblooded
28:30ghouls he'd wind up working with. He had
28:33a fairly rough childhood owing largely
28:35to being born with a club foot. While he
28:38could walk with braces, his primary way
28:41of getting around was to be carried
28:43everywhere by his mom, which, as you can
28:46imagine, wasn't great for his
28:48self-confidence.
28:50He eventually began walking on his own
28:52after 12 years and three surgeries,
28:54though he had a limp for the rest of his
28:56life. Got graduated high school in 36
29:00and then enrolled in City College to
29:02study advanced German, but transferred
29:04to the University of Wisconsin in order
29:06to pursue his passion for agricultural
29:09engineering. In order to get in, Gotley
29:12completed a couple of credits at the
29:14University of Arkansas and more
29:16importantly for his future, he endeared
29:18himself to the dean of the University of
29:21Wisconsin's College of Agriculture, who
29:23was none other than Ira Baldwin.
29:27Gotautle got in and in 1940 he graduated
29:30Magna Kumlad and then was admitted to
29:33Caltech's grad program thanks in part to
29:36one of Baldwin's famous letters of
29:38recommendation in which he says that
29:41quote Mr. Gotautle is a very high type
29:45of Jewish boy. This is what people were
29:48willing to risk dying of smallpox for.
29:52While in California, Gotautly met his
29:54future wife, Margaret Moore. The two
29:56immediately bonded over both of their
29:59fundamentalist religious upbringings and
30:01shared desire to explore alternative
30:03spirituality. They got married in 42 and
30:06had two kids. When Scott finished his
30:08PhD, he found work at the FDA, but quit
30:11after a few years, saying that the work
30:14was too monotonous. Always looking for
30:16their next adventure, Sydney, [music]
30:18Margaret, and their kids bounced around
30:20until in 48, the young family moved to
30:23an old cabin about 20 miles from
30:26Washington DC, which [music] they'd make
30:28their home, living a pretty idyllic
30:30life, raising their now four children,
30:33as well as chickens, goats, [music] and
30:35a small crop of vegetables on their
30:37personal hippie homestead. For the next
30:403 years, Gotautle took various
30:42university research positions until in
30:4451, his old mentor called him up with a
30:47job offer. Unbeknownst to Gotautle, at
30:50the time, Dulles was looking for someone
30:52to take over all of the CIA's mind
30:54control research, a field which the spy
30:56master believed would be the ultimate
30:58battleground for the Cold War and
31:01beyond. While Gotautle's brilliant mind
31:04and years of working for the government
31:06made him a solid choice on paper, just
31:09about everything else about him made him
31:11a bit of a weird pick. Not only was he
31:14not a member of the American
31:16aristocracy, the dude lived in the woods
31:19growing his own food, practiced new age
31:22spirituality, and told the CIA
31:24psychologist who screened him that he'd
31:27join the Young People's Socialist
31:29[music] League in college. Nevertheless,
31:32on Friday the 13th of July in 1951,
31:36[music] Gotley reported for his first
31:38day at work at the CIA and within a few
31:41months, he was put in charge of the
31:43chemical division of the tactical
31:45service staff, i.e. the people who make
31:48spy tools. Gotibb's first priority in
31:52this role was of course working on the
31:54mind control program which on August
31:5720th, 1951 had been given the new name
32:00Project [music] Artichoke and with it a
32:03much wider scope. TSS had been tasked
32:07with creating [music] drugs that could
32:08be used for interrogations, particularly
32:11a truth serum. Gotib dove right in
32:14testing all sorts of experimental and
32:16>> [music]
32:16>> illegal chemicals. Their first candidate
32:19was marijuana, which was literally
32:21codeen named TD for truth drug. This of
32:25course didn't work though, and so Got
32:28moved on to something a bit harder,
32:30cocaine. I mean, who ever heard of a
32:33cokehead lying to someone, right? I just
32:36imagine them trying to interrogate
32:37someone like, "Tell me the worst
32:39business idea imaginable." But then
32:41towards the end of 51, Gotle had his
32:43first taste of LSD. And unfortunately,
32:46he really liked it. See, acid had
32:51already been tested and dismissed as a
32:53potential truth drug. But as anyone
32:56familiar with the stuff will know,
32:58there's something uniquely fascinating
33:00about it that tends to cause certain
33:02people to become obsessed. And as you
33:06can probably guess from the whole
33:08growing his own food, woo woo religious
33:11stuff, Gotautle was exactly that kind of
33:14guy. He became convinced that LSD held
33:18some kind of mysterious power that if it
33:21could only be understood would unlock
33:24the secret of mind control.
33:26>> [snorts]
33:26>> From then on, Gotautle and the agents
33:28working for him began regularly taking
33:31LSD as well as dosing each other with
33:34it. This was at first done consensually.
33:37Later, not so much. But things didn't
33:40really get off to the races until
33:41November of 52 when Eisenhower took
33:44office. He and the Dulles family were
33:47extremely close. And so it wasn't too
33:49much of a surprise when Allan Dulles was
33:51made the new DCI and his brother John
33:54Foster Dulles became Secretary of State.
33:57Now that Allan Dulles was in charge of
33:59the CIA, he and by extension Gotautle
34:03were free to pursue their obsession with
34:05the human mind. While Artichoke had a
34:08significantly wider scope than Bluebird,
34:10it was still primarily focused on
34:12interrogation techniques. For Dulles,
34:15this simply wouldn't do. He wasn't just
34:17looking to get prisoners to talk. He
34:20wanted total control. And so on April
34:2313th of 1953, Delos fixed this by giving
34:28Gotautle a new research project with a
34:31$300,000
34:32starting budget and total autonomy. MK
34:36Ultra was officially on. One of the
34:39first orders of business was to test out
34:42the experimental drugs and techniques
34:44they'd been cooking up. And so Gotautle
34:46got to work recruiting doctors and
34:48behavioral researchers with the ethical
34:51flexibility needed to secretly dose
34:55their patients with powerful
34:56mindaltering drugs. For the 10 years
34:59that he ran MK Ultra, Gotley would pay
35:02out $25 million for human experiments
35:06conducted by 185 non-government
35:10researchers at around 80 different
35:12institutions. All of this was paid for
35:14through CIA shell companies as well as
35:17the Office of Naval Research, who'd done
35:20some work of their own trying to develop
35:22a truth serum in 1947, making them an
35:25ideal cover for funding MK Ultra
35:27experiments. To give you an idea of how
35:31loose and sketchy all of this was, let
35:34me take you back to 1952 in Korea, about
35:395 miles northeast of Punjam near the
35:42present-day DMZ. there. Allan Dulles's
35:4622-year-old son, Alan Macy Dulles II,
35:50had his own mindopening experience when
35:52shrapnel from a mortar entered his brain
35:55through the back of his skull, causing a
35:57number of severe disabilities. Not only
36:00that, Allan Jr.'s injury also
36:03significantly loosened his inhibitions.
36:06He became prone to angry rants,
36:08denouncing his father as a quote Hitler
36:11lover. While these were dismissed as
36:14paranoid delusions, he wasn't too far
36:17from the truth, which really struck a
36:20nerve for Dulles Senior. Allan started
36:23hunting for doctors who could do
36:25something to put an end to his son's
36:27rants. The more hopeless it got, the
36:29more esoteric the specialist he went to.
36:32This eventually led him to an
36:34appointment with a neurologist named
36:36Harold Wolf. Rather than a cure for his
36:39son's newly Swiss cheesed hippocampus in
36:42Wolf, Dulles found something else, a
36:45kindred spirit.
36:48As one would hope for with any
36:50neurologist, Wolf, like Dulles, was
36:53deeply interested in finding a way to
36:55control the human mind, a subject which
36:58the two immediately bonded over. Wol had
37:01developed a number of theories for how
37:04to wipe a human mind clean and then
37:07rebuild it, which he referred to as
37:09human ecology. This was all Dulles
37:12needed to hear for him to send Wolf to
37:14Gotautle, who similarly hit it off with
37:16him. And just like that, Wolf became a
37:19part of MK Ultra's network of doctors.
37:22He began offering to test all sorts of
37:25techniques on his patients, including
37:27quote threats, coercion, imprisonment,
37:31isolation, deprivation, humiliation,
37:34torture, brainwashing, black psychology,
37:38hypnosis, and combinations of these with
37:41or without chemical agents. Naturally,
37:44Gotautle rubber stamped all of this. But
37:47while that may seem pretty [ __ ] Wolf
37:50was far from the worst of the colorful
37:53characters the good doctor befriended.
37:55First up, there's Paul Hodgej, a
37:57therapist who, thanks to Gotautle, began
38:00secretly experimenting on one of his
38:02patients named Harold Blau, a tennis
38:05player who was seeking treatment for the
38:07depression he was suffering from
38:08following his recent divorce.
38:11HCH convinced him to start a course of
38:13treatment in which Blau received regular
38:16injections of what was unbeknownst to
38:18him a concentrated derivative of
38:21meascowin called MDA. He complained but
38:24was pressured into continuing the
38:26treatment which he did right up until H.
38:29Hotch administered a dose 14 times
38:32larger than normal. Blower began
38:35sweating, flailing, foaming at the
38:37mouth, and then entered a coma before
38:39dying of an overdose. One of Hatch's
38:42medical assistants later confessed that,
38:44quote, "We didn't know if it was dog
38:47piss or what it was we were giving him."
38:50Or how about Harris Isel, who ran the
38:53Addiction Research Center in Lexington,
38:55Kentucky, which despite its name,
38:57operated essentially as a prison for
39:00drug addicts, most of whom were poor and
39:02black. Isbel had already done some work
39:05for the Office of Naval Research in
39:07which he'd tested out various truth
39:09serums on his inmates. And so when he
39:12heard rumblings that the CIA was looking
39:14to test an exciting new drug called LSD,
39:18he immediately threw his hat into the
39:19ring. Naturally, Gotly jumped at the
39:22opportunity. Once the ink was dry, Isbel
39:25began recruiting test subjects in his
39:27usual way, which was to offer them
39:30heroin in exchange for their
39:31participation. As a side note, Isbel
39:34would go on to write or co-author over
39:37100 scientific articles in which he
39:39described these tests, always referring
39:42to the participants as volunteers rather
39:44than prisoners or, you know, victims.
39:48Anyways, once they'd signed up, he would
39:50dose his volunteers with ridiculous
39:53amounts of LSD daily. In the most
39:56extreme of these experiments, Isbel
39:58selected seven inmates who he gave what
40:00he described to Gotautle as quote
40:02double, triple, and quadruple doses
40:05every day for 77 days. For an idea of
40:10what that would be like, here's the
40:12testimony from a victim of yet another
40:15similar experiment. In 1957, while a
40:19prisoner at the Atlanta Penitentiary, I
40:21was recruited by Dr. Carl Feifer of
40:25Emory University to join a medical
40:27project that was researching a cure for
40:29schizophrenia.
40:31For our participation, we would receive
40:333 days of good time for each month on
40:36the project. We were injected with
40:39massive doses of LSD25.
40:42In minutes, the drug would take over,
40:44and about eight or nine men, Dr. Feifer
40:47and several men in suits who were not
40:49doctors would give us tests to see how
40:52we reacted. Eight convicts in a panic
40:55and paranoid state. Total loss of
40:58appetite, hallucinating. The room would
41:01change shape. Hours of paranoia and
41:04feeling violent. We experienced horrible
41:07periods of living nightmares and even
41:09blood coming out of the walls. Guys
41:12turned to skeletons in front of me. I
41:14saw a camera change into the head of a
41:16dog. I felt like I was going insane. The
41:19men in suits would be in a room and hook
41:22me up to machines asking questions like,
41:24"Did you ever kill anyone? Would you
41:27kill someone?" Two men went psychotic.
41:30They had all the symptoms of
41:31schizophrenia. They had to be pried
41:34loose from under their beds, growling,
41:36barking, and frothing at the mouth. They
41:39put them in a strip cell down the hall.
41:41I never saw or heard of them again. They
41:44told us we were helping [music] find a
41:46cure for schizophrenia. When it was all
41:49over, everyone would feel suicidal and
41:51depressed, rung out emotionally. Time
41:54would [music] stand still. I tried to
41:56quit, but Dr. Viper would appeal to me.
41:59Please, you're my best subject, and we
42:01are close to finding the cure. And then
42:04there was Harold Abramson, an allergist
42:07based in New York City and a very early
42:10acid enthusiast. Abramson had guided
42:12Gotautle through his first ever trip and
42:15therefore received a special place in
42:16the network. Originally, Gotautle had
42:19him delivering LSD to the other doctors,
42:22though naturally Abramson also saved
42:24some, which he gave out to guests at his
42:26infamous sex parties on Long Island. But
42:29after a few years of this, Gotautle
42:31decided that clearly Abramson was ready
42:34for more responsibility and so tasked
42:37him to run some experiments of his own
42:40for which Abramson was given an
42:42incredibly generous $85,000
42:45grant to fund this research. Naturally,
42:48he took this very seriously. His early
42:51experiments involved giving acid to his
42:53Siamese fighting fish. But soon enough,
42:56Abramson found a subject that really
42:59captured his interest. Giving
43:01psychedelic drugs to, and he was very
43:03specific about this, prepubescent boys.
43:08One particularly disturbing experiment
43:11involved a group of 14 schizophrenic
43:14children as young as 6 years old who he
43:17gave LSD to every day for 6 weeks.
43:21Gotley began buying as much LSD as he
43:23could from Sandos Pharmaceuticals, at
43:26the time the only company on Earth that
43:28knew how to make the stuff. He wasn't
43:30just stocking up to make sure he had a
43:33supply for his network of doctors as
43:35well as his personal trips, but also
43:37because the CIA feared that the Soviets
43:40were studying it too and might even be
43:43trying to buy up the world's supply.
43:46I've seen some conflicting claims about
43:48this. Some say that the Soviets were
43:50experimenting with LSD to develop a mind
43:53control program of their own, which is
43:55definitely very possible. Others have
43:57said that this was just CIA paranoia
44:00mixed with some bad intel, which is also
44:02very on brand. Whatever the truth is, we
44:06can say from declassified CIA memos that
44:09at the very least they definitely
44:11believe that this was true. Naturally,
44:14the only reasonable response then was
44:16for the CIA to buy the world's supply of
44:19acid first. In 1953, Gotip attempted to
44:23do exactly that. He thought that he'd be
44:26getting 10 kg of LST, but this was a
44:30miscommunication and he wound up only
44:32receiving 10 g. This was barely enough
44:35to get Gotautle and his colleagues
44:37through a music festival, let alone
44:39supply for an entire clandestine
44:41network. And so [music] Gotautle
44:44instructed the American pharma company
44:46Eli Liy to start researching the stuff
44:48so they could start manufacturing it
44:51themselves. But while you might think
44:53that this limit on Gotautle's acid
44:55supply might have slowed him down, that
44:57couldn't be further from the truth. One
45:00mishap that really shows how fast and
45:02loose they were playing things happened
45:04in 1953 [music] when Gotautle, ever the
45:07fun boss, decided to hold a Thanksgiving
45:09retreat for the scientists running MK
45:12Ultra. He rented a cabin in Deer Creek,
45:14Maryland, and sent out letters inviting
45:17the team to [music] come for a little
45:18sleepover scheduled from Wednesday,
45:21November 18th until that Friday. Since
45:24the guest list consisted of everyone who
45:26knew the daily ins and outs of the US
45:28military's most secret initiative,
45:30security had to be tight. The invitation
45:33contained detailed instructions for the
45:35ciruitous routes they needed to take and
45:38ended with a note that read quote
45:41camouflage winter meeting of script
45:44writers, editors, authors, lecturers,
45:46sports magazines, remove CD, that's Camp
45:50Dedric, decals from cars. You know, just
45:52a fun little office Thanksgiving party.
45:55Dinner and drinks will be provided, but
45:57please bring something for our canned
45:59food drive. Also, anyone who speaks to
46:01you while you're traveling must be shot
46:03and disposed of. No plus ones. Despite
46:06all the cloak and dagger, the first 24
46:08hours were by all accounts a pretty
46:10chill time. But things took a turn on
46:13the second night. After dinner, the men
46:16began drinking and Gotweib decided to
46:18pull a real evil Michael Scott move. He
46:22broke out a bottle of liquor, which the
46:24men helped themselves to. After about 20
46:26minutes, he asked if anyone was feeling
46:28weird and then revealed that he laced
46:31the booze with LSD. [snorts] God, how
46:34does he always find a way to put his
46:37foot in his mouth? Now, for anyone who's
46:40not familiar with taking psychedelics,
46:42an important concept to be aware of when
46:44coming into a trip is awareness of
46:46what's called set and setting.
46:49Originally coined by Alfred Matthew
46:51Hubard, a man often referred to as the
46:53Johnny Apples Seed of psychedelics for
46:55his role in popularizing LSD. Hubard
46:58argued that whether a psychedelic trip
47:01will be a positive or negative
47:03experience generally comes down to the
47:05set, meaning the headspace of the person
47:08taking the drug and the setting
47:10referring to the environment in which
47:12this happens, both physical and social.
47:15And in the case of Gotautle's retreat,
47:17while the setting of being unknowingly
47:20drugged by your boss in the middle of
47:21nowhere isn't ideal for anyone, someone
47:24there who came in with a particularly
47:27bad set was Dr. Frank Olsen. Another one
47:31of Ira Baldwin's recruits. While
47:33high-level decisions about chemical
47:35research were handled by Gotautle, Olsen
47:38was the one directing the day-to-day
47:40operations of Camp Dedric as the acting
47:43chief of the SOD and MK Naomi, which was
47:46the CIA's chemical warfare program. But
47:50at the time of the retreat, Olsen was in
47:53particularly low spirits. For the past
47:56year, he'd been charged with traveling
47:58across Europe and Asia in order to
48:00observe how the chemical cor's handiwork
48:03was being put into practice, which
48:05turned out to be a deeply upsetting
48:08experience. In particular, Olsen
48:11recalled to a friend that he attended an
48:13experiment in England in which a
48:1520-year-old engineer in the Royal Air
48:18Force named Ronald Madison was exposed
48:21to a small dose of a chemical originally
48:23created but never used by the Nazi war
48:26machine known as sarin nerve gas. And
48:30while we can't know if Olsen was aware
48:33that the CIA would use Sarin on
48:36communists in Lao less than 20 years
48:38later, what we do know is that in the 5
48:42minutes he spent watching Madison writhe
48:45in agony before he died, Olsen began to
48:48question the morality of his work. This
48:51is all to say that Frank wasn't in a
48:53great headsp space to be tripping balls
48:55with his boss that night. In fact, it
48:57seems like for Olsen, this was the trip
49:00that broke the camel's back. As in the
49:02days that followed, he didn't go back to
49:04normal. When he returned to his family,
49:07he was suffering from skull flattening
49:10guilt and paranoid delusions that he'd
49:12said something wrong and now the CIA was
49:15out to get him. Honestly, it seems like
49:17the acid might have cured him of being
49:19an evil psychopath, which he correctly
49:22realized made him a liability. After 5
49:25days of this with no signs of
49:27improvement, Olsen's boss Vincent Ruit
49:29and Gotautle himself sat down with Olsen
49:32and were very disturbed by what they'd
49:34seen. Ironically, while the CIA probably
49:37wasn't out to get Frank before, thanks
49:39to his paranoid breakdown, that was now
49:42a different story. Olsen's intimate
49:45knowledge of MK Ultra and SOD meant that
49:49this had to be taken very seriously
49:51since in effect his mental health was
49:53now a matter of national security. But
49:57even though they needed to get Olsen
49:59straightened out ASAP, he couldn't
50:01exactly go yapping to a regular
50:03therapist. The only solution would be
50:05for him to talk to a doctor who also
50:08knew about MK Ultra. Luckily, Gotautleb
50:12knew a bunch of those. Of the people in
50:14his network, Gotautleb decided to send
50:16Olsen to the sketchiest and least
50:19qualified one, Harold Abramson, who
50:23might I remind you that even setting
50:25aside his disturbing interest in young
50:27boys, Abramson wasn't a psychologist.
50:31But once that was decided, Ruit and
50:33Gotautle's chief aid, Robert Lashbrook,
50:36brought Olsen to New York to see
50:38Abramson. The meeting actually seemed to
50:41have gone pretty well. Even though
50:42Abramson wasn't a therapist, he did have
50:45high enough security clearance that
50:46Olsen could feel free to open up to him.
50:49And after the appointment, Frank seemed
50:52to be returning to his old self. This
50:54didn't last though, and the following
50:56day, he was worse than ever. Olsen,
50:59Ruit, and Lashbrook went back to
51:01Abramson for two more appointments,
51:03which again seemed to calm Olsen down
51:06significantly. After his third visit,
51:08Olsen seemed to be lucid and in good
51:11spirits. The three men checked into room
51:131018A at the Statatler Hotel, had
51:17dinner, and then went to bed. However,
51:20Frank didn't stay there for long. And at
51:232:25
51:24a.m., he was lying in a pool of blood on
51:27the sidewalk in front of the hotel,
51:29which he got to via the window of his
51:3210thstory room. Strangely, when the
51:35police arrived to investigate said room,
51:37they found Lashbrook calmly sitting on
51:39the toilet. He claimed to have been
51:42asleep when Olsen's LSD adult brain made
51:45contact with the sidewalk and said that
51:47he didn't call 911 or even leave the
51:50room cuz he thought that there was no
51:52point. Lashbook was brought in for
51:54questioning, but quickly released once
51:56the police confirmed who he worked for.
51:59The [snorts] police investigation was
52:00subsequently squashed and the CIA sent
52:03their fixers to the hotel room to get
52:05rid of all evidence. Meanwhile, Ruitt
52:08was sent to break the news to Alice
52:10Olsen that she was now a widow. When she
52:14asked to know what happened, Ruitt
52:16simply said that her late husband quote
52:19fell or jumped to his death. When
52:23Alice's crying woke her nine-year-old
52:25son, Eric, Ruitt responded extremely
52:29strangely by simply turning to the child
52:31and flatly telling him that, "Your
52:34father had an accident. He fell or
52:36jumped out a window." This strange
52:39phrase wound up being used in every
52:41description of Olsen's death, from
52:43official police reports to the obituary
52:46in his hometown newspaper.
52:48Weird. Eric Olsen would go on to spend
52:52decades investigating his father's death
52:55and came to the conclusion that he
52:57didn't fall or jump, but instead was
53:00pushed or thrown, likely by the man who
53:03first told him that phrase in his
53:05childhood living room. Personally, I'm
53:08not totally sure, but I also don't think
53:11it really matters. As far as I'm
53:13concerned, Frank Olsen was killed by the
53:15CIA regardless of what happened in that
53:18hotel room. As you can imagine, this was
53:20a pretty sobering event. In the
53:22immediate aftermath, the higherups at
53:24the CIA decide that Gotautly need to be
53:27reigned in by walking away the LSD and
53:30requiring him to receive approval to
53:32access it. Something that it's wild that
53:35they took so long to do. However, this
53:38didn't last long. The decision was
53:40quickly reversed when it was decided
53:42that Gotautle's work was too important
53:45to place literally any restrictions on.
53:49Gotautle naturally responded to this by
53:52becoming even more insane. Like leading
53:55up to the CIA's 1954 Christmas party, a
53:59memo had to be released warning people
54:01not to drink the punch since the MK
54:04Ultra guys were sure to spike it with
54:06LSD. In fairness though, the boys in TSS
54:11had a lot to celebrate at that time.
54:13They just received an early Christmas
54:15present when near the end of 54, Eli
54:18Lily finally cracked the code for LSD
54:21and began producing it at an industrial
54:24scale.
54:25>> Santa brought here.
54:27>> As a sort of New Year's resolution,
54:29Gotautle started out 1955 by writing a
54:32list of all the things that he was
54:34working on or hoping to study. The list
54:37is as follows. One, substances which
54:40will promote illogical thinking and
54:42impulsiveness to the point where the
54:45recipient would be discredited in
54:47public. Two, substances which increase
54:49the efficacy of mentation and
54:51perception. Three, materials which will
54:54prevent or counteract the intoxicating
54:56effects of alcohol. Four, materials
54:59which will promote the intoxicating
55:01effects of alcohol. Five, materials
55:04which will produce the signs and
55:05symptoms of recognized diseases in a
55:08reversible way so that they may be used
55:10for malingering etc. Six, materials
55:13which will render the indication of
55:16hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its
55:19usefulness. Seven substances which will
55:22enhance the ability of individuals to
55:25withstand privation, torture, and
55:27coercion during interrogation and
55:30so-called brainwashing. Eight, materials
55:33and physical methods which will produce
55:35amnesia for events preceding and during
55:38their use. Nine, physical methods of
55:41producing shock and confusion over
55:44extended periods of time and capable of
55:46surreptitious use. 10. Substances which
55:49produce physical disablement such as
55:52paralysis of the legs, acute anemia,
55:55etc. 11. Substances which will produce
55:59pure euphoria with no subsequent
56:01letdown. 12. Substances which alter
56:05personality structure in such a way that
56:08the tendency of the recipient to become
56:10dependent upon another person is
56:12enhanced. 13. A material which will
56:16cause mental confusion of such a type
56:19that the individual under the influence
56:21will find it difficult to maintain a
56:23fabrication under questioning. 14.
56:26Substances which will lower the ambition
56:28and general working efficiency of men
56:30when administered in undetectable
56:33amounts. 15. substances which will
56:36promote weakness or distortion of the
56:39eyesight or hearing faculties,
56:41preferably without permanent effects.
56:4416. A knockout pill which can
56:46surreptitiously be administered in
56:48drinks, food, cigarettes as an aerosol,
56:51etc. which will be safe to use, provide
56:54a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable
56:56for use by agent types on an ad hoc
56:59basis. 17. a material which can be
57:02surreptitiously administered by the
57:04above roots and which in very small
57:07amounts will make it impossible for a
57:09man to perform any physical activity
57:11whatever. But there was something else
57:14he got up to that wasn't on the list.
57:16Now that Gotautle had access to swimming
57:19pools of LSD, he wanted to begin doing
57:21real clinical trials, something that the
57:24lab at Camp Dedrich and his sketchy
57:27doctor friends weren't equipped for. And
57:29so he did what any scientist looking to
57:31test a new drug would do and began
57:34outsourcing to reputable schools and
57:36hospitals. Unlike most other scientists
57:39though, the funding for this came from a
57:41series of CIA cutouts through which
57:44Gotautib funded his studies and expanded
57:47his network to include many of the top
57:49behavioral scientists in America. But
57:53the thing is, doesn't that all sound
57:56like too much of a hassle? Having to
57:58queer things with other departments in
58:01the agency, keeping track of all these
58:03different shell companies, not to
58:05mention the very slight amount of
58:08oversight that this involved. Wouldn't
58:10it be easier if Gotautle had a front of
58:13his very own so he didn't have to keep
58:15borrowing the agencies?
58:18He thought so, too. So in 55, Gotautle
58:21called up his old friend Harold Wolf and
58:24using his term, the two of them started
58:26the Society for the Investigation of
58:28Human Ecology with Wolf as the founding
58:31president. The first study they funded
58:33involved trying to brainwash Chinese
58:35people in America in the hopes that they
58:37could be made to go home and commit acts
58:40of sabotage. Things quickly ballooned
58:42from there as they began funding
58:44research on just about any hairbrain
58:47shower thought that popped into Gotle's
58:49head. And since he'd been doing acid
58:52constantly for 4 years at this point,
58:54there was no shortage of weird ideas.
58:57They did a study on how owning a nuclear
59:00fallout shelter affects people's views
59:02on foreign policy. Then one about the
59:05emotional effects of circumcision. And
59:08of course, there was plenty of good old
59:10phronology. Now, moving on, let me tell
59:13you a little bit about a real piece of
59:15[ __ ] named George Hunter White. White
59:19was a dirt bag tough guy narcotics agent
59:22who had been brought on to show the
59:24nerds at TSS how things go down in the
59:27streets. He'd originally been put in
59:29charge of running fake safe houses in
59:32New York, where he'd dose hippies and
59:34drug [music] addicts, then study their
59:36behavior. That may sound kind of nuts,
59:38but don't worry. White made it a point
59:40to personally test all the drugs that he
59:43was using. He generally preferred to do
59:45this orally. In 55, he got promoted to
59:49head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
59:52and relocated to San Francisco. Gotibb
59:55saw this as a fantastic opportunity to
59:57take things up a notch with White
1:00:00setting up a new and even more insane
1:00:02safe house. And so began Operation
1:00:06Midnight Climax. The cheap vampire porno
1:00:10sounding name was absolutely intentional
1:00:12here since what Midnight Climax entailed
1:00:15was White along with his friend, a
1:00:17former military intelligence officer
1:00:19named Ira Ike Feldman setting up a
1:00:22brothel in which the sex workers he
1:00:25hired were trained to dose their JS with
1:00:28acid and then talk to them after they'd
1:00:30had sex to see if LSD or whatever other
1:00:34drugs Gotautle had cooked up could be
1:00:36effectively combined with decks to
1:00:37loosen someone's tongue. The place was
1:00:40wired up with bugs from floor to ceiling
1:00:42and a secret room was built so that
1:00:45White could watch the show while, this
1:00:48is completely true, sitting on a
1:00:50portable toilet and drinking martinis
1:00:53from a picture. Now, Ike Feldman is a
1:00:56particularly interesting source thanks
1:00:59to the extremely honest look he gives us
1:01:02into what kind of a guy Gotautle really
1:01:04was. While he was known at home as a
1:01:07wholesome old hippie dad to his bosses
1:01:10as a nerdy Jewish outsider with his head
1:01:13in the clouds and his subordinates as a
1:01:15kind and understanding boss, although
1:01:18you should definitely watch or drink
1:01:19around him. Ike, on the other hand, saw
1:01:22a very different side of Sydney. He
1:01:25described their first meeting as
1:01:27follows. Several times Sydney got came
1:01:30out. I met Gotautle at the pad and at
1:01:33White's office. Sydney was a nice guy.
1:01:36He was a [ __ ] nut. They were all
1:01:38nuts. I says, "You're a good Jewish boy
1:01:41from Brooklyn like me. What are you
1:01:44doing with these crazy cocksuckers?"
1:01:47He had this black bag with him. He says,
1:01:50"This is my bag of doy tricks." He had
1:01:53all kinds of crap in that bag. We took a
1:01:56drive out to Meyer Woods out by Stinson
1:01:59Beach. Sydney says, "Stop the car." He
1:02:02pulls [music] out a dart gun and shoots
1:02:05this big eucalyptus tree with a dart.
1:02:08Then he tells me, "Come back in 2 days
1:02:11and check this tree." So we go back in 2
1:02:14days. The tree was completely dead. Not
1:02:17a leaf left on it. And while I know that
1:02:21sounds pretty bad, and I don't just mean
1:02:23my Brooklyn accent, don't worry. Golly
1:02:25wasn't just some total psycho. He was
1:02:28also a dirt bag. Feldman added some more
1:02:31juicy details during a deposition in
1:02:33which he said that quote, "Anytime that
1:02:36[ __ ] came to San Francisco, get me a
1:02:39[ __ ] He always needed a goy." And hey,
1:02:43definitely not good. But it was the 50s.
1:02:46I'm re-watching Madmen right now. I'm
1:02:48sure everyone involved in this looked
1:02:50really cool. Where this gets a bit
1:02:53weirder, though, is with Gotautle's
1:02:55relationship with Mr. and Mrs. White.
1:02:58Felman claims that when he and Gotautle
1:03:01would visit White, the scientists would
1:03:04slip something into George's drink and
1:03:06then proceed to [ __ ] his wife while her
1:03:09husband was unconscious [music] and
1:03:11Feldman watched. They were very good
1:03:14friends. I'd always pick him up. We'd go
1:03:16there. We'd sit. I don't drink. Before
1:03:20you know it, White passed out in the
1:03:22bedroom and Sydney was on the couch with
1:03:24the old lady humping her brains out.
1:03:28George knew, [music] but he I think he
1:03:31loved her very much. A what the [ __ ]
1:03:36Anyways, in 57, Gotib was approaching 40
1:03:39and having evidently fallen into the
1:03:40grips of a midwife crisis, decided he
1:03:43needed a change and applied to be
1:03:45transferred to a field office in Munich,
1:03:47where he'd be able to try out his
1:03:49techniques under more realworld
1:03:52circumstances.
1:03:53The application was accepted and so he
1:03:55and his family moved to Germany for 2
1:03:58years. While in Munich, Gotautle's
1:04:00presence was definitely felt. Soon after
1:04:02he arrived, there was a sharp uptick in
1:04:05people being illegally kidnapped by the
1:04:07CIA and then subjected to strange and
1:04:10extremely illegal interrogation
1:04:12techniques, all without the knowledge of
1:04:14the German authorities. According to
1:04:17some agents stationed there, Gotautle
1:04:19was regularly being brought in to
1:04:20interrogate prisoners and seemed to have
1:04:23an uncanny ability to get the truth out
1:04:25of them. After his two years abroad,
1:04:28Gotautle returned to America in time for
1:04:30the CIA to be handed over to John
1:04:33McCome, a complete outsider who didn't
1:04:36share Dulles's super villainesque
1:04:38obsession with controlling people's
1:04:40minds, preferring instead to stay in his
1:04:42lane overthrowing democratically elected
1:04:44socialists. And so when he learned about
1:04:47MK Ultra, he was a little surprised and
1:04:51called for the CIA's inspector general
1:04:53to conduct a full audit of the project.
1:04:56Unsurprisingly, the report called for MK
1:04:58Ultra to receive a lot more oversight
1:05:01and a much more narrow scope. You might
1:05:04expect Gotleb to have thought this, but
1:05:07instead he responded with a letter that
1:05:10argued that the report actually didn't
1:05:12go far enough, claiming that MK Ultra's
1:05:15findings lacked practical applications
1:05:17and suggested that the whole thing be
1:05:20shut down. And so they did just that.
1:05:23Over the next few years, MK Ultra's sub
1:05:25projects were shut down. And in 64, it
1:05:28officially ended and was replaced with
1:05:30MK Search, which had a much more limited
1:05:34mission. Quote, to develop a capability
1:05:37to manipulate human behavior in a
1:05:40predictable manner through the use of
1:05:42drugs. It's crazy that I have to call
1:05:44that reasonable now, but here we are.
1:05:47Got spent the rest of his career at the
1:05:49agency devising increasingly insane ways
1:05:52to assassinate socialist politicians.
1:05:54Like you know that meme about the CIA
1:05:57trying to kill Castro with a poison pen.
1:06:00That was a real thing that got made.
1:06:03Some other highlights from this time
1:06:05include botulism lace toothpaste which
1:06:08was made to assassinate Patrice Leumba,
1:06:12a coin with a poison tip needle hidden
1:06:15inside so that captured US soldiers
1:06:17could commit suicide with it. And
1:06:19funniest of all, he was involved in
1:06:22another plan to take down Castro where
1:06:24the CIA figured that the source of the
1:06:27Cuban leader appeal was his beard. And
1:06:30so Gotautle developed a powder that
1:06:32would make him go bald if it was put in
1:06:36his shoes. Unfortunately, the plan fell
1:06:39apart because they spent so long working
1:06:42on the anti-beard powder that they
1:06:45actually never figured out a way to get
1:06:47their hands on Castro shoes. Isn't that
1:06:50[ __ ] nuts? Like that's entirely real.
1:06:52They were actually just like, "Oh,
1:06:55stupid, stupid. How do we get our hands
1:06:58on the shoes? The plan was perfect, too.
1:07:01We realized that his beard is where his
1:07:04power is. We made the powder that goes
1:07:07in his feet to make it fall out.
1:07:10[clears throat]
1:07:12Back to the drawing board, guys.
1:07:14Actually though, with everything I just
1:07:16named, one of the weirdest things is
1:07:19that for one reason or another, none of
1:07:22those inventions were ever actually
1:07:24used. you really get the sense that
1:07:26Gotautle's creations weren't remotely
1:07:28practical at any point ever. It was just
1:07:31all about like doing cool weird [ __ ]
1:07:35But Gotautle's idealic mad scientist
1:07:38life was interrupted one day in 1973
1:07:42when Nixon fired then director of the
1:07:44CIA Richard Helms as retribution for him
1:07:47not suppressing the FBI's investigation
1:07:49into Watergate. While he was on his way
1:07:52out, Helms called his old buddy Sydney
1:07:55into his office to reminisce about old
1:07:58times. The meeting took on a more
1:08:00serious tone, though, when Helms changed
1:08:03the subject to Gotautleb's baby MK
1:08:06Ultra. The two men came to an agreement
1:08:09that all the files needed to be
1:08:11destroyed. And that night, that's
1:08:14exactly what they did. as a declassified
1:08:17memo by an unnamed CIA psychologist
1:08:20describes. Early in 1973, Dr. Gotautle,
1:08:23the then chief of the technical services
1:08:25division, called and me into his office
1:08:28and requested that we review our branch
1:08:31holdings and assure him that there were
1:08:34no extent records of the drug research
1:08:36program, which had been terminated many
1:08:38years before. Dr. Gotautle explained
1:08:40that Mr. Helms in the process of
1:08:42vacating his chair as DCI had called him
1:08:45and said in effect, "Let's take this
1:08:47with us or let's let this die with us."
1:08:51Essentially, Helms was taking notice
1:08:53that he and Dr. Gotautle largely
1:08:55personified the always controversial
1:08:58drug research program. And since it was
1:09:01long over, he wanted them to take the
1:09:04onus and responsibility away with them
1:09:06in their retirements, not leaving it as
1:09:09a burden or an albatross for those who
1:09:12came after them. There was no related
1:09:15investigations taking [music] place at
1:09:17the time and no relevant caveats on
1:09:20reduction of files. Mr. Helms seemed to
1:09:22be saying, "It was our bath. Let us
1:09:25clean the tub." Honestly, say what you
1:09:27will about these guys. pretty rare to
1:09:29see a boss who's down to support the
1:09:31next generation by destroying evidence
1:09:34of a massive illegal conspiracy rather
1:09:36than just pulling the ladder up with
1:09:38them. However, while these two bosses of
1:09:40the year did manage to destroy about 90
1:09:42to 95% of the documents, things didn't
1:09:45remain buried for long.
1:09:46>> [snorts]
1:09:46>> Nixon replaced Helms with James
1:09:48Slesinger, who rattled by the Watergate
1:09:51scandal, called for complete accounting
1:09:53of any illegal activities the agency had
1:09:56conducted, which were collected into a
1:09:58693page
1:10:00document that came to be known as the
1:10:03family jewels. The existence of this
1:10:06wound up being leaked to the journalist
1:10:08Seymour Hirs by a disillusioned CIA
1:10:10agent resulting in the front page New
1:10:13York Times story huge CIA operation
1:10:16reported in US against anti-war forces
1:10:20and other dissident in Nixon years. This
1:10:23story sparked a new round of government
1:10:26investigations into CIA misconduct in
1:10:29the forms of the Rockefeller Commission,
1:10:31the Church Committee, and the 1977 joint
1:10:34Senate hearing. [snorts] Even though the
1:10:36files were gone, through these hearings,
1:10:38the American public learned about the
1:10:40many, many, many illegal activities of
1:10:43the CIA through testimony directly from
1:10:46the agents mouths. Finally, while all of
1:10:48this was going on, a former State
1:10:50Department employee named John Marx
1:10:52decided to do some digging of his own
1:10:54and began filing foyer requests for
1:10:56anything related to Bluebird, Artichoke,
1:10:59or MK Ultra. In 1976, he hit paid dirt
1:11:03when the person processing his request
1:11:05searched the CIA's retired record center
1:11:08and found seven boxes containing about
1:11:1120,000 pages that Helms and Gotautle
1:11:14missed. Turns out that while they were
1:11:16able to destroy all of their lab reports
1:11:19and just about everything that directly
1:11:20describes what they got up to, all the
1:11:23financial documents were filed in a
1:11:25separate way, which saved them from
1:11:27being destroyed. While there are
1:11:29obviously still massive holes in our
1:11:31knowledge, Gotaut was obsessive about
1:11:33recording every expense, which gives us
1:11:36a surprisingly full view of what
1:11:38happened. Markx used the contents of
1:11:40these boxes to write this book, The
1:11:42Search for the Manurion Candidate, which
1:11:44was the first major history of MK Ultra
1:11:48and is still one of the best ones that
1:11:50you can read. But while all this was
1:11:52happening, Gotautle was blissfully
1:11:54ignorant. He'd [music] retired in 73
1:11:57when he was 54 years young. and deciding
1:12:00that they were ready for [music] their
1:12:02next big adventure, he and his wife sold
1:12:04their home and set off to travel the
1:12:06world, providing humanitarian aid and
1:12:09searching for spiritual enlightenment.
1:12:12Without any plan other than to serve the
1:12:14needy, the two aging [music] hippies got
1:12:16on a freighter in San Francisco and
1:12:18headed off. They traveled [music] the
1:12:20world, eventually winding up at a
1:12:22hospital in India, helping people with
1:12:24leprosy until [music] one day a message
1:12:27arrived for Sydney. The US government
1:12:30had finally tracked him down and wanted
1:12:32to ask him some questions.
1:12:35Got returned to America to testify
1:12:37before the church committee and the
1:12:39Senate. Not only was he able to receive
1:12:42full immunity in exchange for his
1:12:44testimony, but Gotautle also claimed to
1:12:47be suffering health issues, which made
1:12:49him medically incapable of appearing
1:12:52before a crowd, and so was able to
1:12:55provide his testimony over an intercom
1:12:57in a private room. When asked about why
1:13:01he had destroyed all of his documents,
1:13:03Gotautle claimed that it had nothing to
1:13:06do with covering illegal activity and
1:13:08that there were actually three very good
1:13:11reasons. One, as with the other files
1:13:14which were destroyed in a continuing and
1:13:16important CIA program of files
1:13:18destruction to handle a burgeoning paper
1:13:21problem, there was constant pressure to
1:13:24retire files and to destroy those files
1:13:27which had no further use.
1:13:29Two, with my retirement and that of
1:13:32others connected with this work and with
1:13:34the drug work over and inactive for
1:13:37several years, these files were of no
1:13:40constructive use to the agency. They
1:13:42were the kind of sensitive files that
1:13:45were capable of being misunderstood by
1:13:48anyone not thoroughly familiar with
1:13:50their background. Three, the files
1:13:53contained the names of prominent
1:13:55scientists, researchers, and physicians
1:13:57who had collaborated with us and who had
1:14:00been assured that their relationship
1:14:02with the CIA would be kept forever
1:14:04confidential. I felt that the careers
1:14:07and reputations of these people would be
1:14:09severely damaged or ruined, for
1:14:12instance, in today's climate of
1:14:14investigations
1:14:16if their names and CIA connections were
1:14:19made public. I felt a special deep
1:14:21personal obligation to respect this
1:14:24assurance of confidentiality and to make
1:14:27as certain as I could that these
1:14:30particular CIA sources would never be
1:14:32revealed. Literally just A we're
1:14:35destroying files all the time. B you'd
1:14:39probably misunderstand them and think
1:14:40that drugging people is bad. And C
1:14:43cancel culture. As far as further
1:14:46justice though, following his testimony,
1:14:48Gotautle faced a number of lawsuits from
1:14:51people who believed that they had been
1:14:52victims of the program. All wound up
1:14:55being dismissed. And Gotautle went on to
1:14:58spend his golden years in comfort,
1:15:00surrounded by his loved ones until he
1:15:02died in 1999 at the age of 80.
1:15:06But now the question is, of course, what
1:15:09exactly was in those destroyed
1:15:11documents? Well, one CIA psychologist
1:15:15named John Ginger claimed that by the
1:15:1860s they'd realized that all the
1:15:20brainwashing stuff was a complete dead
1:15:22end. Quote, "By 1961, 1962, it was at
1:15:27least proven to my satisfaction that
1:15:30brainwashing, so-called as some kind of
1:15:33esoteric device where drugs or
1:15:36mindaltering kinds of conditions and so
1:15:39forth were used, did not exist. The
1:15:42Manurion Candid as a movie really set us
1:15:45back a long time because it made
1:15:47something impossible look possible. But
1:15:50by 1962 and 1963, the general idea that
1:15:54we were able to come up with is that
1:15:56brainwashing was largely a process of
1:15:59isolating a human being, keeping him out
1:16:02of contact, putting him under long
1:16:04stress in relationship to the
1:16:05interviewing and interrogation and that
1:16:08they could produce any change that way
1:16:11without having to resort to any kind of
1:16:14esoteric means. ironic that a movie
1:16:16doing red scare anti-China propaganda
1:16:20somehow ended up screwing the CIA.
1:16:23There's also a quote from David Rhodess
1:16:25who was the president of the Society for
1:16:27the Investigation of Human Ecology for a
1:16:29couple of years and he said that quote
1:16:32the possibility of creating a Manurion
1:16:35candidate is a total psychological
1:16:37impossibility but it is intriguing. It
1:16:40is a lot of fun. Hey, doesn't it make
1:16:42you feel better to know that they were
1:16:44having fun? This, however, is backed up
1:16:46by Gotautle's testimony in which he said
1:16:49that at the time I left the CIA, my
1:16:51conclusion would have been that the
1:16:53probability of them using psychoggenic
1:16:56materials in a finely tuned way to alter
1:16:58behavior was very low on the basis that
1:17:02we found it was very hard to do. what
1:17:05really happened to people when they were
1:17:08under the influence of these
1:17:10mindaltering or psychoggenic drugs was
1:17:13very variable, very unpredictable. The
1:17:16thing is though that while those claims
1:17:19may be true, we also have to consider
1:17:21who they're coming from, which are
1:17:23members of the CIA. And if you only
1:17:26learn one thing from this video, you
1:17:29should absolutely never ever take the
1:17:32CIA at their word. We do have some
1:17:35harder evidence though in the form of
1:17:37CIA memos. There's this artichoke memo
1:17:41from January 22nd, 1954 that
1:17:44specifically describes trying to
1:17:46hypnotize someone into committing a
1:17:48political assassination and comes to the
1:17:50conclusion that it can't be done.
1:17:52There's also another from July 15th of
1:17:55the same year saying that when it comes
1:17:58to using hypnosis for military purposes,
1:18:01they weren't able to achieve anything
1:18:03meaningful outside of lab conditions.
1:18:06And then there's a memo Gotautle himself
1:18:09wrote titled scientific and technical
1:18:11problems in covert action operations in
1:18:14which he admitted that quote as of 1960
1:18:18no effective knockout pill, truth serum,
1:18:21aphrodesiac or recruitment pill was
1:18:24known to exist. Typical Gotautle to be
1:18:27most concerned about creating an
1:18:29aphrodesiac. Was that going to help with
1:18:31interrogations or did you just want that
1:18:33for George White's wife? And finally,
1:18:36probably one of the most convincing
1:18:38pieces of evidence for the dumbass
1:18:40theory is that back then, just like
1:18:42today, the CIA was sharing their intel
1:18:44with the Israeli intelligence agency
1:18:47MSAD. And when they heard about MK
1:18:50Ultra, the Israelis got very interested.
1:18:53In ' 68, they tried to put the CIA's
1:18:55work into practice by kidnapping a
1:18:57Palestinian child who they then spent
1:19:00three months trying to brainwash into
1:19:02becoming their programmed assassin in
1:19:05order to kill Yasser Arafat. However,
1:19:08within about 5 hours of them setting him
1:19:11loose, he turned himself into the police
1:19:14and told them everything that happened.
1:19:16Now, I definitely find this stuff pretty
1:19:18convincing, but to be fair here, it's
1:19:20still absolutely possible that they had
1:19:22some big successes, too. It's also worth
1:19:25noting that as Naomi Klein argues in the
1:19:27shock doctrine, in order to distract
1:19:30from the more nefarious stuff that they
1:19:32were up to, the CIA was likely happy to
1:19:34be made a laughingstock as the press
1:19:37zeroed in on the strange projects like
1:19:39the use of LSD as well as some of the
1:19:42like really bizarre research such as sub
1:19:45project number 136 which focused on
1:19:49cultivating ESP. Overall though, in my
1:19:52opinion, where this theory gets it right
1:19:54is in highlighting the fact that MK
1:19:56Ultra was a massive [ __ ] show. That's
1:19:58completely true. The problem though is
1:20:01that if you're claiming that they didn't
1:20:03get anything out of it, then all we have
1:20:06to do is prove that they did. And I
1:20:10think that that's pretty doable. So, let
1:20:13me introduce you to
1:20:22>> [music]
1:20:27>> So, this theory states that MK [music]
1:20:30Ultra was far from a failure, but that
1:20:33its goals were substantially [music]
1:20:35more mundane. Not mundane as in boring,
1:20:39but mundane in the way that almost
1:20:41everything is compared to creating
1:20:43mind-controlled secret agents. The idea
1:20:46is that all the weirdass mind control
1:20:48stuff, you know, the drugs, hypnosis,
1:20:51brain implants, and what have you, were
1:20:53either quickly abandoned, never really
1:20:55taken seriously in the first place, or a
1:20:58cover to make the agency look silly in
1:21:00order to hide the real objective of MK
1:21:03Ultra, developing more effective torture
1:21:06[music] techniques, something that
1:21:07undeniably they were massively
1:21:10successful in doing. Two big proponents
1:21:13of [music] this theory and the main
1:21:14sources I'll be using for this section
1:21:16are the historian Alfred McCoyy's book,
1:21:19A Question of Torture, as well as the
1:21:21shock doctrine by [music] Naomi Klein.
1:21:23Now, before we get into things, let's do
1:21:25a brief refresher on torture. It is
1:21:28obviously one of humanity's most ancient
1:21:30forms of artistic expression. But
1:21:32interestingly, opposition to torture is
1:21:34far from some form of modern woke
1:21:37squeamishness and in fact goes almost as
1:21:40far back as torture itself. The practice
1:21:42[music] was forbidden in ancient Greece
1:21:44except on slaves. And while the Romans
1:21:46were cool with it, even they urged
1:21:48caution. The imperial jurist Alpion in
1:21:52the 3rd century AD described torture as
1:21:54a quote delicate, dangerous, and
1:21:57deceptive [music] thing. For many
1:21:59persons have such strength of body and
1:22:02soul that they heed [music] pain very
1:22:04little so that there is no means of
1:22:07obtaining the truth from them. While
1:22:09others are so susceptible [music] to
1:22:11pain that they will tell any lie rather
1:22:13than suffer it. It's crazy that people
1:22:16today have significantly less
1:22:18progressive views than this guy. Some of
1:22:20them are probably writing angry comments
1:22:22about what a liberal cuck he was right
1:22:24now. But if we've always known about
1:22:26these drawbacks, why is torture stuck
1:22:28around for so long? Well, it's not hard
1:22:31to imagine a situation ripped out of
1:22:32some early 2000s action movie to justify
1:22:35its use. Picture this. You're the leader
1:22:38of a country and there's trouble a foot.
1:22:40You have solid intel that one of your
1:22:42evil enemies is planning to kill a ton
1:22:45of your citizens or worse, threaten your
1:22:47power. You know just enough to be sure
1:22:50that something's coming, but not enough
1:22:52to stop it. [music] Luckily, you've
1:22:54captured one of the conspirators, but he
1:22:57isn't talking and every second counts.
1:22:59What are you going to do? Sure, a trial
1:23:02would be nice, but that's not really a
1:23:04luxury you can afford. If only just this
1:23:07once there was some way to skip all of
1:23:11that and quickly [music] extract the
1:23:13information that you need. The problem
1:23:16though is that even in the most black
1:23:17and white hypothetical you can imagine,
1:23:20it never really stops there. Sure, the
1:23:22results aren't very reliable, but the
1:23:24ease and efficiency with which they're
1:23:26extracted makes that easy to ignore.
1:23:29There's also something deeply
1:23:31intoxicating about wielding that kind of
1:23:33power, both for you and the people
1:23:36actually getting their hands dirty.
1:23:38Pretty soon, what used to be a dubious
1:23:40but potentially justifiable last resort
1:23:42is being used more and more with less
1:23:45and less discrimination. This tends to
1:23:47have some serious political costs in the
1:23:50long term. Citizens and rival states
1:23:52don't look too kindly on torture or all
1:23:55the nasty business that comes with it.
1:23:57However, far from dissuading you, this
1:24:00opposition only provides more
1:24:02justification for you to really take the
1:24:04gloves off. Back in ancient times, the
1:24:07thing that put a damper on the use of
1:24:09torture in Europe was actually the
1:24:11spread of Christianity. In 866, Pope
1:24:15Nicholas banned the practice on the
1:24:17grounds that it was antithetical to
1:24:19Christ's teachings. But of course, this
1:24:22didn't last for long. Torture started to
1:24:24make a comeback around 1215 when the
1:24:27church abolished trial by ordeal and was
1:24:30made official in 1252 when the
1:24:33ironically named Pope Innocent IV
1:24:36declared that torture was kosher both
1:24:39for interrogation and punishment as it
1:24:42was used to great effect during the
1:24:43Inquisitions. But all trends are
1:24:45cyclical. And so by the 18th century,
1:24:48torture once again fell out of fashion
1:24:50in European courts, which were starting
1:24:52to prefer evidence over forced
1:24:54confessions. This time, the pendulum
1:24:57took about 200 years to swing back. But
1:25:00sure enough, as World War I ended,
1:25:03strong men leaders rose to power across
1:25:06Europe. each bringing with them a secret
1:25:09police force who were all too happy to
1:25:11get their hands dirty, enforcing their
1:25:13respective authoritarian regime by
1:25:16applying new methods to this very old
1:25:19profession.
1:25:20It took a bit longer for this to be felt
1:25:23stateside. In 48, the US helped pass the
1:25:26UN's Universal Declaration of Human
1:25:28Rights. But in a move that might feel
1:25:31pretty familiar, the Conservatives
1:25:33jumped on this issue, arguing that it
1:25:36represented a Luciferian globalist one
1:25:39world government nWo takeover. I'm sure
1:25:43it was also just a coincidence that Jim
1:25:45Crow was a queer violation [music] of
1:25:47it. In response, conservatives tried to
1:25:49pass the Bricker Amendment, which would
1:25:51limit the president's control over
1:25:53[music] foreign policy. Eisenhower
1:25:55stopped this, but to do so, he had to
1:25:57prove that he wasn't a little [ __ ] by
1:25:59refusing to [music] sign the UN Covenant
1:26:01on human rights, the UN Covenant on the
1:26:04political rights of women, or support
1:26:06the genocide convention. Now, we already
1:26:08covered how the CIA's fear of communist
1:26:11brainwashing was the catalyst for
1:26:12Operation Bluebird, but I left a couple
1:26:15details out. While Bluebird was
1:26:17absolutely trying to develop all sorts
1:26:19of weird mind control techniques through
1:26:21drugs and hypnosis, the image that calls
1:26:23to mind is probably some guys in white
1:26:26lab coats waving a pocket watch back and
1:26:28forth. In reality, what Bluebird
1:26:30actually entailed was a lot closer to,
1:26:34you know, Bluebird's first ever memo
1:26:36called for experiments, quote,
1:26:38investigating the possibility of control
1:26:40of an individual by application of
1:26:43special interrogation techniques using
1:26:46defectors, refugees, PSWs, and others.
1:26:50While this was started by Hill and Coder
1:26:52in 1950, it really took off after Alan
1:26:54Dulles joined the CIA. Now, in order to
1:26:57try out these special interrogation
1:26:59techniques, they needed somewhere nice
1:27:01and remote. One of the first of such
1:27:03places was a captured Nazi base in
1:27:06Germany on the outskirts of Ubersol
1:27:08called Camp King, where a notoriously
1:27:11brutal group of American soldiers called
1:27:13the Rough Boys conducted interrogations.
1:27:16The CIA began performing Bluebird
1:27:18experiments just outside the base's
1:27:20perimeter in a safe house, i.e. a secret
1:27:24prison they built where captured enemy
1:27:26agents could be subjected to
1:27:27experimental torture methods. The modern
1:27:30term for this is of course a black site.
1:27:33The agents who conducted these bluebird
1:27:35interrogations were working under the
1:27:37skilled eye of a doctor who they
1:27:38referred to as Doc Fiser. His real name
1:27:42though was Walter Shriber, the former
1:27:45surgeon general of the Nazi army who had
1:27:47approved all manner of horrific
1:27:49experiments on the inmates of Achvitz,
1:27:52Ravensbrook, and Daau. After the war,
1:27:55Shriber was captured by the Russians and
1:27:57imprisoned in the infamous Lyanka
1:27:59prison, but managed to escape and sneak
1:28:02over to West Germany, where he turned
1:28:04himself over to the Counter Intelligence
1:28:06Corps, who quickly scooped him up in
1:28:09Operation Paperclip. then sent him to
1:28:12Camp King. There the tables were turned
1:28:15as Shriber was set to work pllying his
1:28:18trade on captured Soviets.
1:28:21This wound up being such a hit that soon
1:28:24similar black sites started opening up
1:28:26shop all over West Germany and then East
1:28:28Asia, often coming complete with their
1:28:31own war criminal doctors provided by
1:28:34Operation Paperclip. One example was
1:28:37Shiro Ishi, who ran Japan's infamous
1:28:40Unit 731, a germ warfare research
1:28:44division stationed in Manuria, who
1:28:46served as the inspiration for the
1:28:48Chemical Corps. Unit 731's research
1:28:51involved dissecting the bodies of
1:28:53between 3 and 12,000 prisoners while
1:28:56they were still alive. But directly
1:29:00following the war, the bourgeois Tokyo
1:29:03war crimes trial was trying to take
1:29:05punitive measures, but the US stepped in
1:29:08to mediate a transformative justice
1:29:11process based on anarchist principles of
1:29:14abolition in which was allowed to avoid
1:29:17all charges in exchange for turning over
1:29:19his research and taking a job at an East
1:29:22Asian black site, shooting up captured
1:29:25North Koreans with benzadrine and sodium
1:29:28amatl. Remember kids, AAB includes war
1:29:31crime tribunals. [laughter]
1:29:34It's my best bread tube impression.
1:29:37Anyways, as we know, Sydney Gotautle was
1:29:39brought into the agency in 1951. And
1:29:42shortly thereafter, Bluebird was renamed
1:29:44to Artichoke and handed over to him.
1:29:47[snorts] As one of Dulles's early memos
1:29:49makes clear, while Artichoke had a much
1:29:51wider scope than Bluebird, at its core,
1:29:54it would be a continuation of it. Our
1:29:57principal goal remains the same as it
1:29:59was in the beginning. The investigation
1:30:01of drug effects [music] on ego control
1:30:03and volitional activities i.e. can
1:30:05willfully suppressed information be
1:30:07elicited through drugs affecting higher
1:30:09nervous systems? If so, which agents
1:30:12[music] are better for this purpose?
1:30:14Team Artichoke began conducting their
1:30:16experiments at a black site in the
1:30:18Panama [music] Canal called Fort
1:30:19Clayton. Their first guest was a
1:30:21prisoner they called Kelk, real name
1:30:24[music] Dmitri Ditrov, a Bulgarian
1:30:27politician who'd been sharing intel with
1:30:29the CIA. The issue, though, was that
1:30:31they'd heard Dimmitrov might [music]
1:30:33have been thinking of switching over to
1:30:35work with the French. Never ones to take
1:30:38rejection, well, the CIA did the only
1:30:40rational thing, kidnapping Dimmitrov
1:30:42[music] and bringing him to a Greek
1:30:44prison where they tortured him for 6
1:30:46months. After that, he really didn't
1:30:50want to work with America, so they
1:30:52brought him to Fort Clayton, where he
1:30:54was subjected to experimental [music]
1:30:56torture methods for three years. In that
1:30:59time, while Dimmitro never really came
1:31:01around on Uncle Sam, a lot of other
1:31:04things did change. Under Gotautle,
1:31:06Artichoke carried on conducting
1:31:08experiments primarily on Americans and
1:31:10had seen some preliminary success with a
1:31:13combination of LSD, sodium penol, and
1:31:15hypnosis. The CIA guys were very excited
1:31:19about all of this. And so in 53,
1:31:21Artichoke was expanded [music] again,
1:31:23turning into MK Ultra. Delos announced
1:31:26the creation of what would be the CIA's
1:31:29most closely guarded secret in an oddly
1:31:31public way. On April 10th, [music]
1:31:34exactly 3 days before the official
1:31:36launch of MK Ultra, Dulles gave a speech
1:31:39at a conference for his fellow Princeton
1:31:41alumni. The subject was the dangers of
1:31:44communist brainwashing [music] which he
1:31:47claimed were a dire threat to America,
1:31:49saying that the Soviets had mysterious
1:31:52techniques, the victims [music] of
1:31:53which, quote, are deprived of the
1:31:56ability to state their own thoughts,
1:31:58[music] parrot-like, the individuals so
1:32:01conditioned can merely repeat thoughts
1:32:03which have been implanted in their minds
1:32:05by suggestion from outside. [music]
1:32:08In effect, the brain under these
1:32:10circumstances becomes a phonograph
1:32:13playing a disc [music] put on its
1:32:15spindle by an outside genius over which
1:32:18it has no control. Interestingly though,
1:32:21as the speech went on, the methods
1:32:23Dulles described seemed to have a
1:32:25suspicious similarity to the types of
1:32:27things [music] the CIA had been
1:32:29developing at black sites for the past 2
1:32:31years. claiming to have spoken to a
1:32:34Christian missionary who was tortured
1:32:35[music] in China. Dois said this man
1:32:38described how he had been subjected for
1:32:4075 [music] days to the monotony of
1:32:43interrogation, mostly during the night
1:32:45hours by relays of brutal [music]
1:32:47questions, deprived of sleep and
1:32:50subjected to the effects of bright
1:32:52lighting during the period [music] of
1:32:53his questioning. As far as he knew, no
1:32:56drugs were used, but of course they
1:32:58might have been used without his knowing
1:33:00it. What makes this all the stranger is
1:33:02that while with hindsight it's pretty
1:33:04clear that these rumors of communist
1:33:06brainwashing experiments were almost
1:33:08entirely [ __ ] Dulles actually knew
1:33:11that back then too. Jumping back a bit,
1:33:15on May 30th, 1951, Sir Henry T. Tizzer,
1:33:19the senior scientist for the British
1:33:21Ministry of Defense, checked into the
1:33:24Ritz Carlton Hotel at 1228 Rue Sherbrook
1:33:29West in Montreal. He was there to
1:33:31address the Canadian Association of
1:33:33Physicists at a conference that would be
1:33:35taking place in 2 days. On June 1st, the
1:33:38day of the conference, [music] Tizzard
1:33:39gave two speeches, one over lunch and a
1:33:41second at dinner. In between these
1:33:43[music] two addresses, he slipped away
1:33:45to the real reason for his trip, a
1:33:48meeting which he described in his diary
1:33:50[music] simply as quote discussion with
1:33:53Soland, etc. Sand referred to Dr. Orman
1:33:58[music] Sanden, the first chairman of
1:34:00the Canadian Defense Research Board,
1:34:02etc. referred to Sirill Hastings, a
1:34:06senior researcher at the CIA, as well as
1:34:08[music] a group of Canadian scientists
1:34:10and psychologists.
1:34:12The purpose of the meeting was to
1:34:14discuss what else? The possible threat
1:34:17of communist [music] mind control.
1:34:20During the meeting, Tizzard made it
1:34:22clear that quote, "There has been
1:34:24nothing new in the interrogation
1:34:26business since the days of the
1:34:28Inquisition." Shout out Pope Innocent.
1:34:30He went on to say that there was no
1:34:33evidence of [music] the Soviets making
1:34:34any changes to the state of torture.
1:34:37Rather, their techniques [music] were
1:34:39quote remarkably similar to the age-old
1:34:42methods. But the meeting didn't end
1:34:45there. With that worry out of the way,
1:34:48they began toying with the possibility
1:34:50of the US, [music] England, and Canada
1:34:54going on the offensive. The communists
1:34:57might not have been [music] able to
1:34:58revolutionize the interrogation
1:35:00business, but maybe they could. The
1:35:03first major development in this process
1:35:05would [music] ultimately come from
1:35:06another attendee of this meeting, a
1:35:09Canadian psychologist named Donald O'.
1:35:11Heb, both the chair of [music] the human
1:35:14relations and research committee of the
1:35:16Canadian Defense Research Board, as well
1:35:18as the head of the psychology department
1:35:20[music] of McGill University. Shortly
1:35:22after the meeting, Heb took a defense
1:35:24grant for $10,000 and began conducting a
1:35:28[music] series of experiments over the
1:35:29next three years that would completely
1:35:31change the practice of torture. In
1:35:34[music] classic psychology fashion,
1:35:36Heb's experiments were conducted on
1:35:38firstear students, all of which involve
1:35:41[music] disrupting their senses. This
1:35:44started with what Heb called
1:35:46experimental [music] deafness in which
1:35:48five test subjects had their ears
1:35:50plugged with cotton and petroleum
1:35:52[music] jelly during a 3-day weekend.
1:35:54But things escalated quickly.
1:35:57Eventually, Heb's students were [music]
1:35:59being made to spend days in his black
1:36:02room. A small soundproof room with a
1:36:05white noise machine to block out all
1:36:07sound, opaque goggles over their eyes to
1:36:10block their vision, and foam tubes
1:36:12placed over their hands and around their
1:36:14heads to minimize tactile stimulus. The
1:36:18results were devastating. test subjects
1:36:21showed dramatically reduced cognitive
1:36:24abilities after only a few hours. While
1:36:27most of them quit on the first day,
1:36:29those that stuck around past day two
1:36:31began hallucinating. They conducted
1:36:34another experiment to see how this
1:36:36treatment would affect the subject's
1:36:38susceptibility to propaganda by
1:36:40selecting subjects who were atheists and
1:36:43then rather than white noise played a
1:36:45loop recording of a man saying that
1:36:48science can't be trusted or that ghosts
1:36:51are real. Sure enough, the subjects
1:36:53reported a newfound interest in religion
1:36:56and the supernatural which lasted for
1:36:58weeks after the experiment ended.
1:37:01Checkmate atheists. Heb's work, which on
1:37:04all official documents he claimed was
1:37:07meant to prevent railroad and highway
1:37:09accidents, had shown that the human
1:37:12brain needs sensory stimulus to function
1:37:15properly and that the simple act of
1:37:17depriving someone of that constituted
1:37:19one of the most powerful forms of
1:37:21torture imaginable.
1:37:23In 1954, he presented his work at a
1:37:26conference for the American
1:37:27Psychological Association, which
1:37:30interestingly was held at the exact same
1:37:32hotel that Frank Olsen had fell or
1:37:36jumped out of one year earlier. And just
1:37:39like the last time that hotel came up,
1:37:42there were a number of CIA agents in the
1:37:44building. This time on the lookout for
1:37:46promising research that could help MK
1:37:49Ultra. By this point, the agency was
1:37:51well aware of what Heb had been cooking
1:37:53up. Not only had they played a role in
1:37:56funding it, but they'd even sent an
1:37:58undercover agent to secretly act as one
1:38:01of his research assistants. That said,
1:38:04at the convention, Heb did not
1:38:06disappoint. His work earned him a lot of
1:38:09love from the CIA and even resulted in a
1:38:12Nobel Prize nomination. But in classic
1:38:15Canadian fashion, the same couldn't be
1:38:17said in Ottawa. The same year as the
1:38:20conference, the Canadian government
1:38:22decided that Heb's research was a waste
1:38:25of money and cut the funding, cancelling
1:38:27his work. What's more, he claimed that
1:38:30all of his raw research data were
1:38:33suddenly snatched up by some
1:38:35organization in the States. Bummer.
1:38:38Interestingly, the mysterious
1:38:41disappearance of those documents didn't
1:38:43seem to be too big of an issue for the
1:38:45CIA, who immediately began working to
1:38:48continue Heb's work. They saw
1:38:50particularly promising results from an
1:38:52experiment in which a soldier suffered a
1:38:55complete breakdown after being kept in
1:38:57isolation for 40 hours. This caught the
1:39:00attention of the former head of
1:39:01Artichoke, Moors Allen, as well as the
1:39:04guy who'd gone undercover as one of
1:39:05Heb's research assistants, a brain
1:39:08surgeon from the National Institute of
1:39:09Mental Health named Maitellyn Baldwin.
1:39:12Allen and Baldwin got really excited and
1:39:15began advocating for the experiment to
1:39:17be repeated under terminal conditions,
1:39:20i.e. in a life ordeath circumstance.
1:39:23Now, this problem of a lack of terminal
1:39:25test cases actually came up four years
1:39:28earlier in Dulles's speech. Towards the
1:39:31end, after so much time spent describing
1:39:34the brainwashing methods that the
1:39:36communists were using, Dulles included a
1:39:39line that assured the audience that the
1:39:42US wasn't doing anything like this.
1:39:45except he decided to do this in a pretty
1:39:48strange way by lamenting the fact that
1:39:51unfortunately America is just too dang
1:39:54moral. We in the West are somewhat
1:39:57handicapped in getting all the details.
1:39:59There are few survivors and we have no
1:40:02human guinea pigs ourselves on which to
1:40:04try out these extraordinary techniques.
1:40:07Pretty strange to describe torture and
1:40:09brainwashing as extraordinary techniques
1:40:12while framing a lack of human guinea
1:40:15pigs as a bad thing. But hey, luckily
1:40:17for him though, this was about to
1:40:19change. Not only was the CIA more than
1:40:22happy to abandon any semblance of ethics
1:40:24or sanity, but as we covered, Gotautle
1:40:27was getting real busy developing a
1:40:30network of doctors to solve this guinea
1:40:32pig problem. That said, while he was
1:40:35giving pints of LSD to anyone who so
1:40:38much as owned a lab coat, Golib had a
1:40:41way harder time finding someone who was
1:40:43willing to test sensory deprivation.
1:40:46One person who they contacted was a very
1:40:49interesting scientist named John Willie.
1:40:52This was a pretty natural fit given that
1:40:54he had already invented an isolation
1:40:56tank of his own, believing that it could
1:40:59be used to provide tremendous mental
1:41:01health benefits related to like
1:41:03meditation.
1:41:04Lily agreed to work with the CIA, but
1:41:07refused to conduct tests on anyone other
1:41:10than himself. I'm not convinced that
1:41:12this was purely altruistic since Lily
1:41:15seemed to really enjoy tripping. That
1:41:18said, when it became clear to him that
1:41:21the CIA had no interest in the positive
1:41:24uses of his work, Lily cut ties with
1:41:26them, which does definitely earn him
1:41:29some points in my book. Later, Lily
1:41:31would go on to conduct some pretty
1:41:33strange LSD experiments of his own, such
1:41:36as when he and Carl Sean dropped acid
1:41:39with a dolphin. There was also the time
1:41:41he made a dolphin and a human woman in
1:41:44juglet makeup live together as a couple.
1:41:48Well, I realize this has all gotten
1:41:50pretty dark. In this case, there
1:41:53actually wasn't a sinister motive behind
1:41:55any of this. Lily simply believed that
1:41:58these experiments were crucial in order
1:42:00to unlock the secret of communicating
1:42:03with aliens. Also, one of my favorite
1:42:05John Lily stories is the time that he
1:42:08was having a quiet night in watching TV
1:42:12while on Meascalin when he was abducted
1:42:15by aliens who quote bloodlessly removed
1:42:19his penis and then replaced it with a
1:42:22robotic one that he could make hard or
1:42:25soft at will. Once they brought him
1:42:28home, he tested it out by having sex
1:42:30with his wife. But then this is where it
1:42:33gets really crazy. The next day, his
1:42:36penis was inexplicably back to normal.
1:42:40I like to think I'm pretty skeptical
1:42:42with these kinds of things, but even I
1:42:44have to admit that I can't really
1:42:46explain that one. Anyways, in 1956, the
1:42:49CIA finally found someone to test
1:42:51sensory deprivation when they stumbled
1:42:53upon a paper by none other than Heb's
1:42:55professional rival, Euan Cameron.
1:42:59Cameron's paper was called psychic
1:43:01driving and described a therapy method
1:43:03he developed that took Heb's work
1:43:06considerably further. Cameron used
1:43:08sensory deprivation along with hypnosis
1:43:11and drugs like LSD, measculine, sodium
1:43:15aml, a stimulant called dexoxin, and
1:43:18medically induced comas to place his
1:43:21patients into a suggestible state before
1:43:24playing looped recordings of them saying
1:43:26phrases like my mother hates me or that
1:43:30their father wanted to molest them. The
1:43:33paper proudly proclaims that the end
1:43:36result is quote analogous to the
1:43:38breakdown of the individual under
1:43:41continuous interrogation.
1:43:43A professor at McGill and the president
1:43:45of both the American and Canadian
1:43:48psychological associations who have had
1:43:50once described as quote criminally
1:43:52stupid. Cameron soon found himself in a
1:43:56meeting with our old friend Maitlyn
1:43:57[music] Baldwin who approached him with
1:43:59a proposal. Cameron was to get McGill's
1:44:02Allen Memorial Mental Hospital to join
1:44:04the Society for the Investigation of
1:44:06Human [music] Ecology. Once that was
1:44:08done, his research became MK Ultra Sub
1:44:11Project 68 and received a generous
1:44:14annual payment of [music] $20,000
1:44:17through the society. Once the money
1:44:18started flowing, he made some big
1:44:20changes to Alam Memorial. The old
1:44:23stables out back, as well as the
1:44:24hospital's basement, were both converted
1:44:26to house isolation rooms. [music] This
1:44:29went on from 1957 to 63 during which
1:44:32time he experimented on around a 100
1:44:35patients generally under the guise of
1:44:37trying to find a cure for schizophrenia.
1:44:41Cameron's work was based off of his
1:44:43theory that the correct way to treat
1:44:45mental illness was by first breaking the
1:44:48patient down into a completely blank
1:44:51slate and then building up a new healthy
1:44:54version of them on top of that wreckage.
1:44:56He called this process depatterning.
1:44:58[music]
1:44:59And while he used Heb's work as a
1:45:01starting point, Cameron got a lot more
1:45:04twisted with it. In addition to the
1:45:07drugs, hypnosis, comas, and repetitive
1:45:10phrases, Cameron was also really into
1:45:13electroshock. This was a new and
1:45:16controversial treatment at the time.
1:45:18While it seemed to be extremely
1:45:19effective, it also came with some
1:45:21serious side effects, namely amnesia and
1:45:25regression. For Cameron though, these
1:45:27side effects were the whole point. His
1:45:30goal was to completely overwhelm the
1:45:32minds of his patients. And so, while the
1:45:34manufacturers of the Paige [music]
1:45:36Russell electroshock machines he used
1:45:38recommended a maximum of 24 total shocks
1:45:42per patient, Cameron instead took a more
1:45:45liberal [music] approach and would
1:45:46generally administer around 360.
1:45:50In a paper from 1960, Cameron wrote that
1:45:53there are two ways that people hold on
1:45:55to their sense of identity, memory and
1:45:58sensory input. His experiments in deping
1:46:02therefore sought to destroy both. Here's
1:46:05what that looked like for a typical
1:46:07patient. Their stay began with a nice
1:46:10relaxing medicallyinduced coma which
1:46:12could last up to 86 [music] days. This
1:46:15was done in Cameron's sleep room where
1:46:18patients were kept unconscious for
1:46:20around 22 hours a day only woken up to
1:46:24eat and [music] use the bathroom during
1:46:26which times they weren't allowed to
1:46:28speak. Some of these people were also
1:46:30given a drug called cure which causes
1:46:34paralysis [music]
1:46:35essentially making them prisoners inside
1:46:37of their own bodies. Once that was over,
1:46:40it was on to the electroshock treatment
1:46:42administered three times [music] a day
1:46:44for 30 days. Finally, it was time for
1:46:47sensory deprivation, which generally
1:46:50went on for weeks and in the case of one
1:46:52patient, 35 days. This was very often
1:46:57accompanied by mindaltering drugs and a
1:47:00special helmet that played recorded
1:47:02messages on an infinitely repeating
1:47:04loop. But believe it or not, this last
1:47:07step came with some problems. Cameron
1:47:10found that some of his patients were
1:47:12able to keep track of time based off of
1:47:14when they were fed. He was able to solve
1:47:16this, though, by instructing the kitchen
1:47:19to randomly change the intervals between
1:47:21meals as well as what was being served.
1:47:24Unfortunately, he found that despite his
1:47:27best efforts, one patient was still able
1:47:29to keep track of time by listening for
1:47:32the faint rumble of a plane that flew by
1:47:35the hospital every morning at 9. But
1:47:38believe it or not, there was a bigger
1:47:40problem with all this. Cameron's theory
1:47:42of depatterning involved destroying a
1:47:44person's mind and then rebuilding it.
1:47:47While his techniques proved to be
1:47:49incredibly effective for the first part
1:47:51of that equation, he wasn't having any
1:47:54luck with the second. Rather than being
1:47:56healed, Cameron's victims, many of whom
1:47:59came to see him for relatively minor
1:48:01issues, ended up with their minds being
1:48:04irreparably shattered. In a paper by the
1:48:08Alliance for Human Research Protection,
1:48:10they note the case of Gail Castner, for
1:48:13whom, quote, "The shock treatment turned
1:48:16the then 19-year-old honors student into
1:48:19a woman who sucked her thumb, talked
1:48:22like a baby, demanded to be fed from a
1:48:24bottle, and urinated on the floor." All
1:48:28of this was uncovered in an expose in
1:48:301980, which revealed what Cameron was
1:48:33getting up to and who'd been bankrolling
1:48:35him. Nine former test subjects filed a
1:48:38civil suit against the CIA, which they
1:48:41settled out of court for $750,000,
1:48:45a little over 80K a piece. Not a great
1:48:48payout for having your brain [ __ ]
1:48:50beyond repair, but hey, it could be
1:48:52worse. Those nine victims also sued the
1:48:55Canadian government, who only paid out a
1:48:58total of 180K.
1:49:01The American Psychological Association
1:49:03made a statement condemning Cameron's
1:49:05work, but their Canadian counterpart
1:49:07decided to go a different direction and
1:49:10defended their former president's
1:49:12research. Now, one question that's worth
1:49:14asking in all of this is if Cameron knew
1:49:17what he was doing. He and the CIA both
1:49:20claim that he was kept in the dark about
1:49:22who he was working for. And while I'll
1:49:25admit that that is possible, I find it
1:49:28pretty unlikely. Cameron was a devout
1:49:31cold warrior who wouldn't have taken
1:49:33much convincing to bend medical ethics
1:49:35in service of fighting the red menace.
1:49:38He also seemed extremely aware of the
1:49:40connection between his work and torture.
1:49:43As we know, in his depattering paper, he
1:49:45compared the effects of his experiments
1:49:47to those of continuous interrogation.
1:49:51A year earlier, he got even more blatant
1:49:54in an interview with a magazine where he
1:49:56said that his patients quote like
1:49:58prisoners of the communists tended to
1:50:01resist treatment and had to be broken
1:50:03down. Eventually, he completely dropped
1:50:06all pretenses. In 1960, he gave a talk
1:50:08at the Brooks Air Force Base in Texas
1:50:11where he said that his treatment quote
1:50:13produces the primary symptoms of
1:50:15schizophrenia, which is a pretty
1:50:18interesting thing to say given that the
1:50:20stated point of his work was to find a
1:50:23cure for schizophrenia. Same goes for
1:50:25Heb who in 58 appeared as a speaker at a
1:50:28symposium held by the CIA for everyone
1:50:31who was anyone in the field of mind
1:50:33control and torture. In his speech, Heb
1:50:36admitted that his incredibly flimsy
1:50:39highway safety cover story had been
1:50:41total [ __ ] and that the real purpose
1:50:44was, of course, to study brainwashing,
1:50:47specifically to see if sensory
1:50:48deprivation could make people more
1:50:50susceptible to propaganda. To which the
1:50:53answer was, of course, a resounding yes.
1:50:56Now, while all of this was happening, in
1:50:58the background, there were two other
1:51:00American innovations in the field of
1:51:02torture. For the first one, you remember
1:51:04Harold Wolf when the crank neurologist
1:51:08turned founding president of the Society
1:51:10for the Investigation of Human Ecology
1:51:12proposed to Gotweb that he conduct
1:51:15research into coercion. That eventually
1:51:18led him and his associate Lawrence
1:51:20Hinkle to conduct a study on the torture
1:51:23techniques used by communist states,
1:51:26which yielded some pretty interesting
1:51:29discoveries.
1:51:30Turns out that rather than drugs or
1:51:32hypnosis, the communists tended to
1:51:34prefer the good old-fashioned ways,
1:51:37mainly relying on isolation, anxiety,
1:51:40lack of food and sleep, you know, all
1:51:42the classics. Far from developing
1:51:44cuttingedge brainwashing techniques, in
1:51:47the case of the Soviets, they literally
1:51:49just inherited these tricks from the
1:51:50Tsarists. However, Hinkle and Wolf
1:51:54discovered that the KGB had made one
1:51:57significant breakthrough that despite
1:51:59not being anywhere near as high-tech or
1:52:02esoteric as what the CIA was cooking up,
1:52:05still had pretty massive implications.
1:52:09The novel torture method used by the
1:52:11Soviets was to force prisoners to stand
1:52:14for periods of 18 to 24 [music]
1:52:17hours.
1:52:19That's it. This might not sound like too
1:52:21big of a deal, but in practice, the
1:52:24effects are absolutely brutal. If this
1:52:27is kept up for long enough, the
1:52:28prisoner's ankles double in size with
1:52:31the skin in the area becoming
1:52:32particularly sensitive. On the bottoms
1:52:35of the feet, blisters form and then
1:52:38erupt. If you keep going, then before
1:52:40too long, heart rates sore and kidneys
1:52:43shut down. All the while, the prisoner's
1:52:46mind sinks deeper and deeper into
1:52:48delusion.
1:52:50As bad as this is, though, the physical
1:52:52effects weren't the point. After all,
1:52:55brutal torture methods were nothing new.
1:52:57And frankly, in the pantheon of sadistic
1:53:00punishments, this was fairly tame. What
1:53:03made the difference though was that
1:53:04rather than some external agent in this
1:53:07case [music]
1:53:08the pain came from the victim's own body
1:53:12and that had some very interesting
1:53:14psychological effects. See, if you beat
1:53:17the [ __ ] out of someone, they'll blame
1:53:20you for their pain and hate you for it.
1:53:23But if the pain instead feels
1:53:26self-inflicted, it causes feelings of
1:53:28guilt, making them far more likely to
1:53:31crack. In short, Wolf and Hinkle had
1:53:34discovered the power of stress
1:53:36positions. Finally, in 1961, Stanley
1:53:40Mgram conducted his famous study on
1:53:43obedience in which participants were
1:53:45told to press a button to administer an
1:53:47electric shock to someone on the other
1:53:50side of a wall. The person being shocked
1:53:52was an actor and the real test was to
1:53:55see if an average person would obey
1:53:57instructions to torture a man who was
1:53:59pleading for them to stop. The answer
1:54:02was yes. 65% of participants obeyed the
1:54:06instructions even to the point where
1:54:07they believed that they had killed the
1:54:09actor. In essence, what Mgrim had proven
1:54:13was that anyone could be made into a
1:54:15torturer. Now, I'll admit that this is
1:54:18about to get a little bit conspiratorial
1:54:20and there's no hard proof that Mgrim's
1:54:22experiment was part of MK Ultra, but
1:54:25with that said, when you look into it a
1:54:28little, the facts do seem to paint a bit
1:54:30of an odd picture. First of all, as we
1:54:33know, the CIA was funding all sorts of
1:54:36studies, particularly when this one
1:54:38happened. The subject of torture also
1:54:40means that it was definitely right up
1:54:42their alley. That doesn't prove anything
1:54:45though, and I wouldn't bring this up if
1:54:46I didn't have something more solid. So,
1:54:48let's keep digging. Towards the end of
1:54:501960, Mgrim had applied and been
1:54:53rejected for a grant from the American
1:54:55Council of Learned Societies, asking for
1:54:58$2,000 to study how measculine affects
1:55:01the way that people appreciate art.
1:55:05Seems a little strange how different
1:55:07that is from the one that he'd conduct
1:55:09only a couple months later, eh? But hey,
1:55:12who knows, right? In Mgrim's biography,
1:55:15Thomas Blas claims that he had already
1:55:17planned to study obedience and the
1:55:19measculine study was just a side
1:55:21interest. In my opinion, that seems a
1:55:25little odd, but who knows, right?
1:55:28Following this rejection, Mgrim got in
1:55:30touch with a man named Luigi Petrvo, the
1:55:33head of the group psychology branch of
1:55:36the Office of Naval Research, the
1:55:38organization that if you recall was
1:55:40being used by the CIA to fund a large
1:55:42number of their MK Ultra projects. The
1:55:45story goes that Mgrim pitched Petrulo on
1:55:48his idea for a study to see if ordinary
1:55:51people could be made to torture someone
1:55:54with electroshock. They had some back
1:55:56and forths and then in January 1961,
1:56:00Mgrim applied for a grant from the
1:56:03National Science Foundation. NSF sent
1:56:06three people to New Haven to review
1:56:09Mgrim's work in person and then had
1:56:11their lawyers make sure that Yale would
1:56:14assume any legal liability for the
1:56:16experiment before cutting a check for
1:56:19$24,700.
1:56:22Again, there's no hard proof here, but
1:56:25giving him that much money while also
1:56:28being so worried about the legality of
1:56:30the study feels strange. Maybe Mgrim
1:56:33just made a strong impression on Patrulo
1:56:36and the folks over at NSF. But it also
1:56:38doesn't seem crazy to me to think that
1:56:41maybe the CIA or the ONR pulled some
1:56:44strings here. It's also worth noting
1:56:47that NSF refused to fund any of Mgrim's
1:56:50later projects. To be fair though, they
1:56:53were far from alone there. The
1:56:55experiment was a massive ethical
1:56:57controversy for which Mgrim suffered
1:56:59major professional fallout. Not only did
1:57:02he have trouble securing funds for
1:57:04future experiments, but he also wound up
1:57:06being refused tenure and no college want
1:57:09to touch him. But don't worry, things
1:57:11eventually turned around when he was
1:57:13hired with a promotion. No, at the City
1:57:16University of New York. Now again, this
1:57:19could be explained by the fact that City
1:57:21University was very new at the time and
1:57:23Mgrim had friends in the faculty. That
1:57:26said, it's also worth noting that their
1:57:29new dean, Mina Ree, was previously the
1:57:32deputy science director for, you guessed
1:57:35it, the Office of Naval Research.
1:57:38Honestly, I really don't know where I
1:57:40stand on this one. The evidence is all
1:57:43purely circumstantial and there's no
1:57:45smoking gun. Another possible
1:57:47explanation here is that reading about
1:57:48MK Ultra for months has completely
1:57:50cooked my brain. As you'll see, this is
1:57:53far from the craziest conspiracy theory
1:57:55that I'll be talking about in this
1:57:56video. But yeah, seems a bit sus.
1:58:00Speaking of suspicious coincidences
1:58:02though, as you'll remember, MK Ultra
1:58:05officially ended in 1963, which happened
1:58:08to be the same year that the CIA
1:58:11released the Kubark counterintelligence
1:58:14interrogation handbook. Declassified in
1:58:171997, Kubark is essentially an
1:58:20instructions manual for torture. There
1:58:22are a lot of fun tidbits in it, like the
1:58:25section devoted to getting around laws
1:58:27that might prevent people from being
1:58:29imprisoned for indefinite amounts of
1:58:31time. But what's really interesting
1:58:33about Kubark is how closely and
1:58:36explicitly it maps on to the techniques
1:58:39developed during MK Ultra. As they
1:58:42explain, it is a fundamental hypothesis
1:58:45of this handbook that these techniques
1:58:48which can succeed even with highly
1:58:50resistant sources are in essence methods
1:58:53of inducing regression of the
1:58:55personality to whatever earlier and
1:58:57weaker level is required for the
1:58:59disillusion of resistance and the
1:59:02inculcation of dependence.
1:59:05All of the techniques employed to break
1:59:07through an interrogation roadblock. The
1:59:10entire spectrum from simple isolation to
1:59:12hypnosis and narcosis are essentially
1:59:15ways of speeding up the process of
1:59:18regression. The manual goes on to
1:59:20provide detailed descriptions of various
1:59:22techniques for achieving this
1:59:24regression, ranging from asking absurd
1:59:27questions in order to quote obliterate
1:59:29the familiar and replace it with the
1:59:31weird, limiting the amount of stimulus
1:59:34in the subject's cell, randomly
1:59:36fluctuating the intervals between meals
1:59:38to mess with their sense of time, and
1:59:40suggests that when it comes to pain,
1:59:43quote, "It has been plausibly suggested
1:59:46that whereas pain inflicted on A person
1:59:48from outside himself may actually focus
1:59:51or intensify his will to resist. His
1:59:54resistance is likelier to be sapped by
1:59:57pain which he seems to inflict upon
1:59:59himself. The manual even made our job
2:00:01easy and avoided being the subject of an
2:00:03H bomberg guy hit piece by citing its
2:00:06sources. The techniques just mentioned
2:00:08are attributed to Wolf and Hankle's
2:00:10study on communist interrogation
2:00:12techniques as well as quote a number of
2:00:15experiments conducted at McGill
2:00:17University. And let me be clear that
2:00:20this wasn't just some random memo. The
2:00:23Kubark manual was for a time the CIA's
2:00:26premier training manual. [snorts] In
2:00:291970, the agency held a massive training
2:00:31exercise at Camp Perry to teach these
2:00:33techniques. competition to attend was so
2:00:37intense that agents were fighting just
2:00:39to get selected to be a volunteer victim
2:00:43in order to get a spot the following
2:00:45year. However, the experience of being
2:00:48on the receiving end of these techniques
2:00:50turned out to be so intense that about
2:00:5210% of the victims dropped out before
2:00:55the end of the course and even more
2:00:57refused to come back the following year
2:01:00for their turn as interrogators.
2:01:02Clearly, the CIA had discovered
2:01:04lightning in a bottle, and so now all
2:01:06that was left to do was ship it out. The
2:01:08agency began sending copies of the
2:01:10Kubark manual to allied countries in
2:01:13need of more effective secret police.
2:01:15The first known example of these
2:01:17techniques being used was in Northern
2:01:19Ireland, 1971.
2:01:23This was a year when the troubles, which
2:01:24for the past 3 years had been a slowly
2:01:27simmering civil unrest, finally began to
2:01:29boil [music] over into what would soon
2:01:31become the IRA, waging full-on guerrilla
2:01:34warfare against the Brits. Early that
2:01:37year, the Provisional IRA amped up their
2:01:39bombing campaign, [music] targeting the
2:01:41centers of cities like Belfast and
2:01:43Derry, and soon they'd killed their
2:01:45[music] first British soldier. Faced
2:01:48with tremendous pressure to put an end
2:01:50to this, on August 9th of [music] that
2:01:52year, the newly elected Prime Minister
2:01:54Brian Faulner carried out Operation
2:01:56Demetrius.
2:01:58At 4:00 a.m. that morning, thousands
2:02:00[music] of British troops stormed into
2:02:02nationalist neighborhoods and arrested
2:02:04342 men, most of whom had no active
2:02:08connection to the IRA. Of the prisoners,
2:02:1114 were singled out for so-called
2:02:12[music]
2:02:13deep interrogation, which involved
2:02:15covering their faces in hoods, playing
2:02:18loud white noise, forcing them to stand
2:02:21against the wall on their tiptoes
2:02:22[music]
2:02:23and depriving them of food, water, and
2:02:25sleep. But while the US and UK have a
2:02:29long tradition of sharing intelligence,
2:02:32for other countries in need of their
2:02:33counterinsurgency expertise, the CIA had
2:02:37to be a bit sneakier. The way they did
2:02:40this was through the office of public
2:02:43safety or ops, a very funny acronym for
2:02:46a division of USAID under their civil
2:02:49police program. While its stated goal
2:02:52was to provide humanitarian aid and
2:02:54nation building support by training the
2:02:57police in developing countries to act
2:02:59more like those in America, which um not
2:03:03really the part of America I'd want to
2:03:05emulate, but hey. By the way, while I
2:03:08absolutely don't think it's good that
2:03:10Elon Musk took a chainsaw to USAD, make
2:03:13no mistake, the reason America was
2:03:16funding all of those humanitarian
2:03:18projects wasn't because they're so
2:03:20generous, but so they could exert soft
2:03:23power and do [ __ ] like this.
2:03:26Anyways, starting in ' 62, the CIA used
2:03:30ops as a cover for their
2:03:31counterinsurgency work all over Asia and
2:03:34South America. In ' 74, a series of
2:03:37high-profile scandals brought the
2:03:39program into the public's attention,
2:03:41leading to it being shut down. An audit
2:03:44was conducted by the General Accounting
2:03:46Office to investigate the accusations of
2:03:49torture. But wouldn't you guess, they
2:03:51didn't find anything. Strangely though,
2:03:54Amnesty International conducted an
2:03:56independent audit and they found quite a
2:04:00lot. Specifically, there was evidence of
2:04:03police torturing people in 24 out of the
2:04:0649 countries where ops had operated. Of
2:04:10those countries though, there's
2:04:12definitely one that stands out for being
2:04:14the place where the CIA really cut
2:04:16loose. Vietnam.
2:04:19In ' 62, OP setup shop in Saigon where a
2:04:23CIA station chief named Pier Dilva began
2:04:27working to train the South Vietnamese
2:04:29police and army into a secret
2:04:32counterinsurgency intelligence agency.
2:04:36Dilva was a devout cold warrior who
2:04:39despised commie [ __ ] like soft
2:04:41power, winning hearts and minds, and
2:04:44avoiding committing war crimes. Instead,
2:04:48he believed that the Vietkong had won
2:04:50the support of rural villages through
2:04:52violence and fear, and therefore the
2:04:55only way to break their control was to
2:04:58be even more violent. As such, he
2:05:01focused on shaping the South Vietnamese
2:05:03police and soldiers into death squads,
2:05:06ready to take back the countryside
2:05:08through a very bloody terror campaign.
2:05:11However, he didn't have much luck. Turns
2:05:14out that both groups weren't too
2:05:17enthusiastic about kidnapping and
2:05:19killing their own countrymen, many of
2:05:21whom lived in the same villages as them.
2:05:23Plus, they were both ridiculously
2:05:26corrupt, which didn't help things much
2:05:27either. The CIA realized that if they
2:05:31wanted some communist gerillas crushed,
2:05:34they'd have to do it themselves. Enter
2:05:37the Phoenix program. This was a massive
2:05:40counterinsurgency operation that the CIA
2:05:42described as quote a set of programs
2:05:45that sought to attack and destroy the
2:05:47political infrastructure of the
2:05:49Vietkong. These programs included
2:05:52conducting censuses in South Vietnamese
2:05:55villages and building informant
2:05:57networks. Oh, and also a lot of
2:06:00assassinations, SCOPS, kidnappings, and
2:06:03what should by now be a very familiar
2:06:06method of torture.
2:06:08While this was all presented as a
2:06:11sophisticated intelligence operation, in
2:06:14reality it was a brutal terror campaign
2:06:17based off of Dilva's derange theories of
2:06:20counterterrorism.
2:06:22This wasn't helped by the fact that the
2:06:24Vietnamese people who made up these
2:06:26death squads were pretty much all just
2:06:28the types of scumbags and losers who
2:06:31wanted any excuse to murder, rape, and
2:06:34extort anyone they could find a reason
2:06:36to label a communist. You know, the same
2:06:39demographic that ICE recruits from. The
2:06:41Phoenix program ran from 68 to 72, in
2:06:44which time, by the CIA's own admission,
2:06:46it killed over 24,000 people. But I
2:06:51would argue that ops and the Phoenix
2:06:53program's ties to MK Ultra don't end at
2:06:56the Kubark manual. In 1966, the CIA sent
2:07:00three psychologists and a Paige Russell
2:07:03electroshock machine to Bienhao mental
2:07:05hospital where they conducted
2:07:07experiments on captured Vietkong
2:07:09prisoners.
2:07:11It gets much weirder. In ' 68, they sent
2:07:14a neurosurgeon who implanted remotecont
2:07:17controlled electrodes into the brains of
2:07:20three captured Vietkong. By activating
2:07:23the electrodes, the CIA agents were
2:07:26reportedly able to make the prisoners
2:07:28[ __ ] and puke with the press of a
2:07:31button. The three prisoners were then
2:07:33locked in a room together and each given
2:07:36a knife. For the next week, their
2:07:38captors tried to see if they could use
2:07:40the electrodes to make them get angry
2:07:43and kill each other. When that failed,
2:07:46the surgeon and agents all flew home
2:07:48while the prisoners were executed by
2:07:51Green Beretss. In this sense, I think
2:07:54that the Phoenix program can be
2:07:55understood as a continuation of MK
2:07:58Ultra, in which the endless supply of
2:08:00Vietnamese prisoners being
2:08:02indiscriminately kidnapped finally solve
2:08:05Gulis's complaint about not having
2:08:07enough human guinea pigs. Since then,
2:08:10these techniques have spread all over
2:08:12the world. From Sha Muhammad Resa's
2:08:15secret police during the Iranian
2:08:17Revolution to the Philippines under
2:08:19Marcos to Honduras in the8s. Of course,
2:08:23America wasn't about to let those other
2:08:25countries have all the fun. Following
2:08:28the shock of 9/11, the country entered a
2:08:30state of confused regression, just like
2:08:32one of Cameron's patients. W seized on
2:08:35this moment of crisis to launch the war
2:08:38on terror. And appropriately, one of the
2:08:40first orders of business was to legalize
2:08:42torture. First, Rumsfeld declared that
2:08:45prisoners who were suspected terrorists
2:08:47would be designated as enemy combatants
2:08:49rather than PWS or, you know, regular
2:08:52prisoners. This meant that they were no
2:08:54longer protected by the Geneva
2:08:56Convention. Next, he approved a bunch of
2:08:59torture methods that were taken directly
2:09:01from the pages of Kubark. This was
2:09:03accomplished by making some changes to
2:09:06the definition of torture to only
2:09:08include things that cause an amount of
2:09:10pain comparable to a physical injury
2:09:13like catastrophic organ failure. If it
2:09:17doesn't feel like your appendix rupture,
2:09:19then it's fair game. With that done, the
2:09:21door was now open for the actions
2:09:23carried out at Abu Grave and Guantanamo
2:09:26Bay, where the techniques dreamed up in
2:09:29the basement of Allen Memorial were
2:09:31perfected and used to their full
2:09:33potential. According to reports of
2:09:35Guantanamo, when prisoners are first
2:09:38brought in, they're subjected to sensory
2:09:40deprivation for months. The only relief
2:09:42being brief moments where they're
2:09:44brought into a room with barking dogs,
2:09:47flashing strobe lights, and recordings
2:09:49of babies crying.
2:09:52As a result, it's extremely common for
2:09:55prisoners to completely lose their
2:09:57minds. So much so that they've had whole
2:09:59wings built that essentially just act as
2:10:01insane asylums where witnesses have
2:10:04described the inmates as acting like
2:10:06children. While the staff of these
2:10:09facilities may not have been cribbing
2:10:11directly off of the pages of the Kubark
2:10:13manual, the link is extremely clear. And
2:10:16so, yeah, that's the torture theory. Uh,
2:10:20pretty grim, but it does definitely have
2:10:22a lot going for it. This is kind of the
2:10:25Goldilocks theory. Not so normie that it
2:10:28accepts the CIA's official narrative,
2:10:30but not soed that there's no actual
2:10:33evidence. In fact, I'd go so far as to
2:10:35say that while it's not perfect, this
2:10:38theory probably has the strongest
2:10:40evidence since unlike the other two, the
2:10:43torture theory is based almost entirely
2:10:45off of hard documents in journalism
2:10:47rather than needing to believe anyone's
2:10:50testimony. I'd also say that while maybe
2:10:54I'm fussing over semantics a bit here, I
2:10:56think that the existence of the Kubar
2:10:58manual does pretty definitively mean
2:11:00that the dumbass theory can't be
2:11:02strictly true since, as we now know, the
2:11:05CIA absolutely got something pretty
2:11:08major out of MK Ultra. With that said,
2:11:11it's possible that this wasn't that
2:11:14important to their aim or wound up being
2:11:16kind of a side benefit, which is pretty
2:11:19in line with how things work at the
2:11:21agency. While the CIA is far from a
2:11:24budget conscious organization, and
2:11:26they've done tons of ridiculously stupid
2:11:29things, one thing that they are actually
2:11:32really good at is making sure that
2:11:33anything that they invest time and money
2:11:35into can serve multiple different
2:11:37purposes. For example, Gotautle himself
2:11:40has [clears throat] claimed that part of
2:11:41the purpose of getting Eli Liy to
2:11:43manufacture LSD was to develop
2:11:46connections with chemical manufacturers
2:11:48for future projects. He similarly said
2:11:51that part of the point of MK Ultra
2:11:54itself was to fund exploratory research
2:11:56that could be followed up on if it led
2:11:58to anything useful.
2:12:00Overall though, just like with the
2:12:02dumbass theory, the torture theory's
2:12:04main weakness isn't really in what it
2:12:07claims, but what it denies. Remember
2:12:10that part of the theory is that the CIA
2:12:12never really cared about any of the
2:12:14drugs, hypnosis, or mind control stuff.
2:12:16And frankly, I just don't believe that
2:12:18that's true. First of all, when it comes
2:12:20to LSD, Gotautle was clearly obsessed
2:12:23with this stuff in a way that I don't
2:12:25think you can easily write off. Remember
2:12:28that by the time he first tried it, LSD
2:12:30had already been ruled out as a truth
2:12:32serum, but he continued experimenting
2:12:34with it because something about it
2:12:36fascinated him. This clearly seems like
2:12:39more than just a passing interest. And
2:12:41then what about the weirder mind control
2:12:44stuff? I mean, I'll weigh my cards on
2:12:46the table a little bit here and say that
2:12:48even though I think I came into this
2:12:50extremely skeptical, I mean, what the
2:12:53[ __ ] was up with the weird brain surgery
2:12:55in Vietnam? more people should be
2:12:58talking about that. Look, I realize that
2:13:00I'm starting to sound kind of insane
2:13:02here. I've been working on this video
2:13:04for months, and whenever I tell my
2:13:06friends about it, I get some really
2:13:07weird looks. With that said, you've come
2:13:10this far. We've covered the theory that
2:13:13nothing happened and the theory that
2:13:15something happened. So, let's go all the
2:13:18way. What about the theory that
2:13:21everything happened?
2:13:23What if they succeed?
2:13:37Since we're about to get into the
2:13:39weirder stuff, let's come back to the
2:13:41sci-fi tropes we talked about at the
2:13:43beginning. Specifically, the one of a
2:13:46brainwashed sleeper agent who's
2:13:48programmed to follow a set of specific
2:13:50commands when they hear their trigger
2:13:52word. I have promises to keep and miles
2:13:55to come before I sleep.
2:13:57>> Echo choir has been breached.
2:14:12[music]
2:14:17>> [music]
2:14:28>> The origin of this trope was the
2:14:29Manurion Candid, a political thriller by
2:14:33Richard Condan in which an American
2:14:36soldier named Richard Shaw is captured
2:14:38during the Korean War and then
2:14:40brainwashed by his communist captain.
2:14:42chapters turning him into a sleeper
2:14:44agent who once back in America is
2:14:47programmed to kill an anti-communist
2:14:49politician when he sees the Queen of
2:14:52Diamonds playing card. And while I
2:14:55realize that this is going to sound like
2:14:56a way crazier version of someone
2:14:58claiming that Battlestar Galactica was a
2:15:01documentary, Condan's book may well have
2:15:04been based off of a real event. On June
2:15:0718th, 1953, a meeting was held in the
2:15:11special operations conference room of
2:15:13the CIA's headquarters. According to the
2:15:16minutes, at some point, discussion
2:15:18turned to something pretty strange that
2:15:20they'd noticed with some American PS
2:15:23who' been released from Korea. following
2:15:26this commented on the very interesting
2:15:28angle that interrogations of the
2:15:31individuals who had come out of North
2:15:33Korea across the Soviet Union to freedom
2:15:37recently had apparently had a blank
2:15:39[music] period or period of
2:15:42disorientation while passing through a
2:15:44special zone in Manuria. [music] pointed
2:15:47out that this had occurred in all
2:15:49individuals in the party after they had
2:15:52had their first full meal and their
2:15:54first coffee on the way to freedom was
2:15:57attempting to secure further
2:15:59confirmatory facts [music] in this
2:16:01matter since drugging was indicated. The
2:16:04reason why this random author seemed to
2:16:06have access to highly classified
2:16:09information was explained in [music]
2:16:10John Marx's book in which he says that
2:16:14quote Condan consulted with a wide
2:16:17variety of experts while researching the
2:16:19book and some inside sources may well
2:16:21have filled him in. But as is so often
2:16:24the case in art and espionage, this
2:16:27inspiration wound up being a two-way
2:16:29street. As we saw from the testimonies
2:16:32of John Giddinger and David Rhodess, the
2:16:34Manurion candidate was a massive
2:16:37inspiration for MK Ultra. It's an
2:16:40extremely welldocumented fact that
2:16:42[music] the CIA saw this vision of fully
2:16:45mind controlled secret agents as their
2:16:48holy grail. Imagine being able to make
2:16:51people act as couriers, conduct
2:16:54surveillance, or even perform
2:16:55assassinations, all without even knowing
2:16:58that they're [music] doing it. the
2:17:00advantages are pretty obvious. And so,
2:17:03as wild as this all sounds, since this
2:17:07is exactly what it would mean for MK
2:17:09Ultra to be a success, [snorts] it might
2:17:12be worth taking this seriously.
2:17:14But before we jump head first into the
2:17:17Manurion candidate theory, let's take a
2:17:20breather and go over some guidelines
2:17:22first. So far, I've been trying to lay
2:17:26out the strongest case I can for each
2:17:28theory and mostly waiting till the end
2:17:30to give my opinions on the strengths and
2:17:33weaknesses so that you can make up your
2:17:35own minds.
2:17:37I can't quite do that here, though. The
2:17:40reason why is because while the
2:17:42weaknesses of the previous two theories
2:17:45are that they leave out too much, this
2:17:48one has the opposite problem. What I
2:17:51mean is that the Manurion candidate
2:17:54theory is kind of an infohazard. Like
2:17:57just think about the downstream
2:17:59implications of the CIA or whoever else
2:18:03actually being able to control the minds
2:18:05of anyone on Earth. Once you're deep
2:18:08enough down that rabbit hole, it becomes
2:18:10pretty easy to use this theory to
2:18:13explain away the weaknesses in literally
2:18:15any conspiracy theory. You don't even
2:18:18need any evidence since if this is all
2:18:20true, then wouldn't it be easy for them
2:18:22to cover their tracks? Think about it.
2:18:25The moonlanding, 9/11, your ex cheating
2:18:28on you. It's not hard to argue that
2:18:31these were all orchestrated by the
2:18:33government if you think that anyone can
2:18:36have their mind controlled like a
2:18:38puppet. Oh, you're breaking up with me
2:18:40because I don't communicate my feelings.
2:18:43Nice try. I'm sure your puppet masters
2:18:46over in the deep state would just love
2:18:48to know all about why I felt insecure at
2:18:52Chase's birthday party. The point being
2:18:54that while I am still going to try to
2:18:57present the strongest case I can for
2:18:59this stuff, as we go deeper, we're going
2:19:01to come across a lot of obviously insane
2:19:05[ __ ] that I'm not just going to sit
2:19:08here and uncritically present alongside
2:19:11well doumented facts as if they're
2:19:13equally credible. [snorts] Sorry in
2:19:16advance to any fans of obviously insane
2:19:18[ __ ] or as they prefer to be called
2:19:20the parapolitics community. With that
2:19:23said, I told you at the beginning of the
2:19:25video that I think that all of these
2:19:27theories have some truth to them, and I
2:19:30meant that. While researching this
2:19:32section, I read tons of deranged
2:19:34[ __ ] but also plenty of things that
2:19:37I can't really explain and actually
2:19:40wound up changing my mind about.
2:19:42>> [snorts]
2:19:42>> So, the way I decide to organize this
2:19:45section is by going through things in
2:19:47order of how strong the evidence is,
2:19:50starting with what we know for sure is
2:19:52real and ending with the really crazy
2:19:54stuff. There's even a little conspiracy
2:19:56that I think I may have personally
2:19:59uncovered. So, without further ado,
2:20:02let's dive into the hard evidence. To
2:20:04start, let's talk a little bit about
2:20:06hypnosis. Now, I'm absolutely not an
2:20:10expert, but [music] from what limited
2:20:12research I've done, it more or less
2:20:14seems like while it's pretty hotly
2:20:17debated to what extent it's [music] some
2:20:19genuinely different state of
2:20:21consciousness versus a sort of powerful
2:20:23placebo, hypnosis is definitely a thing,
2:20:26although not one that's respected in
2:20:28most medical practices. Regardless, the
2:20:31CIA was definitely very interested in
2:20:34it. [music] And in the ' 50s, their
2:20:36resident expert was a guy named Moors
2:20:38Allen, the former head of Bluebird,
2:20:41[music] now working as part of
2:20:42Artichoke. Allan took an immediate
2:20:44interest and was so eager to learn that
2:20:47he tracked down a famous [music] stage
2:20:49hypnotist in New York, who told Allen a
2:20:52bunch of stories about how he'd use
2:20:54hypnosis to have [music] sex with women
2:20:57at his shows. As Allen reported,
2:21:00hypnotist stated he had constantly used
2:21:03hypnosis as a means of inducing young
2:21:06women to engage in sexual intercourse
2:21:08with him. A performer in orchestra was
2:21:13forced to engage in sexual intercourse
2:21:16with hypnotist while under the influence
2:21:18of hypnosis. hypnotist stated that he
2:21:22first put her into a hypnotic trance and
2:21:25then suggested to her that he was her
2:21:27husband and that she desired sexual
2:21:30intercourse with him. Many times while
2:21:33going home, hypnotist would use hypnotic
2:21:36suggestion to have a girl turn around
2:21:39and talk to him. And as a result of
2:21:41these suggestions induced by him, he
2:21:44spent approximately five nights a week
2:21:46away from home engaging in sexual
2:21:48intercourse.
2:21:50Now, personally, that sounds to me like
2:21:53something only an incredibly gullible
2:21:56and horny rapist would believe. Allan,
2:22:00on the other hand, thought that this guy
2:22:01was really cool and legit. He
2:22:04immediately signed up for a 4-day course
2:22:07and then started using his newfound
2:22:09skills to what else? Hypnotize the
2:22:12secretaries at the CIA. This sounds
2:22:15incredibly stupid and also more than a
2:22:18little rapy, right? And it was. Allan
2:22:21basically just did parlor tricks, making
2:22:23the secretaries forget their names,
2:22:25reveal secrets that Allen had just told
2:22:27them, or having them flirt with people
2:22:29around the office. Like, this guy's
2:22:32doing what basically amounts to magic
2:22:34tricks in sexually harassing employees.
2:22:36And the whole time he's just like, "I've
2:22:38unlocked the secrets of the mind." The
2:22:41thing is though that I've seen a few
2:22:43accounts of this that act like that's
2:22:45all, but no. As the years went on and he
2:22:50got better at hypnosis, he definitely
2:22:52did more than you [music] might think.
2:22:55In one artichoke document from 1951, we
2:22:58see a description of Allen hypnotizing a
2:23:00woman, giving her what she thinks is a
2:23:03bomb, and then getting her to plant it
2:23:05in the office. To be fair, while that's
2:23:08definitely kind of wild, it's also
2:23:11probably reasonable to think that the
2:23:13secretary knew it wasn't a real bomb and
2:23:15was just playing along to some extent.
2:23:18[music] Let's keep going. An artich
2:23:20choke document dated January 7th, 1953
2:23:24with the section heading outline of
2:23:26special H cases describes them
2:23:29hypnotizing two 19-year-old girls. They
2:23:33were able to put them into trance using
2:23:35a special word which could be said by
2:23:37anyone either in person or over the
2:23:39phone. According to the memo, once the
2:23:42girls were hypnotized, they could be
2:23:43made to deliver information without
2:23:45realizing and could be given a new name
2:23:48and identity which they would swear by
2:23:51even during a polygraph test. [music]
2:23:54That's definitely pretty nuts, but hard
2:23:56to believe that this could go much
2:23:58further, right? Moralon thought the same
2:24:02thing. And so on February 10th, 1954, he
2:24:05carried out the [music] following
2:24:07experiment. Miss was then instructed,
2:24:10having previously expressed a fear of
2:24:13firearms in [music] any fashion, that
2:24:15she would use every method at her
2:24:17disposal to awaken Miss, now in a deep
2:24:20hypnotic sleep. [music] And failing in
2:24:23this, she would pick up a pistol nearby
2:24:25and fire it at Miss.
2:24:28She was instructed that her rage [music]
2:24:30would be so great that she would not
2:24:32hesitate to kill
2:24:35for failing to awaken. Miss carried out
2:24:39these suggestions [music] to the letter,
2:24:41including firing the unloaded pneumatic
2:24:44pistol gun at and then proceeding to
2:24:48fall into a deep sleep. After proper
2:24:51suggestions were made, both were
2:24:53awakened and expressed complete amnesia
2:24:56of the entire sequence. Miss
2:25:00was again handed the gun, which she
2:25:02refused in an awakened state to pick up
2:25:05or accept from the operator. She
2:25:07expressed absolute denial that the
2:25:09foregoing sequence [music] had happened.
2:25:12And like I'm not so sure about this
2:25:14proving that hypnotized assassins are a
2:25:17thing, but that is kind of crazy, right?
2:25:20Personally, while I'm still far from
2:25:22convinced that this could [music] be
2:25:24particularly useful for like a spy
2:25:26mission, remember that memo we saw where
2:25:29they said that they were never able to
2:25:31recreate any of these experiments
2:25:32outside of a lab [music] setting. That
2:25:35said, I'll admit that this is a lot
2:25:38further than I would have thought that
2:25:40they'd get. Lastly, and this isn't
2:25:43really as crazy as the other stuff I
2:25:45mentioned, but is still pretty
2:25:47interesting and worth keeping in mind
2:25:49for reasons that we'll get to [music]
2:25:50later. So, as you may remember, a big
2:25:54objective of Bluebird, Artichoke, MK
2:25:57Ultra, and MK Search was to try to find
2:26:00a way of causing people to forget that
2:26:02they'd been interrogated. Allan did a
2:26:04number of experiments to achieve this
2:26:06effect and found that when it comes to
2:26:09hypnosis, it's much easier to implant
2:26:12false memories than to permanently erase
2:26:14or recover real ones. The CIA were able
2:26:18to use this to their advantage, though,
2:26:20by first giving the subject a wide
2:26:23variety of drugs and then hypnotizing
2:26:24[music]
2:26:25them. But rather than trying to get them
2:26:28to forget the interrogation, they
2:26:30instead implanted four or five [music]
2:26:32false memories of what happened so the
2:26:35subject wouldn't know which one was
2:26:37real. Anyways, most of the really weird
2:26:40hypnosis stuff was in artichoke
2:26:42documents with far fewer mentioned in
2:26:44the MK Ultra ones. [snorts] There's a
2:26:47couple possible reasons for this. One
2:26:49theory that I've seen a few times is
2:26:50that MK Ultra was just a distraction and
2:26:54the real [ __ ] was all an artichoke.
2:26:56There's really not that much evidence to
2:26:59support this. Any articles I found about
2:27:02it tend to claim that this was all
2:27:04admitted in [music] declassified CIA
2:27:06documents, but then don't actually
2:27:08provide any of those documents. [music]
2:27:11Something that, as you'll see, is kind
2:27:13of common among people making really
2:27:16wild claims. It's also very well
2:27:19documented that while Artichoke was
2:27:22trying to develop a specific methodology
2:27:24for interrogations, often referred to in
2:27:27official documents as the Artichoke
2:27:29method, which I will admit does sound
2:27:31very scary and mysterious. MK Ultra
2:27:34seems to have carried on all of
2:27:36Artichoke's objectives and many more. To
2:27:39me, this just kind of sounds like an
2:27:42indie snob claiming that, "Oh, yeah, I'm
2:27:45more into their first album from before
2:27:47they changed their name." You probably
2:27:49never heard of it. Two theories that I
2:27:51think make more sense are that most of
2:27:53the people conducting MK Ultra
2:27:56experiments were actual psychologists
2:27:58who probably weren't as interested in
2:28:00making their secretaries cluck like
2:28:02chickens as the guy who learned hypnosis
2:28:05in a 4-day course taught by a sexual
2:28:07predator.
2:28:09>> [snorts]
2:28:09>> but also that later on you see more of
2:28:12an emphasis on drugs as well as some
2:28:14attempts to make a hypnosis machine. I
2:28:18would imagine that this was because they
2:28:20were looking for something more reliable
2:28:22and practical. Like sure, Moors was
2:28:25getting pretty good at hypnotizing the
2:28:27girls at the office, but it doesn't
2:28:30really make sense to expect every
2:28:32anti-communist death squad to include a
2:28:34resident hypnotist. But now, let's move
2:28:37on to the actual craziest [ __ ] that I
2:28:40found here. [music] The brain implants.
2:28:43Like with the Moors Allen hypnosis
2:28:45stuff, [music] I've generally only seen
2:28:48that story of the experiment on Korean
2:28:51PS getting brought up as a way of
2:28:54showing how these guys were crazy or had
2:28:57no idea what they were doing. And that
2:29:00was exactly my assumption, too. But
2:29:03turns out that actually there's so much
2:29:06more to this to the point [music] where
2:29:08this is the thing that I've most changed
2:29:10my mind on. First of all, we can look at
2:29:14MK Ultra sub project number 94, which
2:29:18was a set of experiments that took place
2:29:21from around 1959
2:29:23to 1961, where remotec controlled
2:29:27electrodes were implanted into various
2:29:29animals like mice, [music]
2:29:31birds, and dogs in order to control
2:29:34them. The documents for this sub project
2:29:37note that the goal of this research was
2:29:39to eventually use it on humans. They
2:29:43also mention initial biological work on
2:29:46techniques in brain locations. The work
2:29:50that they're referring to there was done
2:29:52by Dr. Joseé Delgado, [music]
2:29:54a neurosurgeon and Yale professor known
2:29:57for his experiments in electrically
2:29:59stimulating the brain using a device he
2:30:02invented called the stimosiver, a brain
2:30:06implant [music] that could be remote
2:30:07controlled to send electrical signals to
2:30:10specific parts of the brain. Delgato is
2:30:13most famous for [music] an experiment
2:30:15that could probably be better described
2:30:18as a stunt [music] where in 1963 he
2:30:22implanted one of his chips into a bull's
2:30:25brain and then stood in a ring with a
2:30:27matador and using a remote control was
2:30:31able to cause the bull to stop charging
2:30:34and become passive with the press of a
2:30:36button. His main research though was on
2:30:39monkeys. In the late60s, [music]
2:30:41Delgato started some new experiments at
2:30:44the 6,571st
2:30:47Aeromedical Research Laboratory
2:30:49stationed at Hollowman Air Force Base
2:30:51near Alamagordo, [music]
2:30:53New Mexico. The 6,571st
2:30:57is most known as the birthplace of
2:31:01>> spaceships. Where's reverse on this
2:31:04thing?
2:31:04>> Welcome to Instar. How can I help you?
2:31:07[laughter]
2:31:08So, that movie is actually based on a
2:31:10true story. As part of Project Mercury,
2:31:13in 1961, a 2-year-old chimpanzee named
2:31:17Ham became the first primate to survive
2:31:20a trip to space. Shortly after his
2:31:23return party, Delgado showed up and
2:31:26started to run his experiments on Ham's
2:31:28colony. Specifically, he installed a
2:31:31chip in the brain of an aggressive alpha
2:31:34male and then gave the button
2:31:36controlling it to a lowranking female
2:31:39who eventually learned to use it to
2:31:41effectively turn off the alpha's
2:31:44aggressive behavior whenever he
2:31:46threatened her. I [snorts] mean, say
2:31:48what you will about Delgato, feminist
2:31:50king. Where this gets really interesting
2:31:52for us though is in the acknowledgments
2:31:55of Delgato's papers where we can find a
2:31:58who's who of CIA cutouts from the Office
2:32:01of Naval Research to the Public Health
2:32:04Service which served the same purpose as
2:32:06the ONR but usually funded more medical
2:32:09stuff. But the other thing you notice
2:32:12when you dive into Delgato's work is
2:32:14that just like his sponsors, he didn't
2:32:17only experiment on animals. In his book,
2:32:20Physical Control of the Mind, he
2:32:23described a particularly wild study in
2:32:26which three patients with severe
2:32:28epilepsy were interviewed by a
2:32:30psychologist while they had remote
2:32:32controlled electrodes tickling their
2:32:35left temporal loes. The first was a
2:32:3836-year-old woman who reported a
2:32:40pleasant tingling when she got zapped.
2:32:43Then Delgato writes, "Repetition of
2:32:46these stimulations made the patient more
2:32:48communicative and flirtatious, and she
2:32:51ended up openly expressing her desire to
2:32:54marry the therapist. Same goes for the
2:32:57second patient, a 30-year-old woman who
2:33:00considerably increased her verbal
2:33:02output, which took on a more intimate
2:33:05character. The patient openly expressed
2:33:07her fondness for the therapist who was
2:33:09new to her, kissed his hands, and talked
2:33:12about her immense gratitude for what was
2:33:15being done for her. The third patient
2:33:17was an 11-year-old boy who had
2:33:20electrodes placed in both temporal loes.
2:33:24When they were stimulated, he suddenly
2:33:26began to discuss his desire to get
2:33:29married. But when asked to whom, he did
2:33:32not immediately reply. Following
2:33:34stimulation of another point and a 1
2:33:37minute 20 second silence, the patient
2:33:39said, "I was thinking there's I was
2:33:43saying this to you. How to spell yes
2:33:48s I mean yo s. No, you ain't eo. It's
2:33:56this yo u." He then expressed doubt
2:34:00about his sexual identity, saying, "I
2:34:03was thinking if I was a boy or a girl,
2:34:05which one I'd like to be." Following
2:34:07another exitation, he remarked with
2:34:10evident pleasure, "You're doing it now."
2:34:13And then he said, "I'd like to be a
2:34:15girl." So, yeah, that's pretty freaky,
2:34:19eh? Delgato faced a lot of criticism for
2:34:23his research, what with all the
2:34:25incredibly obvious potential for abuse.
2:34:28In one particularly haunting exchange,
2:34:31Delgato put an electrode in a man's left
2:34:33periodal cortex, which when stimulated
2:34:36caused his right hand to form a quenched
2:34:38fist. The patient was told to try to
2:34:41resist it. And when he couldn't, he
2:34:43said, "I guess, doctor, that your
2:34:45electricity is stronger than my will."
2:34:48It does get worse though. While the vast
2:34:51majority of Delgato's book is very dry
2:34:54and technical, the one part where it
2:34:56isn't is when he discusses his
2:34:58philosophy, which basically consists of
2:35:00a deeply held belief that mind control
2:35:03should be widely adopted in order to fix
2:35:06society's ills. Turns out this was a
2:35:10pretty common viewpoint in his line of
2:35:12work. At the same time over at Harvard,
2:35:15some of Delgato's peers were working on
2:35:18the same thing. Throughout the mid60s
2:35:20and early 70s, Vernon Mark, Frank Irwin,
2:35:24and William were working at the
2:35:26Massachusetts General Hospital's
2:35:29neurossychiatric institute where they
2:35:31were implanting electrodes and also
2:35:33performing amygdaltoies,
2:35:36a type of brain surgery where they
2:35:38destroy a small piece of the amygdala
2:35:40which is thought to be associated with
2:35:42aggression.
2:35:44This was the general focus of these
2:35:47doctors research using experimental and
2:35:49invasive brain surgery to curb
2:35:51aggression. All of which [snorts] is
2:35:53thoroughly documented in Mark and Iran's
2:35:55book violence in the brain. The trio
2:35:58took this theory to its logical
2:36:00conclusion in September 1967 when they
2:36:03wrote a letter to the Journal of the
2:36:05American Medical Association arguing
2:36:08that these surgeries would be an
2:36:09effective way to prevent civil rights
2:36:12riots, which they believed were caused
2:36:14by brain disease instead of racial
2:36:17inequity.
2:36:19Definitely seems pretty in line with the
2:36:21CIA to me. This is far from everyone
2:36:24involved in doing these kinds of
2:36:25surgeries for MK Ultra and MK Search,
2:36:27but we've got a lot left to cover. So,
2:36:29let's just wrap this section up by
2:36:31talking about Frank Irvin's mentor, Dr.
2:36:34Robert G. Heath, the chairman of the
2:36:37department of psychiatry and neurology
2:36:39at Twain University from 1949 to 1980.
2:36:44In his time there, Heath became a
2:36:45pioneer in the field of deep brain
2:36:48stimulus. As beginning in 49, he
2:36:50conducted experiments in which he'd
2:36:52stimulate different parts of the brain
2:36:54in order to try to map it. He was
2:36:57specifically interested in ways of
2:36:58stimulating the brain's pleasure center
2:37:00as he believed that it could be useful
2:37:02for treating schizophrenia. He'd been on
2:37:05the CIA's payroll since 1954 when he
2:37:08started receiving money from the Gisher
2:37:11Fund, yet another of the AY's many, many
2:37:14cutouts. And what kinds of work was he
2:37:17doing back then? Well, throughout the
2:37:20late 50s, he wrote a bunch of papers on
2:37:22the effects of LSD in which prisoners
2:37:25with schizophrenia were injected with it
2:37:27and then had their brains studied. Oh,
2:37:30and then in 1960 he did a study on a
2:37:33drug called bulbacapine where he
2:37:35administered it to black inmates at the
2:37:38Louisiana State Penitentiary and then
2:37:40monitored their brains claiming that the
2:37:42drug was able to turn off their motor
2:37:45functions and willpower. By the way, we
2:37:48can't actually prove anything here, but
2:37:50given all of this as well as the
2:37:52timeline, Heath is the prime suspect for
2:37:55who did those experiments on Vietnamese
2:37:57prisoners. Finally, let's end off by
2:38:00talking about what Heath is most known
2:38:02for, which I think might actually be
2:38:04worse than a lot of that other stuff.
2:38:07While Heath had dedicated his early
2:38:09career to trying to map the brain, as
2:38:12well as looking for a cure for
2:38:13schizophrenia, by the late 60s and early
2:38:1670s, he had pivoted to using his
2:38:19techniques for something else, gay
2:38:22conversion therapy. In 1972, Heath
2:38:25published a paper titled Septile
2:38:27Simulation for the Initiation of
2:38:29Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual
2:38:32Man, in which he describes treating a
2:38:3524year-old gay man referred to in the
2:38:37paper as B19. Heath implanted an
2:38:40electrode into a pleasure center called
2:38:43the septal region of B19's brain. The
2:38:47electrode could be activated by either
2:38:49Heath and his assistant or by B19 using
2:38:53a button that he was given. All while he
2:38:55was being made to watch straight porn.
2:38:58Apparently B19 liked this button so much
2:39:02that in one of these sessions he pressed
2:39:04it over a thousand times, eventually
2:39:07forcing them to turn it off despite him
2:39:10begging them not to. After a few of
2:39:12these sessions, B19 started to jerk off
2:39:15to what they were showing him and then
2:39:18expressed interest in having sex with a
2:39:20woman. Heath was very encouraged by this
2:39:23and so he made arrangements for a sex
2:39:26worker to come to the lab and have sex
2:39:28with B19 which happened soon after he
2:39:32was deemed to be cured. Heath's team
2:39:35conducted regular checkups on B19. And
2:39:3811 months after the experiment, Heath
2:39:40happily reported that not only did he
2:39:43claim to still be attracted to women, he
2:39:45was actually having an affair with a
2:39:47married woman. So that's good, I guess.
2:39:51By the way, one of the main sources I've
2:39:53been using so far for this section is
2:39:55this book, The CIA Doctors by Colin A
2:39:58Ross, MD. The thing that's fun about
2:40:01Ross is that he is a crazy person. He's
2:40:04one of those guys who brings up the fact
2:40:06that he's written 34 books as if it's a
2:40:09credential and not a red flag. Most of
2:40:12those books are about the way crazier
2:40:14theories that I'll be talking about
2:40:15towards the end of this section. Also,
2:40:18um, have you ever heard of these skeptic
2:40:21organizations that offer to give a bunch
2:40:23of money to anyone who can demonstrate
2:40:25that they have supernatural abilities
2:40:27under scientific conditions? Uh, the
2:40:30first one was started by Houdini, I
2:40:32think, but there's a bunch. The most
2:40:34famous was the James Randy Educational
2:40:37Foundation's $1 million paranormal
2:40:40challenge. It ended in 2015, but in
2:40:432008, Ross applied to be on it, claiming
2:40:47that he can shoot energy beams out of
2:40:49his eyes.
2:40:51That said, the reason I've been using
2:40:53this book is because while Ross
2:40:55sometimes comes to what I consider to be
2:40:58questionable conclusions, this book is
2:41:01literally just a collection of FOYA
2:41:03documents that he presents with very
2:41:05little editorialization, making it a
2:41:08genuinely fantastic source. Moving on
2:41:11though, remember that this theory states
2:41:13that the CIA was using MK Ultra to
2:41:16create brainwashed assassins. And the
2:41:18thing is that an awful lot of murderers
2:41:22actually do have strange connections to
2:41:25the program. This was actually the thing
2:41:27that got me interested in researching
2:41:29this subject in the first place. So,
2:41:31let's get into it. At this point, we're
2:41:33kind of done with the hard evidence and
2:41:36are now treading into some murkier
2:41:38waters. That isn't to say that I'm
2:41:40pulling this out of my ass or anything,
2:41:42but since we aren't always going to have
2:41:44a queer smoking gun for some of this,
2:41:47we'll have to start putting on our
2:41:49tinfoil hats a bit to connect the dots
2:41:51ourselves. This probably goes without
2:41:53saying, but what follows should
2:41:55definitely be taken with a healthy grain
2:41:57of salt.
2:41:59Before we get into the more speculative
2:42:02parts though, let me first introduce you
2:42:04to one of the biggest psychos in
2:42:07Gotautle's network, Lewis Jollian West.
2:42:11Known as Jolly to his friends, West's
2:42:14decadesl long career placed him at the
2:42:17center of some of the strangest and
2:42:20bloodiest parts of the CIA's mind
2:42:22control experiments. His resume begins
2:42:25with Lackland Air Force Base in San
2:42:27Antonio where he served as the chief of
2:42:30psychiatric services. West first made a
2:42:33name for himself during the Korean War,
2:42:35helping to deprogram those brainwashed
2:42:38soldiers we talked about earlier. And
2:42:40credit where credit is due, he actually
2:42:42came to the surprisingly levelheaded
2:42:44conclusion that their confessions
2:42:47weren't the result of communist
2:42:49hypnosis, but just lack of sleep and
2:42:52what he called DDD, dability,
2:42:55dependency, and dread. As I'm sure you
2:42:57can guess though, the CIA was very
2:43:00interested in developing their own
2:43:02version of this. And pretty soon, West
2:43:05was brought into the fold. Things got
2:43:07dark very quickly. In the wee hours of
2:43:10July 4th, 1954, a three-year-old girl
2:43:13named Sher Joe Horton went missing
2:43:16outside of a bar that her parents were
2:43:18drinking at. Once they realized that she
2:43:20was gone, the Hortons formed a search
2:43:22party, which soon found a shirtless man
2:43:25covered in blood and scratches not far
2:43:27from Sher's body, which had been
2:43:29stripped [music] naked with her neck
2:43:31broken and legs spread open. The man
2:43:34appeared to be in a daysaze. He made no
2:43:36attempts to resist arrest and simply
2:43:39seemed confused, unsure of where he was
2:43:41and what was going on. His name was
2:43:44Jimmy Shaver, a 29-year-old airman at
2:43:48Lackland with a wife, kids, no prior,
2:43:51and no memory of what happened. The
2:43:54military police who arrested him had
2:43:56never seen anything like it. Even after
2:43:582 months in prison, Shaver had no memory
2:44:01of the crime. And so to figure out if he
2:44:03was sane enough to stand trial, the
2:44:05military called their in-house
2:44:07psychologist, Jolly West. Under his
2:44:11direction, Shaver was subjected to a
2:44:13battery of tests and brought back to the
2:44:16scene of the crime in the hopes of
2:44:17jogging his memory. [snorts] When all
2:44:19this failed, Wes turned to his
2:44:21specialty, a combination of hypnosis and
2:44:24a massive dose [music] of his truth
2:44:26serum of choice, sodium aml. The session
2:44:30was recorded and begins with West
2:44:33putting Shaver into a trance and then
2:44:35asking him leading questions such as,
2:44:38"Tell me about when you took your
2:44:39clothes off, Jimmy. Do you remember when
2:44:42something like this happened before?"
2:44:44And after you took her clothes off, what
2:44:47did you do? To which Shaver responded,
2:44:50"I never took her clothes off." For some
2:44:53reason, at this point, Wes seems to turn
2:44:56off the recorder. When it comes back on,
2:44:59West says, "Shaver is crying. He's been
2:45:03confronted with all of the facts
2:45:05repeatedly. Now you remember it all,
2:45:08don't you, Jimmy?" Shaver replies, "Yes,
2:45:11sir." From there, Shaver goes on to
2:45:13confess [music] to the rape and murder
2:45:15of Horton, saying that she reminded him
2:45:18of his cousin named Beth Rainboat, who
2:45:21he claimed sexually abused him as a
2:45:23child. Apparently, on the night of the
2:45:26murder, Shaver had visions of God
2:45:28telling him to quote, "Sk and kill the
2:45:32evil girl Beth." It's worth noting that
2:45:34this story of his cousin was never
2:45:36investigated and Miss Rainboat was never
2:45:39sought out or brought in for
2:45:41questioning. West went on to testify at
2:45:43Shaver's trial. And while he was called
2:45:46as an expert witness for the defense,
2:45:48you could be forgiven for not realizing
2:45:50that since he argued that Shaver's
2:45:53confession while drugged and hypnotized,
2:45:56was the strongest possible evidence of
2:45:58his guilt. Not only that, West also
2:46:01pushed back on Shaver's insanity defense
2:46:04by insisting that despite having
2:46:06experienced a temporary belt of
2:46:08insanity, [music] he was now perfectly
2:46:10capable of standing trial. Of course,
2:46:13West may have had good reason for
2:46:15wanting this sweep shaver under the rug
2:46:17since for the past year he'd been
2:46:18conducting secret experiments on [music]
2:46:21soldiers stationed at Lackland. In his
2:46:23letters to Gotautle, West described
2:46:25successes in inducing amnesia,
2:46:28transl-like [music] states, and getting
2:46:30men to do things that violate their
2:46:32moral codes. He went on to say that his
2:46:35experiments [music] must eventually be
2:46:37put to test in practical trials in the
2:46:40field. Soon after this, West left the
2:46:42military for an academic career at the
2:46:45University of Oklahoma, where he was
2:46:47made head of the departments of
2:46:49psychology, neurology, and behavioral
2:46:51sciences at the ripe old age of 29. It's
2:46:55worth noting that this was fairly
2:46:57typical of CIA doctors who tended to
2:47:00rise to positions of authority in
2:47:02academic and medical institutions
2:47:04suspiciously quickly. In the case of
2:47:07West, there was actually quite a bit of
2:47:10evidence that he probably shouldn't have
2:47:12been trusted with that much authority
2:47:14since it was around this time that he
2:47:16did the thing he's probably most famous
2:47:18for, injecting an elephant with so much
2:47:21LSD that it died. This is especially
2:47:25insane because like in terms of just the
2:47:28physical effects it has on the body, LSD
2:47:31is an incredibly safe drug. The amount
2:47:34that you would need to cause a [ __ ]
2:47:36elephant to OD is actually absurd. Wes
2:47:40took this in stride, though, apparently
2:47:42telling the story to friends and
2:47:43colleagues any chance he got. But one
2:47:46question in all this that tends to get
2:47:48overlooked is how he was able to pay for
2:47:51this. It doesn't come up much, but if
2:47:54you're enough of a freak, zoos work the
2:47:57same as antique stores. You break it,
2:48:00you buy it. When people at U of O
2:48:03started freaking out over how they were
2:48:05going to pay for this [ __ ] elephant,
2:48:08West assured them that he'd take care of
2:48:10it. Turns out he did so using money he
2:48:13was receiving from a group called the
2:48:16Foundation's Fund for Research in
2:48:19Psychiatry, Inc. I know, right? Another
2:48:22awkwardly named Foundation funding
2:48:24research into LSD. What could it be? You
2:48:28guessed it. the same people who paid for
2:48:30West's experiments on how drugs affect
2:48:33hypnotic suggestability,
2:48:35also known as MK Ultra Sub Project 43.
2:48:38But as much as I'm sure you'd love to
2:48:41watch me list CIA shell companies all
2:48:44day, and I haven't even gotten to the
2:48:46Joshua Macy Jr. Foundation,
2:48:49let's move on to the big dog.
2:48:53This wouldn't be a proper conspiracy
2:48:55video if I didn't talk about JFK. Don't
2:48:57worry, the UFOs and satanic cults are
2:49:00coming. But yeah, probably the most
2:49:02famous potential alumnest of MK Ultra is
2:49:05Lee Harvey Oswald. Basically, during his
2:49:08time in the Marines, Oswald was
2:49:10stationed at its Sugi Naval Air Force
2:49:12Base in Japan. In addition to being used
2:49:14for launching U2 spy planes to fly over
2:49:17the Soviet Union, Itsugi was a hub for
2:49:19LSD experiments. [music] There's no hard
2:49:22evidence of Oswald ever being subjected
2:49:25to these tests, but if he was, that
2:49:29might explain some of his very strange
2:49:31behavior. Oswald left the military in
2:49:341959 on, you guessed it, September 11th.
2:49:38He was pretty much completely broke with
2:49:41only $23 in his bank account. That
2:49:44didn't stop him though from immediately
2:49:46getting on a boat to England and from
2:49:49there Finland where he somehow stayed in
2:49:52two of the nicest hotels in Helsinki.
2:49:54His next stop was Moscow where he
2:49:57marched into the [music] US embassy and
2:49:58announced that he was defecting to the
2:50:00Soviet Union where he stayed for 2 and
2:50:031/2 years before changing his mind and
2:50:05coming back to America. Now, I realize
2:50:08that talking about this stuff makes me
2:50:10look like a complete maniac, but we can
2:50:13all agree that that's really [ __ ]
2:50:16weird, right? Like, this definitely
2:50:19seems like the kind of thing someone
2:50:21would do if they were a spy or at least
2:50:24a bipolar person having the most
2:50:26powerful manic episode known to man.
2:50:28With that said, I'm not going to go too
2:50:31deep into Oswald here because I need
2:50:33this video not to be 12 hours long.
2:50:36Something I will say though is that
2:50:38while I can definitely see the argument
2:50:41for some MK Ultra shenanigans going on
2:50:43here, pretty much everything about
2:50:46Oswald's life was incredibly weird to
2:50:48the point where you can kind of just
2:50:51throw this on the pile. So instead of
2:50:54digging into Oswald's life, let's take a
2:50:56look at his death. That came two days
2:50:59after Candies in the basement of the
2:51:01Dallas police headquarters where Oswald
2:51:04was being transferred to the county
2:51:05jail. During the handoff at 11:21 a.m.,
2:51:09a local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby
2:51:12pushed through the crowd of reporters
2:51:14and shot Oswald in the abdomen before
2:51:17being immediately tackled and arrested.
2:51:19In terms of motive, Ruby claimed that he
2:51:22did it for the pretty odd reason of
2:51:24wanting to save Jackie Kennedy from the
2:51:26trauma of a trial. This was allegedly a
2:51:28lie. According to leaked conversations
2:51:31with Ruby and statements later made by
2:51:33his legal team, this was actually just
2:51:35an excuse they'd fed him to gain
2:51:37sympathy. In reality, they [music]
2:51:39claimed Oswald couldn't remember why he
2:51:42did it, or for that matter, anything
2:51:43that happened between when he pulled out
2:51:46the gun and when he found himself in
2:51:48handcuffs. One of his attorneys named
2:51:51Melvin Belly described Ruby's mental
2:51:53state with the following mixed metaphor.
2:51:56potential justifications had been poured
2:51:59like water into the vacuum of his
2:52:01pathologically receptive memory and once
2:52:04there had solidified like cement. This
2:52:07is already pretty strange, but it gets
2:52:09way weirder. As soon as details of the
2:52:12case became public, West started trying
2:52:14to insert himself into the trial, going
2:52:17so far as to directly reach out to the
2:52:19judge asking to [music] be brought into
2:52:21the case. His wish was eventually
2:52:23granted when during the appeal process,
2:52:26Ruby fired his original legal [music]
2:52:28team and replaced them with Dr. Hubert
2:52:30Winston Smith, a psychiatrist with a law
2:52:33degree who'd been involved in the case.
2:52:36Smith immediately brought in West to see
2:52:38if he could work some of his magic with
2:52:40hypnosis and sodium penol to help Ruby
2:52:43regain his lost memories. I mean, it
2:52:46went so well last time, right? Well,
2:52:48despite the hole in his memory and being
2:52:50the kind of guy who's crazy enough to do
2:52:52a high-profile public assassination,
2:52:54everyone who had examined Ruby up until
2:52:56that point had determined that he was
2:52:58sane enough to stand trial. This changed
2:53:01on April 26th, 1964 when West flew to
2:53:05Dallas to conduct his assessment. Here's
2:53:07everything that we know for sure. That
2:53:10afternoon, West visited with Ruby. There
2:53:12were no witnesses or records of what
2:53:14happened while they were alone together.
2:53:16But when it was over, Ruby was incurably
2:53:19insane for the rest of his life. And so
2:53:22given this track record, you can
2:53:24understand how West is a pretty
2:53:26polarizing figure when you're reading up
2:53:28on MK Ultra. In the less conspiratorial
2:53:31histories, like the ones I use for the
2:53:33dumbass and torture theories, he's
2:53:35barely a footnote, if he's mentioned at
2:53:37all. On the other hand, in the weirder
2:53:40books that I'll be covering in this
2:53:42section, he's talked about so much that
2:53:44you'd think that he was running the CIA.
2:53:47While I don't think that Wes was really
2:53:50the evil mastermind he's sometimes made
2:53:52out to be, he was in charge of a number
2:53:54of sub projects that had to do with
2:53:56studying violence and definitely liked
2:53:59inserting himself into important events,
2:54:02which in my books makes him pretty
2:54:04interesting. Given that, it makes sense
2:54:06that people have built on what we
2:54:08already know and theorized that West may
2:54:10have played a role in other violent
2:54:12crimes. Probably the best known and
2:54:15strongest case of this was that of
2:54:17Charles Manson. For those who don't
2:54:19know, Manson had a pretty rough life. He
2:54:23was born in 1934 to a 16-year-old
2:54:26Kathleen Maddox with no father in the
2:54:28picture. When he was five, Maddox was
2:54:30arrested for armed robbery. And 8 years
2:54:33later, young Charlie followed suit by
2:54:35robbing a grocery store, landing him in
2:54:38a juvenile correction center, which he
2:54:40ran away from 18 times over the next 3
2:54:43years. His final escaped attempt
2:54:46involved driving a stolen car across
2:54:48state lines, resulting in him being put
2:54:50in a federal high security reformatory.
2:54:53Surprise, surprise, this did not in fact
2:54:56reform him. Manson [snorts] was released
2:54:58at 19 and then almost immediately began
2:55:01stealing cars, forging checks, and
2:55:03pimping. He was arrested a number of
2:55:06times, and when he was eventually
2:55:07released on parole in 1967, he had spent
2:55:10about half of his 32 years on Earth in
2:55:13jail. Now that he was out, Manson moved
2:55:15to the Hate Ashberry neighborhood of San
2:55:17Francisco, where he immersed himself in
2:55:19the hippie counterculture. [music]
2:55:21famous for his intense charisma which
2:55:23he'd honed in prison where he'd studied
2:55:26books like how to win friends and
2:55:28influence people as well as this is real
2:55:30scientology in which Manson reached the
2:55:33level of theta while behind bars. This
2:55:36put him in a prime position to a massive
2:55:38following now that he was living in
2:55:40hippie central during the summer of
2:55:42love. In Hate Ashberry, he established
2:55:45himself as a sort of wandering street
2:55:47guru and soon had a number of female
2:55:49devotees who came to call themselves the
2:55:52family. But as the San Francisco scene
2:55:54grew, it became crowded, rougher, and
2:55:57more policed. Charlie and his girls
2:55:59skipped town and became nomadic
2:56:01wanderers in an old school [music] bus
2:56:03they painted black. In the summer of '
2:56:0668, the family, which by then consisted
2:56:08of around 20 people, moved to Spawn
2:56:11Ranch, a 55 acre lot in Chadzsworth that
2:56:15had previously been a movie set for
2:56:17Westerns, including The Lone Ranger,
2:56:20Bonanza, and Zoro. By the 60s, westerns
2:56:23had gone out of fashion, and the ranch
2:56:25fell into disrepair along with them.
2:56:28Using his trademark charm, Manson
2:56:30convinced the elderly owner to let him
2:56:33and his family stay there rent-free. Now
2:56:36that they had a base of operations,
2:56:38Manson's focus turned to expanding the
2:56:40family and deepening his control. New
2:56:43members would generally be enticed with
2:56:45sex and drugs. Once they were in, it was
2:56:48time for their initiation. This
2:56:50generally involved giving them massive
2:56:52doses of LSD, sometimes over the course
2:56:55of several days, during which time
2:56:57Manson would only pretend to take the
2:56:59drug or take a much smaller dose. Once
2:57:02they were in a vulnerable state, he'd
2:57:04subject them to long lectures about how
2:57:07life and death, good and evil, and God
2:57:09and Satan are the same. By the end of
2:57:12this process, the family members behaved
2:57:14almost like robots, obediently following
2:57:17any command Manson gave them. And while
2:57:21that sounds great, you'll never guess
2:57:23what happened. The drugs, isolation, and
2:57:26worship of his followers caused Manson
2:57:29to spiral into psychotic delusions. I
2:57:32mean, who could have ever seen that
2:57:34coming right now? Despite their peace
2:57:36and love vibes, the family was never a
2:57:39particularly law-abiding group. They'd
2:57:41been funding themselves largely through
2:57:43stealing cars and petty theft and were
2:57:46known to get violent. Things escalated
2:57:48in the early hours of August 9th, 1969
2:57:51when on Manson's orders, four family
2:57:54members drove to 1050
2:57:57CO Drive, home of the actress Sharon
2:58:00Tate and her husband Roman Palansky.
2:58:03That night, Palansky was out of town
2:58:05scouting locations for a movie called
2:58:07The Day of the Dolphin, in which a
2:58:08dolphin is trained to assassinate the
2:58:10president of the United States. The
2:58:12people who were home were an 8 and a
2:58:14halfmon pregnant Sharon Tate, a
2:58:16celebrity hair stylist named Jay
2:58:18Sebring, the ays of the folders coffee
2:58:21fortune, Abigail Fulier, and her
2:58:23boyfriend Voytech Wowski, an aspiring
2:58:26filmmaker who Pansky referred to in his
2:58:29autobiography as a quote professional
2:58:31house guest. When they got to the
2:58:33property, the four family members
2:58:35disconnected the houses's phone lines,
2:58:37then hopped the fence and entered the
2:58:39house, where they proceeded to murder
2:58:41everyone there, then wrote the word pig
2:58:44on the front door in Tate's blood. The
2:58:46next night, Manson, apparently
2:58:48unsatisfied with the sloppiness of the
2:58:50Tate murders, went out to kill again.
2:58:53This time, the target was a grocery
2:58:55store executive named Leno Labiana and
2:58:57his wife, Rosemary. Same as the night
2:59:00before, the killers snuck into the
2:59:02house, tied up their victims, then
2:59:04murdered them before using their blood
2:59:06to write the messages death to pigs,
2:59:08rise, and helter skelter, a reference to
2:59:11the Beatles song, which Manson believe
2:59:13predicted an apocalyptic race war. And
2:59:16yes, they did spell it wrong. So, all of
2:59:19this was covered in Tom O'Neal's book
2:59:21Chaos. I'm not going to scratch the
2:59:23surface of what's in this. It's very
2:59:26good, very messy, and most of it relates
2:59:28to the ways that O'Neal very
2:59:30convincingly argues that the Manson
2:59:32trial was mishandled. With that said,
2:59:35there are definitely lots of suspicious
2:59:37things related to what we've been
2:59:39looking at. A [snorts] big one is the
2:59:41very strange relationship that Manson
2:59:43had with the law. Thanks to their
2:59:46brutality and the celebrity connection,
2:59:48the Tate Labianca murders were some of
2:59:50the most high-profile crimes of the 20th
2:59:52century. Given how many eyes were on it,
2:59:56it was a bit surprising then that it
2:59:58took the cops over four months to
3:00:00finally charge Manson, especially since
3:00:03he was in jail for unrelated crimes for
3:00:06two of those months. Things get even
3:00:08weirder when you realize just how many
3:00:11times he'd been arrested and simply
3:00:13allowed to walk free. Some notable
3:00:15examples include when he and a bunch of
3:00:17his followers were found trespassing in
3:00:20a house in [clears throat] Mendocino
3:00:21County while in possession of weed,
3:00:24acid, and with a 15-year-old girl.
3:00:27Despite the seriousness of these crimes
3:00:29and the fact that he was on parole,
3:00:31Manson only received a suspended
3:00:34sentence for contributing to the
3:00:35delinquency of a minor and was released
3:00:38back onto the streets. while the
3:00:4015-year-old was charged with felony
3:00:42possession, which shouldn't have even
3:00:44been possible since she was a minor.
3:00:46Even weirder, on August 16th, 1969,
3:00:50that's less than a week after the
3:00:52murders, LAPD and the LA Sheriff's
3:00:55Office conducted the biggest raid in
3:00:57their entire history on the Manson
3:00:59Ranch. In preparation, they'd surveyed
3:01:02the ranch from the air, on the ground,
3:01:04through drivebys, and had spoken with a
3:01:07number of ranch hands and neighbors. The
3:01:09day of the raid, they stormed in with
3:01:11over a 100 agents and found lots of
3:01:14stolen cars, drugs, and weapons. No
3:01:17charges were ever filed against Manson
3:01:19or the family, though, since they
3:01:21couldn't prove any of them were
3:01:23responsible for anything they found,
3:01:25despite a bunch of stolen credit cards
3:01:27that literally fell out of Manson's
3:01:29pocket while he was being arrested.
3:01:32Also, because the cops supposedly waited
3:01:34a day too late to conduct the raid,
3:01:37during which time the warrant for the
3:01:39biggest raid they'd ever conducted timed
3:01:41out, rats. All of this seems to stem
3:01:45from a particularly strange relationship
3:01:48that Manson had with his parole officer,
3:01:50Roger Smith. Smith took a pretty
3:01:53handsoff approach to things and was
3:01:55chilled to a point that was very
3:01:58arguably criminal. During the first year
3:02:01of his freedom, Manson was arrested or
3:02:03detained at least six times, any of
3:02:06which should have caused him to be sent
3:02:08back to prison. However, in each case,
3:02:11Smith advocated for him, claiming that
3:02:13he was making positive progress. It gets
3:02:16even weirder, though. Manson's move to
3:02:19hate Ashberry was apparently Smith's
3:02:21idea. And in his reports, he claimed
3:02:24that LSD was turning the once violent
3:02:27criminal into a peaceloving hippie,
3:02:29which is a pretty strange thing to say
3:02:32since A, it wasn't true, and B,
3:02:35possession of LSD is a crime. One
3:02:39possible explanation of this though was
3:02:41that at the time Smith was writing his
3:02:44PhD thesis on the subject of how drugs
3:02:47affected violent gang members. This
3:02:50wasn't the only time Smith encouraged
3:02:52Manson to move either. He tried multiple
3:02:55times to get him approved to move to
3:02:57Mexico, which all failed since, you
3:02:59know, you aren't allowed to do that
3:03:01while on parole. Specifically, Smith
3:03:03wanted Manson to go to Mezzatan, a port
3:03:06city that's a major hub for drug
3:03:08smuggling. Coincidentally, at the time,
3:03:10Smith was doing research on Mexican drug
3:03:12cartels. It's not too surprising then
3:03:15that when he encouraged Manson to move
3:03:17to the Hate, Smith was studying the
3:03:19amphetamine scene there. He was doing
3:03:21his work out of the Hate Ashberry Free
3:03:24Medical Clinic, a volunteer-run clinic
3:03:26set up in the heart of the San Francisco
3:03:28drug scene to provide free health care
3:03:30to those in need of it. Since Smith was
3:03:33spending all of his time there anyways,
3:03:35he suggested to Manson that they hold
3:03:37their parole check-ins at the clinic,
3:03:39making things more convenient for Smith
3:03:41and allowing Manson and his girls to get
3:03:43checked out for STI at the same time.
3:03:46Now, interestingly, we can't actually
3:03:49find any of Smith's amphetamine study.
3:03:52What we do know are two things. It was
3:03:55being funded by the National Institute
3:03:57of Mental Health, which was, say it with
3:03:59me now, a CIA cutout. And also, shortly
3:04:04after Manson was charged for the Tate
3:04:06Labianca murders, there was a break-in
3:04:09at the Hate Ashberry Free Medical
3:04:10Clinic. What's particularly strange
3:04:12about that is that the burglars only
3:04:15took one thing, Roger Smith's documents.
3:04:19Roger wasn't the only spook working at
3:04:21that clinic, either. Just down the hall
3:04:23from him was the office of none other
3:04:26than Lewis Jolan West, who was stationed
3:04:29there while conducting experiments on
3:04:31the residence of a nearby CIA run hippie
3:04:34crash pad. Now, all of this was
3:04:37uncovered by O'Neal. And something that
3:04:39I think really speaks to the quality of
3:04:41his reporting is that while plenty of
3:04:44the other authors whose works I'll be
3:04:46covering would probably consider this a
3:04:48slam dunk, O'Neal makes a big point of
3:04:51saying that he hasn't actually proven
3:04:53anything. The most that we can safely
3:04:55say is that West and Manson probably
3:04:58spent time in the same building. You can
3:05:00definitely point to the clear
3:05:02similarities between MK Ultra techniques
3:05:04and the ways that Manson indoctrinated
3:05:06his followers. Although personally, I'm
3:05:09not too convinced. It seems to me like a
3:05:12lot of this is just kind of classic cult
3:05:15leader behavior. And while the CIA may
3:05:17have made some major refinements, they
3:05:20absolutely didn't invent the wheel.
3:05:22Manson's relationship with the law is
3:05:24way harder to explain away. Although
3:05:27it's also very possible that he was just
3:05:29working for the FBI in some way. No mind
3:05:32control necessary. This is very far from
3:05:34the only example of people tying acts of
3:05:37mass violence to West, though. Another
3:05:39big one happened on April 19th, 1995 at
3:05:439:02 a.m. when a rented rider truck
3:05:46parked in the dropoff zone in front of
3:05:48the Alfred P. Mura federal building in
3:05:50Oklahoma City exploded, destroying the
3:05:53north face of the Mura, damaging 324
3:05:57other buildings in a 16b block radius
3:05:59and killing 168 people with 680 others
3:06:03injured. The man responsible for this,
3:06:06the deadliest act of domestic terrorism
3:06:09in US history, was named Timothy McY.
3:06:12Born in Luckport, New York, as a kid,
3:06:15McVey was bullied in school and
3:06:17responded by basically speedrunning the
3:06:19process of becoming a right-wing
3:06:20[ __ ] From a young age, he was
3:06:22deeply interested in guns survivalism
3:06:25and was an avid reader of Soldier of
3:06:27Fortune magazine. In 1998, he joined the
3:06:31Army where he flourished as what else? A
3:06:34gunner for which he received a bronze
3:06:36star during the Gulf War. After the war,
3:06:39he applied to join the special forces,
3:06:41but dropped out of the assessment course
3:06:43on the second day. From there, he
3:06:45drifted from deadend job to dead-end job
3:06:48while getting really into the gun show
3:06:50community. Like, you know how people
3:06:53will follow bands around to catch each
3:06:55show on their tour? McVey was doing that
3:06:58for gun shows. Before too long, he was
3:07:01writing letters to local papers arguing
3:07:03that taxation is theft. left the NRA
3:07:06because they weren't proun enough for
3:07:08him and started devoting a lot of his
3:07:10time to distributing copies of The
3:07:12Turner Diaries, a neo-Nazi fantasy novel
3:07:16in which the protagonist leads a violent
3:07:18fascist takeover of America. And while
3:07:21none of that's great, things really took
3:07:24a turn over the course of around eight
3:07:26months between August 1992 and April
3:07:291993 with the standoffs between federal
3:07:32law enforcement and apocalyptic nut jobs
3:07:34at Ruby Ridge in Waco, Texas. Both
3:07:37events ended with massive escalations of
3:07:40deadly force by the feds and served as
3:07:42radicalizing incidents for the
3:07:44libertarian crowd McVey belonged to. And
3:07:47so following these attacks, he began to
3:07:50hatch a plan that would take him from
3:07:52handing out copies of the Turner diaries
3:07:54to living it. With the help of two of
3:07:57his army buddies named Terry Nichols and
3:07:59Michael Forier, he constructed a 4,800
3:08:03lb bomb to be delivered on the 2-year
3:08:05anniversary of the Waco massacre to the
3:08:08Mura, which contained the regional
3:08:09offices of the DEA, ATF, and Secret
3:08:12Services. Oh, and also a daycare, which
3:08:16McVey claimed to have not known about.
3:08:18All this is covered and contested in
3:08:21excruciating detail by Wendy S. Painting
3:08:24in her book, Aberration in the Heartland
3:08:27of the Real. A few notes about this
3:08:29book. It's written in a way that begins
3:08:32with the most normal theories about what
3:08:34happened and gradually moves to the
3:08:36craziest, a structure which I have
3:08:39shamelessly stolen for this video. It's
3:08:41meticulously researched and overall a
3:08:44great book, particularly in how it calls
3:08:47into question the FBI's claims that
3:08:49McVey was a lone wolf and not a part of
3:08:51a larger conspiracy. Like at the very
3:08:54least, we know for a fact that he was in
3:08:57contact with people in Elohim City, a
3:09:00private whites only community near the
3:09:02border of Oklahoma and Arkansas with a
3:09:05long history of being used as a place
3:09:07for Nazis to lay low. In particular,
3:09:10McVey seemed to have been running with a
3:09:12neo-Nazi paramilitary gang called the
3:09:15Aryan Republican Army, known for robbing
3:09:18banks and making bombs in order to both
3:09:21fund and help incite a race war. Part of
3:09:24why we know about this is from one of
3:09:26the government's many undercover agents
3:09:29in Elohim City, who claimed under oath
3:09:32that she saw McVey at the compound, but
3:09:35strangely, she wasn't allowed to testify
3:09:38at his trial. Anyways, I highly
3:09:40recommend reading it whether you're
3:09:42interested in learning about the McVey
3:09:44case or you just like to make yourself
3:09:46more insane. With that said, and you
3:09:48might be noticing a bit of a pattern
3:09:50here. While Painting's critique of
3:09:52McVeyy's trial is extremely strong,
3:09:55things get a lot more speculative when
3:09:59it comes to tying him to MK Ultra. To
3:10:03start with, 4 days after the bombing, a
3:10:05former lawyer turned militia advocate
3:10:08named Linda Thompson called the FBI
3:10:10claiming that quote, "Dr. The Louiswis
3:10:13Jollian Jolly West is actually a CIA
3:10:16operative who was responsible for
3:10:18implanting microchips in army personnel
3:10:21in an experiment called MK Ultra and
3:10:24that he had performed a 20inut operation
3:10:27material on McVey in which he implanted
3:10:30a mind control chip which she urged the
3:10:33FBI to remove. Now we aren't starting
3:10:36off very strong here. Thompson was a
3:10:38very deranged conspiracy theorist who
3:10:40painting and even McVey himself
3:10:42acknowledged had spread a ton of
3:10:44misinformation. With that said, the
3:10:46stuff about West was true, even if it
3:10:48had been public knowledge for about 13
3:10:50years at that point. So, let's see if we
3:10:52can back up the rest. I was pretty
3:10:54surprised to find out that there is
3:10:56actually a connection between McVey and
3:10:58West. During the trial, a member of
3:11:00McVeyy's defense team named Andrew
3:11:02Murphy made a call to West to consult
3:11:04him about his client's mental state.
3:11:06specifically dealing with the constant
3:11:08surveillance he was under in jail,
3:11:10something west affirmed that he was very
3:11:12familiar with from his days treating PS.
3:11:16This connection was the result of a
3:11:18referral made by McVeyy's prison
3:11:20therapist and a former student of West's
3:11:22who was actually named John Smith. Turns
3:11:26out that Smith may have had some
3:11:28interesting connections to intelligence
3:11:30himself. Like his teacher, Smith had
3:11:33published a number of papers based on
3:11:35his work treating soldiers, specifically
3:11:37Vietnam vets in Guantanamo Bay Guards.
3:11:40He had also reportedly suggested to
3:11:42McVeyy's defense team, that since their
3:11:45client was being uncooperative, they
3:11:47should apply more psychological pressure
3:11:49to get him to break down and provide
3:11:52more info, which, you know, isn't really
3:11:54something a therapist is supposed to
3:11:56advocate for, regardless of who their
3:11:59patient is. With all that said, I don't
3:12:01know. As Painting herself admits, while
3:12:04there are some weird things here, none
3:12:07of this really amounts to much more than
3:12:09speculation. It's also worth noting that
3:12:12while this doesn't disprove anything,
3:12:15all of this did happen 20 years after MK
3:12:18search supposedly ended. I also have to
3:12:21admit that personally I find this
3:12:23argument to be somewhat undercut by
3:12:25another piece of evidence painting
3:12:27points to that I think is probably the
3:12:29dumbest one I've heard. So apparently a
3:12:32running bit that McVey did was claiming
3:12:35that the army implanted a microchip in
3:12:37his ass while he was serving. While this
3:12:40was pretty obviously a joke, there are
3:12:43several people who knew McVey and
3:12:45claimed that he genuinely believed that
3:12:47this was true.
3:12:49I don't know. I guess I have to admit
3:12:52that I respect the commitment to the
3:12:53bit. But yeah, I really don't think
3:12:56there's any more here. Even if McVy
3:12:58believed that, I don't think that's
3:13:00particularly strong evidence either. So,
3:13:03let's move on to another case. And this
3:13:05one's probably the one that when I told
3:13:08people I was working on this, they asked
3:13:09if I was going to cover the most. Saran
3:13:13Saran. For those not familiar with the
3:13:15details, the assassination of Robert F.
3:13:18Kennedy I took place on June 5th, 1968
3:13:22in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel
3:13:24in LA, in which the jury for the Manson
3:13:26trial would be sequestered one year
3:13:28later. He'd been running as a candidate
3:13:31for the Democratic presidential
3:13:32primaries. While he'd initially been
3:13:35hesitant to challenge LBJ, after his
3:13:37near defeat to McCarthy, RFK decided to
3:13:40throw his hat in the ring at the last
3:13:42moment, running on a popular and
3:13:44innovative campaign focused on
3:13:46progressive platforms like opposition to
3:13:48the Vietnam War, civil rights, social
3:13:51justice, and of course, fierce support
3:13:54for Israel. While the competition was
3:13:56fierce, Bobby Kay's populist message
3:13:59resonated with people. And on what would
3:14:01turn out to be his last [music] night on
3:14:03earth, he won the California primary.
3:14:06After his victory speech at the
3:14:08ambassador, Kennedy was supposed to walk
3:14:10through the ballroom, but was redirected
3:14:12to the hotel kitchen by his security to
3:14:15avoid the massive crowd. While shaking
3:14:17hands with supporters in the kitchen's
3:14:19narrow hallway, a 24year-old man named
3:14:22[music] Saran Saran stepped out from
3:14:24behind an ice machine with a 22 revolver
3:14:27and landed three shots. While the
3:14:30official story claims that Saran's
3:14:32motive was his fierce [music] personal
3:14:34opposition to Zionism as a Palestinian
3:14:37in a lie too big to fail, Lisa Peace
3:14:40outlines her surprisingly plausible
3:14:42theory that he was [music] actually
3:14:44framed. While her theory involves all
3:14:47the usual claims like [music] a second
3:14:49shooter and fabricated evidence, where
3:14:52this really gets interesting for us is
3:14:54that peace also claims that Saran was
3:14:57being controlled through hypnosis.
3:15:00There's a fair bit more meat on this
3:15:02bone than you might think. Like in the
3:15:04cases of Ruby and Shaver, once in
3:15:07custody, Saran seemed to have no memory
3:15:10of the assassination. Saran wasn't drunk
3:15:12or on drugs, didn't have brain damage,
3:15:15and didn't appear to be lying. Both his
3:15:17defense and the interrogators believed
3:15:19that he was telling the truth to the
3:15:21best of his ability. For peace, the
3:15:24explanation is, of course, post-hypnotic
3:15:27amnesia. While this wasn't seriously
3:15:29considered during the trial, in no small
3:15:31part because nobody on either side
3:15:33wanted to feed into another Kennedy
3:15:35assassination conspiracy, peace has no
3:15:38such qualms. She goes on to argue that
3:15:41Saran had been [music] placed into an
3:15:43unusually strong trance state through
3:15:45what she calls deep hypnosis, a type of
3:15:48hypnosis where the entranced person
3:15:51supposedly will not remember any of
3:15:53their actions during the hypnotic state
3:15:55and even forget that they were put under
3:15:57hypnosis at all, unlike the more common
3:15:59light hypnosis where you remember
3:16:01everything. This theory was explored to
3:16:04some extent, [music] and it does
3:16:06definitely seem like Saran was at the
3:16:09very least unusually susceptible to
3:16:11hypnosis. At one point, Saran's defense
3:16:14team actually hypnotized him and found
3:16:16that he was extremely suggestible,
3:16:18entirely forgetting what had happened
3:16:20after waking up. Seems like if you were
3:16:23a shadowy group looking to hypnotize
3:16:26some random guy into taking the fall for
3:16:29your political assassination, Saran
3:16:31would be the type of dude you'd pick.
3:16:34But beyond the hypno assassin stuff,
3:16:36which admittedly is a little kooky,
3:16:39there is plenty of bizarre [ __ ] around
3:16:41the assassination and the ensuing trial.
3:16:44Many witnesses say Saran was with a
3:16:46woman in a polka dot dress with a weird
3:16:49nose. And there's clear evidence of the
3:16:52prosecution doing a bunch of very
3:16:54unethical things in order to claim that
3:16:56she never existed. A former CIA torturer
3:17:00named Sergeant Hank Hernandez
3:17:02interrogated many witnesses, strapping
3:17:05them into a chair under the pretense of
3:17:07a lie detector test and refusing to let
3:17:11them leave until they admitted that
3:17:13they'd never seen the polka dot dress
3:17:15girl. For an example of this, here's an
3:17:18excerpt from an interrogation with a
3:17:2020-year-old woman named Sally Serrano,
3:17:23who Hernandez gave wine to before
3:17:25sending her mother out of the room and
3:17:28then strapping her to a chair for a high
3:17:30pressure lie detector test lasting
3:17:33several hours. Did a girl in a polka dot
3:17:36dress tell you that we have shot
3:17:38Kennedy?
3:17:40A white dress, black polka dots. Did a
3:17:43girl in a white dress with black polka
3:17:46dots tell you we have shot Kennedy? Yes.
3:17:50During the first 19 years of your life,
3:17:52do you remember lying to an FBI agent?
3:17:56No. After Candy was shot, did you lie to
3:18:00an FBI agent? No.
3:18:04Have you tried to answer all my
3:18:06questions truthfully?
3:18:09If possible. This went on and on. Midway
3:18:12through the session, over an hour later,
3:18:15Sarrano is still standing 10 toes down.
3:18:18I know what I saw. You might want to be
3:18:21pushing it off with a smirk on your
3:18:23face, with a smile, but you know that
3:18:25deep down inside I remember seeing the
3:18:29girl. No. No. I'm talking about what you
3:18:32have told here about a person tell you
3:18:35we have shot candy and that's wrong.
3:18:38That's what she said. No, it isn't,
3:18:41Sally. Another hour later, Hernandez
3:18:44finally gets what he's looking for.
3:18:47First, you tell them that the person
3:18:49said, "We shot candy." And now you say
3:18:52you don't know whether they said we or
3:18:54he. Uh-huh. You say that girl is wearing
3:18:57a white dress with black polka dots. Now
3:18:59you know it was a white dress. That's
3:19:01number two. Then you said you saw two
3:19:04people coming down, but there were more
3:19:06than two people coming down. I don't
3:19:09know what happened. I don't know what
3:19:12happened. There were several other
3:19:13witnesses who all corroborated the polka
3:19:16dot girl story, all of whom were
3:19:18pressured to recant. Doesn't really seem
3:19:20like an honest attempt to get to the
3:19:22truth if you ask me. Anyway, I found
3:19:26this book to be a damning indictment of
3:19:28the case against Saran Saran as a whole,
3:19:30but I would definitely stop short of
3:19:33saying that Lisa Piece makes the most
3:19:35convincing case for Saran being a victim
3:19:38of MK Ultra mind control. Don't get me
3:19:41wrong, I do think that it is possible,
3:19:44much more so than I expected going in.
3:19:47That said, she formats her argument in
3:19:49such a way that literally nothing could
3:19:52ever debunk it. Hypnosis is a magic
3:19:55bullet that leads to Saran being
3:19:57innocent no matter what evidence is dug
3:19:59up. He wrote in his journal RFK must
3:20:02die. Someone hypnotized him into doing
3:20:04that. He said that he remembered writing
3:20:07it and gave a reason why he did. Well,
3:20:09you see, victims of deep hypnosis often
3:20:12confabulate stories to explain lost
3:20:15memories. This is kind of a perfect
3:20:18example of what I was talking about with
3:20:20how the Manurion candidate theory can be
3:20:22dangerous since it allows any
3:20:25inconsistencies to be handwaved away.
3:20:27It's also worth noting that for all the
3:20:29faith piece places in the nearly magical
3:20:32power of hypnosis, she never actually
3:20:35talked to any real experts in the field.
3:20:37Instead, her research into hypnosis
3:20:40mainly just consisted of her going to a
3:20:42bunch of hypnosis shows and sometimes
3:20:45cornering the hypnotist after the show
3:20:47to ask a bunch of weird questions. Also,
3:20:50I wasn't really sure where to put this
3:20:52one, so I'm just going to drop it here.
3:20:55MK Ultra is actually connected to one of
3:20:57the most influential books of the new
3:21:00age movement called A Course in
3:21:02Miracles, published in 1976. Supposedly,
3:21:06this book wasn't so much written as it
3:21:08was chneled by a woman named Helen
3:21:11Shookman, who claimed to have had it
3:21:13dictated to her by Jesus Christ himself.
3:21:17There's definitely some nice stuff in it
3:21:19that gives the impression that the
3:21:21course is an adaptation of Christian and
3:21:24transcendental theories through the
3:21:26secular language of psychology. Like how
3:21:29it claims that our separation from one
3:21:31another is an illusion created by the
3:21:33ego which we can overcome through
3:21:36miracles, meaning acts of love and
3:21:38forgiveness. It gets a lot weirder and
3:21:42much worse though. The basic message of
3:21:44the book is that nothing is real except
3:21:47for God who is everything. What that
3:21:50means is that death, time, family,
3:21:53friends, and even our own bodies are all
3:21:56illusions keeping us from this oneness
3:21:58with God. In fact, with regards to our
3:22:01body in particular, a course in miracles
3:22:04claims that all sickness is actually
3:22:06your own fault for not recognizing God's
3:22:09presence and that medicine only makes
3:22:12things worse since you're basically just
3:22:14doubling down. The story of how this
3:22:16wound up being written is that Helen
3:22:18began receiving visions that would
3:22:20become a course in miracles while
3:22:21working at the Colombia Medical School
3:22:24as a research assistant to a man named
3:22:26Bill Thatford. [snorts] The story goes
3:22:28that one night she had a dream telling
3:22:30her about the course in miracles and
3:22:33when she woke up she called Bill. For
3:22:36the next seven years, the two of them
3:22:37worked on this book with Helen visiting
3:22:40Bill's office to tell him what messages
3:22:42she'd received and Bill typing it all
3:22:44out. Also, an interesting detail is that
3:22:47while the official book that was
3:22:49published in 76 supposedly only made
3:22:52slight changes to Helen and Bill's
3:22:54original manuscript, a rough draft was
3:22:57leaked on the internet in the 2000s and
3:22:59contains a lot of references to Helen's
3:23:02personal life, discussing her
3:23:04colleagues, fight she had with her
3:23:06husband, and even provides advice for
3:23:09her buying a new winter coat. [music]
3:23:12Shuckman and Thatford's relationship
3:23:14also comes up a lot. It seems that Helen
3:23:17was in a loveless marriage with her
3:23:18husband Lewis Shuckman and had fallen
3:23:21for her co-scribe Bill. This love was
3:23:24never requited though since Bill was
3:23:26gay. Bearing that context in mind, a lot
3:23:30of the unabridged passages are extremely
3:23:34pointed. For example, and keep in mind
3:23:36that this is supposed to be Jesus
3:23:38talking here. Tell Bill that [ __ ] is
3:23:42sinful only to the extent it is based on
3:23:45the principle of exclusion. [music]
3:23:47Everybody should love everybody. It is
3:23:50wrong to deny the beauty of some souls
3:23:53because of body structures of [music]
3:23:55which you are afraid. Ah, yes. Who could
3:23:58forget Jesus's famous parable about how
3:24:00it's fine to be gay or whatever, but
3:24:02what's [ __ ] up is letting that stop
3:24:04you from pounding Jesus's best friend,
3:24:07Helen Shuckman's back walls. But before
3:24:11you feel too bad for Bill here, let's
3:24:14look into his past a bit. [snorts] It
3:24:16probably won't surprise you to learn
3:24:17that Columbia University was one of the
3:24:19many schools that was involved in MK
3:24:21Ultra experiments. You might also not be
3:24:24surprised to learn that this partnership
3:24:27was confirmed in a 1978 article of the
3:24:30Colombia Daily Spectator, which named
3:24:33William Fetford as a former Colombia
3:24:36Prof, who had been working for the CIA.
3:24:38He also worked with the CIA psychologist
3:24:41Don Giddinger to develop their
3:24:43personality assessment system and
3:24:46received quite a few grants from the
3:24:48Society for the Investigation of Human
3:24:50Ecology by then renamed the Human
3:24:52Ecology Fund. And speaking of which, in
3:24:551957, Bill was a co-author on a paper
3:24:59called Studies in Human Ecology with our
3:25:02old friends Giddinger Hinkle and Wolf.
3:25:05The paper argues that man's relationship
3:25:09to his social environment as perceived
3:25:11by him has a profound effect upon his
3:25:14general health. It influences the
3:25:16development and progression of all forms
3:25:18of illness regardless of their nature
3:25:20and regardless of the influence of other
3:25:23ideological factors. Its effect often
3:25:26far outweighs the influence of changes
3:25:28in the physical environment and the
3:25:30effects of random exposure to pathogenic
3:25:33or noxious agents. As a group, those who
3:25:36are experiencing difficulty in adapting
3:25:38to their social environment have a
3:25:40disproportionate amount of all the
3:25:43illness which occurs among the adult
3:25:45population. Awfully interesting how
3:25:48similar that sounds to a controversial
3:25:50claim made by a certain new age bible,
3:25:53eh? Oh, hello spider. Sorry, this my MK
3:25:56Ultra handler named Spider. Yes, you
3:25:59are. Yes, you are, aren't you? What's
3:26:02more, in a fantastic essay in Harper's,
3:26:04the author Sheila Hedi notes how given
3:26:07the strange translike state Helen
3:26:10received her visions of the book in. It
3:26:13seems possible that Bill could have
3:26:15hypnotized, drugged, or in some way
3:26:18manipulated her into writing it. [music]
3:26:20This is also completely anecdotal, but
3:26:23it's fairly common for people reading
3:26:25the book to report feeling like they
3:26:27were put into a trance of their own. In
3:26:29fact, a friend of mine who told me about
3:26:31this in the first place said that she
3:26:34had to stop reading it because it gave
3:26:36her these like intensely lucid dreams.
3:26:39It's also worth noting that at the time
3:26:42the CIA was actively working to take
3:26:44down the left to stop the civil rights
3:26:47and anti-war movements. And so another
3:26:50theory states that they had gotten into
3:26:52spreading new age beliefs as a way to
3:26:55discredit and defang the radical left.
3:26:58Also, just as a side note, as you can
3:27:01probably guess, this video was a ton of
3:27:03work, and I couldn't have done it alone.
3:27:05Massive shout out to the YouTuber Chill
3:27:07Goblin, who dove into researching this
3:27:10with me. Over the past few months, the
3:27:12two of us had so many just like
3:27:14three-hour long calls at 1:00 a.m.
3:27:16debating every book that I've talked
3:27:18about. If you'd like to see what that
3:27:21looks like, we actually recorded one of
3:27:23these talks about a course in miracles,
3:27:25which you can watch on his second
3:27:27channel, Extra Chill Goblin. Link in the
3:27:29description.
3:27:30>> It's so funny imagining her like, "Yeah,
3:27:34like she's saying this to Bill and she's
3:27:35like, "Yeah, that's what it says.
3:27:37>> I'm sorry. Write that down.
3:27:38>> I I'm just the messenger here." Okay,
3:27:40[laughter] Jesus said it's weird that
3:27:42you will vote.
3:27:43>> I thought it was weird, too.
3:27:44>> I mean, it's what Jesus wants.
3:27:46>> But now it's time for us to head into
3:27:48the [music] deep end. This is of course
3:27:50very far from where the theories end.
3:27:53But once you start digging much deeper,
3:27:56you stop seeing many references to
3:27:58people like Sydney Gotautle or even
3:28:00Allan Delis. Instead, all of a sudden,
3:28:04the MK Ultra theories make a hard left
3:28:07and wind up at the point where basically
3:28:09all conspiracy theories do. Satanic
3:28:13pedile cults. [music] So, how do we get
3:28:16here? There's a couple different
3:28:18versions of this theory, but the basic
3:28:20DNA is that in order to create their
3:28:22Manurion candidates, the CIA wanted to
3:28:25give people [music] disassociative
3:28:27identity disorder or did previously
3:28:29known as split or multiple
3:28:31personalities. This is true. While in
3:28:34some cases, I think it's kind of
3:28:36debatable how literal they were being.
3:28:38As I've covered, implanting a new
3:28:41personality into subjects through
3:28:42hypnosis and whatever else was a major
3:28:45goal. and something they're confirmed to
3:28:48have been experimenting with. Another
3:28:50fact [music] is that while there's no
3:28:52agreed upon definitive cause of DID,
3:28:56severe childhood trauma at the very
3:28:58least massively increases the likelihood
3:29:01of someone developing it. And so if the
3:29:05CIA wanted a supply of people with DID,
3:29:09I'm sure you can see where this is
3:29:11going. If you full send the manurion
3:29:14candid theory, [music] what you wind up
3:29:16with is government-run satanic ritual
3:29:20abuse of children in order to MK altra
3:29:23the victims. The reason why they're
3:29:26supposedly Satanist, by the way, is
3:29:28because it provides cover by making the
3:29:30story less believable, is extra
3:29:33traumatizing for the victims, and I
3:29:35think most of all because they're like
3:29:38evil. So, Satan, most of the evidence
3:29:41for this comes from people who claim to
3:29:44have been victims of it, often claiming
3:29:46to have recovered these memories after
3:29:48being hypnotized. And while I don't find
3:29:51that particularly convincing, we'll be
3:29:54coming back to it later. In terms of
3:29:56some stronger evidence though, we can
3:29:59find that by looking at someone named
3:30:01George Estabbrooks.
3:30:03So, if Jolly West is the guy who the
3:30:06hardcore MK Ultraheads talk about,
3:30:09Esther Brooks is for the real freaks.
3:30:11The chair of the department of
3:30:12psychology at Colgate University from
3:30:151937 to 64, Esther Brooks was a massive
3:30:19proponent of the power of hypnosis with
3:30:21a fair amount of influence. During the
3:30:2430s, he had a series of private
3:30:26correspondences with the head of the
3:30:27FBI, J. Edgar Hoover in which he
3:30:30suggested that the FBI use hypnosis for
3:30:33the interrogation of juvenile
3:30:34delinquents. And then during World War
3:30:37II, he was brought into the Department
3:30:39of War to advise the OSS on the [ __ ]
3:30:41we've been talking about, suggesting the
3:30:44use of hypnotized couriers and spies
3:30:46with multiple personalities. This was
3:30:49all laid out very explicitly in a book
3:30:51Esther Brooks wrote in 1943 simply
3:30:54titled Hypnotism. In it, he devotes a
3:30:58full chapter to the effectiveness of
3:31:00hypnotized spies, saying that we
3:31:03hypnotize our man in, say, Washington.
3:31:06In hypnotism, we give him the message.
3:31:09That message, may we add, can be both
3:31:12long and intricate. A really intelligent
3:31:15individual can memorize a whole book if
3:31:17necessary. Then we start him out for
3:31:20Australia by plane with the instructions
3:31:22that no one can hypnotize him under any
3:31:25circumstances except Colonel Brown in
3:31:28Melbourne. By this device, we overcome
3:31:31two difficulties. It is useless to
3:31:34intercept this messenger. He has no
3:31:36documents and no amount of thirddereeing
3:31:38can extract the information for the
3:31:41information is not in the conscious mind
3:31:44to extract. We could also make him
3:31:47insensitive to pain so that even the
3:31:50third degree would be useless.
3:31:53Secondly, with this hypnotic messenger,
3:31:56we need have no worry about the double
3:31:59cross. In hypnotism, we could build up
3:32:02his loyalty to the point where this
3:32:04would be unthinkable. Besides, he has
3:32:07nothing to tell. Consciously, he has no
3:32:09idea of what he is doing. He's just a
3:32:12civilian with a business appointment in
3:32:14Australia, nothing more. He will give no
3:32:17information [music] for he has none to
3:32:19give. By this device, we could make it
3:32:21much safer to send information when and
3:32:24where the private messenger could be
3:32:26used. He also argues that the
3:32:29dissociative states experienced by
3:32:31people with DID bear a striking
3:32:33resemblance to hypnotic transances and
3:32:36claims that people with DID are
3:32:37therefore extremely susceptible to
3:32:39hypnosis. We know that with hypnosis we
3:32:43can produce multiple personality.
3:32:45Hypnotism is also recognized as the best
3:32:49means to affect a cure. Furthermore,
3:32:51every case of multiple personality which
3:32:54has been subject to a psychologist's
3:32:56experimentation has always turned out to
3:32:59be an excellent hypnotic subject. If he
3:33:02does not prove to be such, we may take
3:33:04it for granted that he is bluffing. So,
3:33:07how seriously should we take this? To
3:33:10figure that out, there's two other
3:33:12questions that need to be answered. If
3:33:14Esther Brooks was ever involved in MK
3:33:16Ultra, and if what he wrote about is
3:33:19actually even possible. When it comes to
3:33:22the first question, things are
3:33:23surprisingly iffy. To start, Esther
3:33:26Brooks absolutely had connections to the
3:33:28intelligence world through the OSS, J.
3:33:31Edgar Hoover, as well as correspondences
3:33:33with a bunch of people who themselves
3:33:35knew people in the CIA or MK Ultra. For
3:33:39example, in 37, thanks to Esther
3:33:41Brooks's recommendation, Hoover met with
3:33:43Dr. Hudson Hogland, who would later
3:33:46write a paper about LSD with Dr. Robert
3:33:49Hyde, who went on to work on MK Ultra
3:33:52sub projects 8, 10, and 63.
3:33:56There's a lot of connections like that
3:33:58that can basically be boiled down to
3:34:00saying that at the very least, he knew
3:34:03people who knew people. So Esther Brooks
3:34:07was very clearly in this world, but we
3:34:09already knew that and it doesn't prove
3:34:11anything. In his book, Ross tries to
3:34:13make this case by pointing to a CIA memo
3:34:16from June 22nd, 1954, which discusses
3:34:21the military applications of hypnosis
3:34:24seems to possibly be written in Esther
3:34:26Brooks's style. And while the author's
3:34:29name is redacted, Ross points out that
3:34:32it looks like the blacked out section
3:34:35with the author's name is the right size
3:34:37to fit the name Estabbrooks. This seems
3:34:41a bit dubious to me, but even if he
3:34:44never actually worked for the CIA, given
3:34:47the fact that he was doing interviews
3:34:49with magazines claiming to be able to
3:34:52get anyone to betray their country using
3:34:55hypnosis, I think it's safe to say that
3:34:58he and his theories were on their radar.
3:35:02The bigger question, though, is of
3:35:04course if the stuff Esther books claim
3:35:06to be able to do is actually real. It
3:35:09seems like the answer to that is
3:35:11probably not. Esther Brooks's theories
3:35:14have been pretty roundly refuted by
3:35:16modern-day psychologists. But also, as
3:35:19you'll remember from the dumbass theory,
3:35:22we have multiple CIA memos directly
3:35:25stating that this doesn't work. In fact,
3:35:28with that proposal for hypnotized spies
3:35:30written by someone who may or may not
3:35:32have 10 letters in their last name,
3:35:35you've actually seen it before as on
3:35:38July 1954,
3:35:40someone responded saying that redacted
3:35:43didn't invent this concept and that
3:35:46they've been unable to reproduce the
3:35:48results outside of a laboratory setting.
3:35:51It's also worth noting that his book on
3:35:54hypnotism, where he explicitly talks
3:35:57about the work he supposedly did with
3:35:59spies in the OSS during World War II,
3:36:01was written for the general public and
3:36:04came out 2 years before the war even
3:36:07ended. It's not that unusual for people
3:36:10in intelligence to reveal things in
3:36:12their memoirs, but that's usually
3:36:14something that's written at the end of
3:36:15their careers and certainly not while
3:36:18the war they're writing about is still
3:36:20going on. Seems a bit fishy to me. I
3:36:25think we also get some reasons to doubt
3:36:27Esther Brooks's massive claims when we
3:36:29look into his backstory. George Esbrooks
3:36:32was born in St. John's New Brunswick in
3:36:341895 and joined the Canadian military to
3:36:37fight in World War I, becoming the
3:36:40youngest commissioned officer in the
3:36:41first Canadian division at just 19. His
3:36:45promising military career was cut short,
3:36:47however, when he was exposed to mustard
3:36:49gas in ERA and then spent the rest of
3:36:52the war recovering from tuberculosis in
3:36:54a Swiss sanitarium.
3:36:56With his bright military career cut
3:36:58short, it seems to me like Estherbrook
3:37:01started looking for different ways of
3:37:03making himself seem useful to the US
3:37:06intelligence community [music] during
3:37:08World War II and beyond. While we've
3:37:12already established that we shouldn't
3:37:13trust anything the CIA says, I think
3:37:16that should also apply to people who
3:37:18wanted to join the CIA, too. Now,
3:37:21honestly, I don't know, though. Even
3:37:24with the potential issues with Esther
3:37:26Brooks's research during this time, the
3:37:28CIA was happy to work with any quack
3:37:31with a passing interest in drugs or
3:37:33hypnosis. And then here comes this guy
3:37:35who literally wrote a book about exactly
3:37:38what they're interested in. And yet, the
3:37:40only way I can tie him to the CIA is by
3:37:43playing six degrees of Sydney Gotautle.
3:37:46To me, it kind of feels equally possible
3:37:49that they either destroyed all the files
3:37:51that mentioned his name or that he was
3:37:54just such a bullshitter that even the
3:37:56CIA didn't want anything to do with him.
3:37:59Coming back to the satanic cults though,
3:38:01as far as I can tell, the origin of the
3:38:03satanic ritual abuse MK Ultra theory
3:38:07goes back to a woman named Kathy O'Brien
3:38:10who realized that she and her daughter
3:38:12were sexually abused in pedic satanic
3:38:16rituals carried out by her own parents
3:38:19in order to turn her into a slave of the
3:38:22deep state and that her husband was her
3:38:24handler. She came to this revelation
3:38:27thanks to a business associate of her
3:38:29husband's named Mark Euan Phillips who
3:38:32claimed to have also worked for the
3:38:34State Department and the CIA and
3:38:37recognized what had been done to Kathy
3:38:39and then freed her by helping her
3:38:42recover these suppressed memories using
3:38:44hypnosis.
3:38:46Coincidentally, soon after this, O'Brien
3:38:48left her husband and married Phillips.
3:38:51In 1995, Phillips and O'Brien wrote the
3:38:54book Transformation of America, a sort
3:38:57of biography of O'Brien, telling the
3:39:00story of how she and her daughter were
3:39:02subjected to these techniques, which
3:39:04they claimed to be part of a top secret
3:39:07MK Ultra spin-off called Project
3:39:10Monarch. Something that's kind of funny
3:39:12about that book is that Philillips
3:39:14claims that Cathy's testimony is backed
3:39:17up by declassified documents, but
3:39:20nothing they cite is in any way proof of
3:39:23Project Monarch. Like the only thing
3:39:25that they show that even has the word
3:39:28Monarch in it is just a letter from Bob
3:39:30Dole replying to them and saying that
3:39:33he'll send their letters over to Al
3:39:35Gore. The other big source of this
3:39:37theory is the book Program to Kill by
3:39:41David McGawen. I know this isn't saying
3:39:44much, but this is a much better book
3:39:46than Transformations of America. For one
3:39:48thing, Maccgawan uses sources that
3:39:51actually exist, which is always nice. He
3:39:54also goes into the connections to the
3:39:56Phoenix program and makes a big point of
3:39:59criticizing how the media will paint
3:40:01violent crimes as the result of a lone
3:40:03crazy person rather than being caused by
3:40:06structural problems, which I agree with.
3:40:09Where I would criticize him though is
3:40:11that I think that sometimes he goes a
3:40:14bit too far in the other direction. Like
3:40:17the thesis of this book is that
3:40:19literally all serial killers are
3:40:22menurian candidates created by the CIA
3:40:25to make society less trusting in order
3:40:28to usher in authoritarianism. That's not
3:40:31an exaggeration. Here's how he puts it.
3:40:33With the possible exception of school
3:40:35and workplace shootings, nothing better
3:40:37serves to facilitate the promotion of a
3:40:40law and order agenda than the plausible
3:40:43fear aroused by the sociopathic killer.
3:40:46A fear that propels the population into
3:40:49an every man for himself mentality.
3:40:51Anyone, after all, could be a serial
3:40:53killer hiding behind a mask of civility.
3:40:56A co-orker, a friend, a neighbor, even a
3:41:00family member. The Phoenix program has
3:41:02been referenced a number of times in
3:41:04past chapters and its relevance to the
3:41:06discussion cannot be overstated. Phoenix
3:41:09was by design a psychological warfare
3:41:12operation. Its goal was quite literally
3:41:14to scare the hell out of the Vietnamese
3:41:16people to such an extent that their will
3:41:19would be broken and they would seed to
3:41:21the demands of their wouldbe oppressors.
3:41:23The techniques employed were barbaric.
3:41:26Victims of the program were not merely
3:41:28assassinated. They were frequently
3:41:30raped, tortured, mutilated, dismembered,
3:41:33and left posed in grotesque displays for
3:41:36their fellow villagers and family
3:41:38members to find. The crime scenes of the
3:41:41Phoenix program were, in other words,
3:41:43indistinguishable from the crime scenes
3:41:45of American serial killers. The ultimate
3:41:48goal, and one we are rapidly
3:41:50approaching, is the destruction of all
3:41:53social bonds and the obliteration of any
3:41:56remaining sense of community. the
3:41:58complete atomization of society and the
3:42:00police state, needless to say, has
3:42:03advanced marketkedly in the last few
3:42:05decades. I don't know. Not to make this
3:42:08video about how evil the CIA is
3:42:10political, but [snorts] it seems to me
3:42:13like America is well on its way to
3:42:15becoming an authoritarian police state
3:42:17now without the use of MK Ultra serial
3:42:20killers. Also, for someone who's making
3:42:23such a massive claim, I'd like to see a
3:42:26bit more rigor in his analysis. McGowan
3:42:28basically just searches the backgrounds
3:42:30of murderers for any possible connection
3:42:33to the military and when he finds it
3:42:35claims that that's irrefutable proof
3:42:37that they're brainwashed assassins.
3:42:39But also, for someone who's so
3:42:42suspicious of official narratives, I
3:42:45kind of wish he'd apply that same
3:42:46skepticism to any claims that went
3:42:49against the official story, too. A good
3:42:51example of this is how McGawan talks
3:42:53about the case of Henry Lee Lucas. So,
3:42:56Lucas was born in 1936 to an extremely
3:43:01abusive mother. Their relationship
3:43:03reached a head in 1960 when Lucas
3:43:06murdered her during an argument. While
3:43:09he claimed that it was self-defense, the
3:43:11court disagreed and sentenced him to 20
3:43:14years in prison, though he was parrolled
3:43:16after only 10. Once released, Lucas
3:43:19became a drifter and befriended Otis
3:43:21Tulle. The two traveled across America
3:43:24together with Tulle's 11-year-old niece,
3:43:26Becky Powell, who Lucas began sexually
3:43:29abusing regularly. This went on for 40
3:43:33years until in 1982, Powell and Lucas
3:43:36had a fight resulting in him stabbing
3:43:39her to death and then doing the same to
3:43:41Kate Rich, an 80-year-old woman who had
3:43:44given Lucas and Powell a place to stay.
3:43:47Also, um, apparently he [ __ ] the
3:43:51bodies of all three of his victims. The
3:43:53following year, he was arrested for
3:43:55unlawful possession of a firearm. And
3:43:57when questioned about recent missing
3:43:59person's cases, Lucas confessed to the
3:44:02murders of both Powell and Rich. But
3:44:05then Henry notices how much better the
3:44:08cops treat him when he confesses.
3:44:11They're nice to him, take him out of his
3:44:13cell, and even buy him some fast food.
3:44:15And so he decides to do it some more.
3:44:19Pretty soon, he's confessing to every
3:44:21unsolved murder the cops put in front of
3:44:24him. Police from all over the country
3:44:27come to interview him to clear out their
3:44:29old cold cases, too. And before too
3:44:32long, Henry Lee Lucas had claimed to
3:44:35have committed over 600 murders, earning
3:44:38himself the nickname the confession
3:44:40killer. Now, McGowan covers all of this
3:44:43stuff, but then goes into how while in
3:44:46prison, Lucas was visited by a minister
3:44:48and author named Max Call, who conducted
3:44:52extensive interviews with Lucas, which
3:44:54form the basis for Call's book, Hand of
3:44:57Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story. The
3:45:00main focus of the book is Lucas's claim
3:45:02that he was indoctrinated into a satanic
3:45:05paramilitary pedophile cult that
3:45:08operates as a secret mobile training
3:45:10base in the Florida Everglades. Lucas
3:45:13claimed that he was sent to this base
3:45:15for training to become an elite
3:45:17international assassin and child
3:45:19trafficker, but that when they saw how
3:45:22good he was with a knife, they actually
3:45:24asked him to teach the class. Naturally,
3:45:27McGawan found all of this completely
3:45:29convincing, saying, "What are we to make
3:45:33of Henry's bizarre tale of being a
3:45:36contract killer? And what of Henry's
3:45:38other stories, including the one about
3:45:40being a close friend of Jim Jones of the
3:45:43People's Temple?" Henry claimed on
3:45:45numerous occasions that it was he who
3:45:48was taken on a chartered plane to Guyana
3:45:51to personally deliver the cyanide to
3:45:53Jones that was allegedly used in the now
3:45:56infamous Jonestown massacre. What are we
3:45:59to make of such stories? Could Henry
3:46:02have been telling the truth about being
3:46:04a contract killer? And if so, did the
3:46:06contracts he was receiving have some
3:46:08kind of government connection? No. These
3:46:11are the most obvious lies imaginable.
3:46:13And they're coming from a guy who's so
3:46:15famous for lying for attention that he's
3:46:18more known for that than for being a
3:46:20serial killing neckliac pedile.
3:46:24Obviously, you shouldn't believe this.
3:46:27With that off my chest, at the start of
3:46:30this section, I promised you a
3:46:31conspiracy theory, and you're going to
3:46:33get it. See, I do actually think that
3:46:36there is a connection between the
3:46:38Satanic Panic and MK Ultra, although not
3:46:42the one that McGawan is arguing for. For
3:46:45those who don't know, the Satanic Panic
3:46:47was a widespread moral panic in the 80s
3:46:49and 90s based on the belief that satanic
3:46:52cults were committing horrific crimes
3:46:54like the ones I've been describing in a
3:46:56lot of this section. This was mostly
3:46:58spread through daytime talk shows and is
3:47:01now largely remembered as the time Oprah
3:47:03convinced a lot of parents to throw out
3:47:05their kids Magic cards and Iron Maiden
3:47:07albums.
3:47:08>> AC/DC, some people say that stands for
3:47:11Antichrist Devil's Child. Does it?
3:47:14>> One of the main catalysts for this was a
3:47:16book called Michelle Remembers by the
3:47:18titular Michelle Smith and her therapist
3:47:20turned husband Lawrence Pastor. The
3:47:23story goes that in 73, Smith began
3:47:26seeing Pastor in order to treat the
3:47:28trauma of her recent miscarriage.
3:47:30However, Pastor realized that there was
3:47:32more to this during a session in which
3:47:34Smith allegedly screamed for 25 minutes
3:47:37straight, [music] quote, in the voice of
3:47:39a 5-year-old. Through over 600 hours of
3:47:43intensive therapy, as well as several
3:47:46literal exorcisms, Pastor was eventually
3:47:49able to discover what he believed to
3:47:51[music] be the true cause of Michelle's
3:47:53trauma, satanic ritual abuse.
3:47:56Apparently, beginning in 1954, at the
3:47:58age of five, Michelle Smith was abused
3:48:01by members of the Church of Satan in a
3:48:03series of rituals, one of which lasted
3:48:05for 81 days. While these memories had
3:48:09been repressed for all these years,
3:48:11thanks to Pastor's work, Michelle
3:48:14Remembered, all of this and so much more
3:48:17is detailed in the book, which they
3:48:19co-authored and released in 1980. The
3:48:22two got married 6 years after, although
3:48:24there's hints that something was going
3:48:26on for a fair bit longer. There's
3:48:29actually a lot of points where Michelle
3:48:31Remembers takes on the tone of a romance
3:48:33novel and overall never misses an
3:48:36opportunity to describe how attractive
3:48:38both Smith and Pastor are. Honestly, the
3:48:42whole book is a pretty wild read.
3:48:45There's a lot of paranormal stuff in it.
3:48:48Like the literal devil is a pretty major
3:48:50character in it and also he always
3:48:53speaks in rhymes. But the thing I'm most
3:48:56interested in is how Warrants Pastor
3:48:58claims to have uncovered Michelle's lost
3:49:01memories. While the book is kind of
3:49:04vague about the specific methods he
3:49:06used, they seem to have involved using
3:49:08hypnosis to regress Michelle to the age
3:49:11of five, recording what she said, and
3:49:14then playing it back to her while she
3:49:16was still in a suggestible state. And
3:49:19hey, doesn't that sound kind of
3:49:22familiar? I thought so, too. So I
3:49:25decided to look into Lawrence Pastor's
3:49:26background a bit. And sure enough, from
3:49:291964 to 1965, he was getting his PhD in
3:49:33psychology at,
3:49:35wouldn't you guess, McGill University.
3:49:39Now, I've looked pretty hard, and as far
3:49:42as I can tell, there's no known
3:49:43connections between Lawrence Pastor and
3:49:45the CIA. However, it is a fact that the
3:49:49two most influential people in McGill's
3:49:51psychology program during the time that
3:49:53he was studying there were Donald O.
3:49:55Heb, who was the head of the psychology
3:49:58department, and Euan Cameron, who ran
3:50:00McGill's Allen Memorial Mental Hospital
3:50:03and was the president of both the
3:50:05American and Canadian Psychological
3:50:07Associations.
3:50:09Given that even if he has no connections
3:50:11to any shady government agencies, just
3:50:14given the way that academic institutions
3:50:17work, it's not at all a stretch to say
3:50:20that Pastor would have been deeply
3:50:22influenced by Heb and Cameron's work. A
3:50:25fact that is very clear to see in how he
3:50:28treated Michelle Smith. For another
3:50:31example of this, let's come back to our
3:50:33old friend Colin A. Ross. Like I said,
3:50:38while this book is for the most part
3:50:40pretty solid, all of Ross' other books
3:50:42are about some combination of psychic
3:50:45powers, disassociative identity
3:50:47disorder, and conspiracies. What I found
3:50:50most interesting about him, though, is
3:50:52the MD at the end of his name. Like,
3:50:56what's it like to have a guy like this
3:50:58as a doctor?
3:51:00Well, Ross is actually the former
3:51:02president of the International Society
3:51:05for the Study of Trauma and
3:51:06Disassociation, a nonprofit made up of
3:51:09health professionals most known for
3:51:11playing a role in the satanic panic by
3:51:14advocating for the practice of
3:51:16hypnotizing patients to uncover
3:51:18repressed memories of SRRA and symptoms
3:51:22of DID, which they naturally see as
3:51:24synonymous with one another. It's also
3:51:27worth noting that while I'm using their
3:51:29preferred term by saying that they
3:51:32recovered these memories, many of their
3:51:34former patients have argued in court
3:51:37that these memories were in fact
3:51:39implanted. Something that as the CIA
3:51:42discovered during Project Artichoke is
3:51:45very easy to do. said lawsuits have been
3:51:48levied against a number of high-level
3:51:50members of the ISSTD,
3:51:52generally involving former patients
3:51:55alleging that they were made to wrongly
3:51:57believe that they had been ritually
3:51:59abused by their families. That's far
3:52:02from all. Their first president, George
3:52:03Greavves, had his medical license
3:52:05revoked for having sex with his patients
3:52:08while they were hypnotized. To be fair,
3:52:11I should also say that the ISSTD has
3:52:14roundly denied all these allegations,
3:52:17claiming that they are deep state scops.
3:52:20When it comes to Ross himself, he's been
3:52:22sued by two former patients named Roma
3:52:25E. Hart and Martha Antio. In the case of
3:52:29Hart, not only did he convince her that
3:52:32she had disassociative identity disorder
3:52:34and that she was ritually abused by her
3:52:36[music] parents, but also that she had
3:52:39been abducted by aliens and impregnated
3:52:42with a half alien, halfhuman hybrid. In
3:52:45her sworn affidavit, Hart describes Ross
3:52:48putting her on extreme amounts of a
3:52:50benzoazipene derivative called Halian.
3:52:53When she began complaining about adverse
3:52:55side effects and that she was becoming
3:52:57addicted to it, Ross told her that that
3:53:00wasn't possible because Hian has no side
3:53:02effects and isn't addictive, which for
3:53:05those of you who don't know, that's
3:53:08completely untrue. Rather than taking
3:53:10these concerns seriously, Ross blamed
3:53:12all of Hart's negative reactions to the
3:53:15drugs on her supposed did. [music] When
3:53:18she started having convulsions between
3:53:20doses, she was told that one of her
3:53:22personalities was epileptic. When her
3:53:25blood pressure fluctuated wildly from 50
3:53:28over 40 to 80 over 60, she was told that
3:53:31each of her personalities had a
3:53:33different blood pressure. When she had
3:53:36suicidal ideiation, she was told that
3:53:39that was because one of her
3:53:40personalities was evil and wanted to
3:53:43kill her.
3:53:44>> [music]
3:53:44>> And when she tried to find someone else
3:53:47to treat her, Ross lied to other doctors
3:53:50saying that she was a heroin addict so
3:53:52they wouldn't take her and then lied to
3:53:54Hart herself by claiming that he never
3:53:57gave her any drugs at all. As for Martha
3:54:00Antio, she came under Ross' care while
3:54:03hospitalized after a suicide attempt in
3:54:061992. After a while receiving treatment
3:54:09from Ross and his associates, which
3:54:11included regular exorcisms, Taio became
3:54:15convinced that she had been ritually
3:54:17abused by most of her family members,
3:54:20and also that she'd given birth to
3:54:22several babies who her parents had made
3:54:25her kill and eat. She found this
3:54:28particularly strange at first, given
3:54:29that she had had a hyctomy at a very
3:54:32young age. However, she was eventually
3:54:35convinced that this was true by Ross and
3:54:38Co. and then followed their instructions
3:54:40to cut her family out of her life and
3:54:42also relinquish her parental rights to
3:54:45her three adopted children who she had
3:54:48come to believe that she was a danger
3:54:50to. At this point, we might ask how Ross
3:54:52was able to get his patients to believe
3:54:55all this stuff. While we don't have
3:54:57complete accounts of his treatment
3:54:59methods, owing in part to how unreliable
3:55:02his former patients memories were once
3:55:04he was done with them, from what we can
3:55:06piece together, it seems pretty
3:55:08familiar. His patients seemed to become
3:55:11willing to accept anything he told them,
3:55:14largely through a combination of drugs
3:55:16and hypnosis. [snorts] Tile also claims
3:55:19that when she was uncooperative, Ross
3:55:21would have her confined in his so-called
3:55:24quiet room. Something that's also
3:55:26important to note here is that it's
3:55:28pretty hard to write off the
3:55:30similarities between these treatments
3:55:32and straight up CIA torture methods
3:55:34since Ross and his fellow members of the
3:55:37ISSTD were extremely aware of MK Ultra.
3:55:41We even have testimony from Taio's
3:55:44former husband where he describes Ross
3:55:46working on this book while treating her.
3:55:49And so I'd say that that's my big
3:55:53criticism of the Manurion candidate
3:55:56theory. It's not so much about the weird
3:55:58theories or lack of evidence, but that
3:56:01the biggest believers, you know, the
3:56:03ones who claim to really care about the
3:56:05victims of this stuff, seem to have time
3:56:08and time again gone down this rabbit
3:56:11hole and come out the other side having
3:56:14decided that they'd like to use these
3:56:16techniques themselves.
3:56:19For me personally, while which one of
3:56:21these theories I tend to land on can
3:56:24change based on the day, after [snorts]
3:56:26months of working on this, the main
3:56:29thing that I've come away from this with
3:56:31is a deep horror and disgust at what was
3:56:34done. And so, regardless of what these
3:56:37people may claim to believe, I feel
3:56:40pretty comfortable painting anyone who's
3:56:42cribbing out of the notebooks of
3:56:44Gotautle, Cameron, [snorts] or West with
3:56:46the same brush.
3:56:49Thanks for watching.
3:56:59[music]
3:57:10[music]
3:57:21>> [music]
3:57:22>> Heat. Heat.
3:57:27[music]
3:58:00>> [music]
3:58:07[music]
3:58:10>> Heat up
3:58:14[music]
3:58:15here.
3:58:22[music]
3:58:55>> [music]
3:59:02[music]
3:59:06>> Heat
3:59:07[music]
3:59:10up here.
3:59:12[music]
3:59:22Heat.
3:59:30[music]
3:59:40[music]
3:59:40Heat.

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