===TRANSCRIPT START=== Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're diving into a real life government horror story that has kept us up at night since the very first time we heard about it. And this topic is important, because while many of you are gearing up to binge part one of the Stranger Things finale, you probably don't know that what you're watching is based partially on secret government experiments that actually happened. That's right, if you take nothing else away from today's episode, go tell your friends that Stranger Things is real. Or some of it anyway. Because on today's episode, we're going to pull back decades of secrecy to shed light on one of the actual top secret programs that inspired one of the most popular shows in the world. The CIA's notorious mind control experiments, known as Project MK Ultra. And we're not going in alone. We're bringing along the dudes from Believing the Bizarre to keep us sane, unless they've already been compromised. In which case, this entire episode is just one more piece of the cover up. So turn up the volume, listen closely for your clandestine orders, and get ready to go mad. This is the secret history of MK Ultra.

What are we scared?

When are we all the time? Now it is time for. Time for.

Scared All The Time.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. It's your boys, Chris and Ed, leading up to Thanksgiving week. We have a very cool episode for you with our buds in Believing the Bizarre, where we are leading up to the release of the first part of the last season of Stranger Things. We've got an episode this week and next week that are both going to be themed around Stranger Things style topics. And this one's great. I do want to warn you, even though some of you may have noticed that Frog Plus mode is no more.

I mean, yeah, for now.

My frogs very much are still alive and well.

Very much are more.

In this episode, you will hear them quite loudly. If you hear a high pitched bell noise, that's not your car falling apart or your house caving in. That is my frogs being obnoxious. I had to record in a different room than I usually do so that Felix could get some sleep and not be woken up by my shouting, which is too close to his room. So there are frog noises in this episode, but I think it's charming. Hopefully you will enjoy and not want to crash your vehicle the way that Ed does every time he hears them. Yep. I also just want to say our condolences to the Astonishing Legends family. I don't know if you guys listen to Astonishing Legends. I assume a lot of you do, but Scott and Forrest have been going through some really difficult personal times. So just keep them in your thoughts and support the show however you can. The whole Astonishing Legends network has been kind of coming together to try to do what we can for the guys, but they rock. They're the reason we're here. So, you know, any way you could support them, definitely do that. And with that, Ed, should we do some five star reviews?

Yeah, sure.

You know them, you love them. If you leave a five star review for Scared All The Time, there is a chance that we will read it on the show. We've got some good ones to read this week. My favorite is from Jarrett B. Five stars. Review is titled Unsolved Mysteries 3000. So you've nailed two of my absolute favorite things in one phrase, and you're comparing us to them. You're saying the best way to describe this podcast is Unsolved Mysteries meets Mystery Science Theater 3000. Keep conquering scary subjects through humor and we'll keep listening. Nice. So thank you. Thank you, Jarrett B so much. Truly that exact description means a lot to me. So thank you for pulling that one out. Ed, do you want to read Five Stars Comfort Podcast?

Sure. Yeah. You know, I can barely read. Let's see. Five Stars Comfort Podcast by Kraft Mac and Cheese.

Comfort food.

Yeah. It's like it's comfort in their big comfort based lifestyle. This podcast feels like I'm sitting with my friends drinking beer and talking about our greatest fears. It's just very comforting and familiar. And I find myself laughing out loud, which is unheard of for me with podcast.

Great.

Yeah. I don't know what the plural of podcast is, but I'm happy you're having fun. It continues. I found it through Astonishing Legends, my top podcast. And so I'm glad I found this one also. Okay, cool. So they're part of the part of the crew here, part of the Astonishing Legends network supporter.

Yeah. Although I'll tell you, I love Astonishing Legends. Not sure that's really a laugh out loud podcast. So you can see why maybe you're not chuckling along with Scott and Forrest listening to Astonishing Legends.

You'll certainly learn more over there though.

Oh, definitely. But we're going to be giving you an episode on Thanksgiving Day next week.

That's huge for us.

Well, it's huge for us. It's going to be honestly, honestly, huge for you, listener. Hell yeah. You're going to get an episode on Thanksgiving Day to tune out your annoying family. And we will do our thanks on that episode for our official Thanksgiving thanks. But until then, visit our Patreon, patreon.com/scared all the time.

Give us something to be thankful for next week.

Give us something to be thankful for next week. And until then, tune in to our episode on MK Ultra with Believing the Bizarre. As listeners of this show know, one of my deepest fears is losing control of my own mind. And MK Ultra is basically that fear weaponized by the government. We've touched on the topic before. Go listen to our episode on gang stalking and our episode on plain old regular stalkers, which both feature a little MK Ultra crossover. But we've never held a magnifying glass up to the whole scope and history of the project. But before we get into that, I wanna take a second to welcome our guests for this episode. Tyler and Charlie from Believing the Bizarre. Thanks for joining us guys. How you doing?

Good, thanks for having us. Appreciate being here.

Yeah, I was on the way up here and I was listening to some music. I saw some beautiful clouds in the sky. And then I saw a man in my back seat. I'm just kidding.

It was a man in the back seat?

No, it was a man in the back seat.

Oh, thank God.

It was a stalking joke.

I gotcha, I gotcha. Well, I'm glad you guys made it all right. We've been guests on your show before, but for any listeners who haven't checked you out yet, tell them a little about Believing the Bizarre and where they can find you.

Yeah, so we are a paranormal podcast. We cover UFOs, aliens, cryptids, hauntings. We have listener submitted stories that people, you know, real life experiences our listeners have had that we talk about. And then at the end of every episode, we rate whether or not we find it believable, which can feel a little harsh when it's a listener submitted encounter.

Because it's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's like how close was I to that actual experience?

Right, right. And you want to give your listeners the benefit of the doubt, but if they're selling you some bullshit, what are you going to do?

Well, you know, we did have somebody one time send us a story how it was like they were in this clearing, this like circular clearing in the woods and they did like a fist fight with a skinwalker. And in that story, it was like, well, what am I? What am I supposed to do?

Obviously, it was wild.

That's the yeah.

Yeah. That's the only reason I went unbelievable is because I don't believe it was a perfect.

So, yeah, very tough to build in the middle of the woods.

You can find us on Apple, Spotify, mostly Spotify, Crunchy Internet Audio, wherever you're listening to this podcast, wherever you're listening to this exact podcast.

Audible.

You could do some.

We're probably there.

Yeah, I also saw that recently. Yeah, like that. I think we're all on Audible, maybe. I don't know how we're on Audible now, but it doesn't seem Audible doesn't pay us books.

Now, boys, we're just one long book. Many. It doesn't always enter intersect, but it's just one long crazy book.

Absolutely.

I wonder how many hours actually. Imagine if somebody did download like your entire current existing catalog and they're like, all right, it's only like four hundred and ninety five hours.

It would be probably shorter than yours and all of ours would be shorter than Astonishing Legends. But yeah, but it was all too long. Genuinely.

Yeah.

Generally just too much.

So how familiar are you guys with MK Ultra? Is this a topic that you guys have covered on Believing the Bizarre at all?

We just did the Montauk project and we touched on MK Ultra, but we have not done MK Ultra. I've never researched MK Ultra. My first exposure was some of my conspiracy friends seeing Kanye videos in 2015, 2016 and being like, look at the way his emotions are. Look at, he's been manipulated. He's in MK Ultra. That was the first time I ever heard it, where I was like, what is this thing? At the time, I didn't even know it was a real thing that actually happened. I was just like, conspiracy theorists wondering why certain celebrities behave in such unusual ways.

I saw Stranger Things and that was about it.

Yeah, I mean, that's part of why we're covering the topic today. And if anyone's interested in the real life stories behind Stranger Things, they should go listen to your Montauk Project episode, because that's another one that even maybe more so than MK Ultra had a huge impact on the creation and lore of Stranger Things. I think, actually, Ed, correct me on this if I'm wrong, but when the Duffer Brothers took the show out initially, it was called Montauk, right?

It was called Montauk. Yeah, it was the name of the show.

Yeah, it was.

Our producer told us that because he's like a super nerd.

It was, that's probably too on the nose, though. They were like, we gotta mix it up a little bit.

This isn't New York, it's Indiana.

Honestly, it's really smart, though, because whenever I hear of a movie or a book or a TV show where the title is something, like a phrase people say, it's kind of like gold, right? Because then you get people thinking about it just in everyday conversation. Like if someone just says the phrase, there are stranger things then, you know, that immediately probably evokes the show.

Yeah.

My first knowledge of MK Ultra, also using a saying that people say, is the movie Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson.

Yep, it's also in there.

Speaking of, why do celebrities act that way? Mel Gibson.

Well.

Yeah, but that's like, I think that's like genuinely talked about, like they say MK Ultra, like in the movie, right?

Yes, yes. Although Mel Gibson's strange activities are based, I think, more on grain liquor than.

Oh, sure.

Government experiments.

Well, rye is a liquor, isn't it? Catcher in the Rye?

Yes.

Isn't like rye a type of booze?

It is. And I gotta say, one of the things we won't get to in this episode, probably, because the history of MK Ultra is long and strange and could be a multi-part episode, which we know our listeners don't like, so we won't get into it. But Catcher in the Rye has been connected to a number of assassins who may or may not have been manipulated by MK Ultra. But I also know from going on the Believing the Bizarre website before this episode that it happens to be one of your guys' favorite books.

That's me?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not me.

I love that book.

You may have been secretly trained to come assassinate us on this program.

Probably. I mean, probably at this point.

He would take any excuse to go to LA.,

so.

Any reason.

I was about to say, like, MK Ultra didn't see remote work coming, so now, like, no one's in the same room anymore.

Deeply rooted in 11th grade. They got me.

Speaking of 11, I do just to make the connection crystal clear for anyone who needs a reminder or hasn't watched Stranger Things. The reason MK Ultra is in the show is because I believe, if my if my mythos here is correct, that the girl 11, the main girl on the show, the history is that her mom was a participant in MK Ultra, and that's what led to 11 being born with these psychic abilities that are kind of the center of the show.

So I couldn't tell you I've never seen it.

So I just watched the first season again, actually, I'm like in preparation for that.

Yeah.

And I remember that specifically.

Yeah, it's it's good. I think it loses some of those pieces a little bit more as the show goes on. I need to catch back up. But MK Ultra has become a nearly mystical McGuffin that intersects with almost every other conspiracy out there, because we know for a fact that this program was real, but we don't really know how successful it was, which leaves this huge gap of knowledge for people to fill in with their own thoughts and feelings and guesses about what exactly MK Ultra did. Like, I think it's kind of like, if you could imagine somebody finding a trove of documents that revealed that the US government knew there was 100% definitely for sure a second shooter in the Kennedy assassination, but no one knows who it was or why they were involved, the conversation would become insane very quickly because you could prove that something very sus happened, but from there it's just up to your imagination, it becomes very hard to argue, you know, what's real and what's not. And that's sort of what's happened with MK Ultra. But this episode is not about my conspiratorial Kennedy fantasies. It is about the program that forces even the most normie naysayer to admit that the government is capable of doing some truly heinous things in the name of national security. So we'll start with a quick introduction to what the hell MK Ultra even is or supposedly was. Straight from the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which tells us, MK Ultra was an illegal mind control research program that the US Central Intelligence Agency operated between 1953 and 1964. The CIA conducted experiments using high doses of LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and sensory deprivation on subjects who often had no idea they were part of a covert test. The ultimate goal was to find a way to erase the memory and then control the mind as a tool in fighting the Cold War. Now, I chose a definition from as beige of a source as Encyclopedia Britannica specifically because once you go any deeper on this subject, it branches off into too many directions and it's hard to find anything else that people can agree on. So from a 30,000 foot view, that is what we're talking about when we reference MK Ultra, a top secret mind control program run on unassuming US citizens.

Crunchy internet audio.

Interesting about that that I think maybe a lot of people don't consider is that that's not a theory. Like that happened. Like you can give the years 53 to 64, right? Like for 11 years, it's not like, well, some people think that or some people say that. No, like, no, it happened.

Yes.

It was done.

And we'll get into the how we know it happened later. But the way that we know it happened also is, is, you know, leaves a lot of room to think about what the government may have actually successfully covered up over the years. Because there's only a very, a slim or a small error that made it possible for us to learn about any of this. But before we get to that, let's talk about why the hell anybody would do this. Because the answer is rooted in equal parts paranoia and patriotism. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans started hearing a scary new term being thrown around by military brass, psychologists and soldiers coming back from the Korean War. Brainwashing. It was the explanation for why some of these fellas seemed to be coming out of prison camps with warm feelings towards their captors. Perhaps even a belief, hear me, that we were the bad guys.

Not America. You unpatriotic motherfuckers.

Exactly. Exactly. It shocked people. And according to smithsonian.com, Quote, Journalist Edward Hunter was the first to sound the alarm in September 1950, when his story Brainwashing Tactics forced Chinese into ranks of Communist Party, ran in the Miami Daily News. Hard-hitting journalism, I'm sure. In the article and later in a book, Hunter described how Mao Zedong's Red Army used terrifying, ancient, mysterious techniques to turn the Chinese people into mindless Communist automatons. He called the hypnotic process Brainwashing, which was a word-for-word translation from the Chinese shi nao, which are the Mandarin words for wash, she, and brain, now. And he warned that this process was meant to, quote, change a mind radically so that its owner becomes a living puppet, a human robot without the atrocity being visible from the outside.

It's a cool term.

It is.

If you just like actually sit down and think about it, it's like-

Jane Dow or Brainwashing?

Brainwashing. Well, both, I guess, are so literal translation, but-

These fucking frogs are brainwashing me, man.

Bro, I know, we'll discuss. This is for people at home that by the end of this, we'll all be brainwashed by these frogs. We belong in the terrariums.

Here's the problem. So normally, I would be away from the frogs, but my son is going to go to nap time very soon because we're recording at a time that we don't usually record. So I'm out in the living room where the frogs are and it happens to be perfect weather for the frogs in LA right now. It's pouring rain, it's very humid, so they're very excited and they're chirping.

They're singing the song to people.

Yeah, exactly. They're chirping their little hearts out.

Like do the Lavell and Frog man.

We want to hear about him.

So if all of our listeners go out and mindlessly buy poison dart frogs, you're welcome, dart frog community. Those are the commands, the secret commands we're putting into this episode.

I'm going to end up being the one person who's like, you guys are all crazy. I'm going to be in pluribus all of a sudden and shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're the one who hasn't been body snatched by our by the frog overlords.

Yeah. Anyway, I think I was saying that there's a cool it was a cool term. But moving on.

Well, it was a sure it was a cat here now.

We're on video, bro.

God knows about the amphibian folk.

It was it was not a cool term for anybody who was Chinese American and was being looked upon very suspiciously for what they might be up to.

Well, don't don't walk around wearing those glasses with like the hypnosis, spinny spirals on them. You won't seem so suspicious.

It's a weird giveaway.

This inflammatory rhetoric didn't immediately have a huge impact until three years into the Korean War when American prisoners of war began confessing to what seemed to be outlandish crimes. So, for instance, when Colonel Frank Schwebel was shot down over Korea and captured in 1952, he and other prisoners of war by February 1953 were, quote, Falsely confessing to using germ warfare against the Koreans, dropping everything from anthrax to the plague on unsuspecting civilians. The American public was shocked and was even more shocked when 5,000 of the 7,200 American prisoners of war that the Koreans had captured either petitioned the US government to end the war or signed confessions of other alleged crimes. The final blow came when 21 American soldiers refused repatriation. So in other words, they were so enamored with the life that they discovered or the people that they discovered in Korea that they didn't want to come back.

Have you heard of K-pop Uneslayer?

There's a direct line from this moment to that production. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty wild. I think it was a hellish war. I think there was like literally discussions about like actively discussions about using quote tactical nukes during that war, which is like not just blowing everything up. I think we could just blow up this front line. It was like I think it was just like it was a lot of I think the other side just had a lot of people they kept sending and sending and sending. So maybe it was part of that like fucking Johnny got his gun type of thing where like war is hell let us all out of it or maybe they were like brainwashed, who knows?

Well, I think in a case like this, and we'll get into it in a little bit, there's a couple different things going on. I think, well, I know some of these men were tortured and some of these confessions probably were false. But I think there were also people committing war crimes and probably feeling extremely terrible about it and confessing to it.

Well, maybe it was one of those things where all of this was torture-based, spinning hypnosis, eyeglasses-based. And then the backlash maybe wasn't as bad back home as they thought it would be. And then they're like, you know what? The public doesn't give enough of shit to not go crazier in Vietnam. Because I feel like the Vietnam War was just like, this is in color on film. There is war crimes happening here. And the public.

I play black ops. I know how crazy that shit goes.

Well, according to history.com, this initial wave of American defections resulted in The New York Times publishing a startling story asserting that the American prisoners of war returning from the country may have been, quote, converted by communist brainwashers. And on April 10th, 1953, Alan Dulles, who had just taken the reins of the CIA, gave a fiery speech in which he said, quote, In the past few years, we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men's minds, the war of ideologies. I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men's minds has become in Soviet hands. He continued, We might call it in its new form, brain warfare, which immediately calls to mind in the image of Crang from Ninja Turtles.

Brain warfare, that's crazy.

Brain warfare, I mean, you know what it sounds like? It's like one of my favorite movies that's at times impossible to watch because it's basically a series of short films. And anyone who's been to a short film festival knows it gets tiring and exhausting fast.

But Ed had just recently went to a short film festival. So it's front of mine.

No, no, no, no shade to those people. Your stuff was great. But but this movie, The 10, it's an old David Wayne movie that I love.

The 10.

But this is reminding me of the cat scan machine sketch or whatever, where like Lee of Schreiber's neighbor gets a cat scan machine, which it's so dumb. But then he wants a cat scan machine. And he was like, oh, to see Rick when got himself a cat scan machine and then like all day just thinking about how he now needs a cat scan machine and then Rick gets another cat scan machine and everyone's like, what the no one need? Why do you need a cat scan machine? And it was like, I don't want to be a guy without a cat scan machine in the neighborhood now. And that kind of feels like what this is, where it's like they got brainwashing. We need brainwashing.

Basically, except Dulles proceeded to describe the, quote, Soviet brain perversion techniques as effective, but abhorrent and nefarious. He expressed fear and uncertainty. Were they using chemical agents, hypnosis, something else entirely?

Asking for a friend.

Yeah.

This is terrible.

What did you guys use?

Where do they hang out? I need to know so I know to avoid that spot.

We in the West, CIA director conceded, are somewhat handicapped in brain warfare because he insisted that this sort of non-consensual experimentation, even on one's enemies, was antithetical to American values and indeed human values.

World War II was 11 minutes earlier, and we have a lot of records about, on our own citizens, the things we were doing.

He's like, we would never do that. Yeah. Not me.

Three days after he said this, he signed off on the beginning of MK Ultra. So he was-

He was fucking drugs, boys.

Yeah, literally, that's not even a joke. Literally three days after he gave this speech, he signed off on MK Ultra and the American version of the nefarious brain perversion techniques, which I'm sure we called patriotic brain reinforcement strategies, began.

Yeah. Do you think it's better or worse that- I don't think anyone should be doing any of this, just putting that out there. But do you think it's better or worse that the Koreans or Chinese or whomever, they were using prisoners of war? We're just in America being like, hey, do you want a free toaster or whatever? Meet us on Long Island.

Oh, no.

It's weirdly all unwilling participants, but we use their own people maybe.

Were they all unwilling? I don't know enough about MK Ultra.

Well, if they accepted the toaster, technically.

There's nothing we can do.

Montauk was more like it was who they would think of as like deplorables, like homeless people, prostitutes. Like those are the people.

Oh, really?

Yeah. You know, it's like the US just needed the social proof, right? Like when you when you go to buy something and before you buy, you're like, let me look at the testimonies. Let me see if this shit works. And it's like we saw it happen to our own people. And we're like, well, yeah, shit works. So like, let's let's jump in on this.

Yeah. Well, so one thing that I didn't dive into too deeply, but I did find really interesting is that there is a lot of evidence that essentially this entire like, let's just call it a 20 year period in American history in the kind of early stages of the Cold War really was, I think, maybe a little bit like what we're seeing going on in the UFO community right now, where you reach a sort of, what's the word I'm looking for?

Like a consensus?

Yeah, there's sort of a consensus view among enough people that a certain seemingly unbelievable thing is real. And then all of a sudden, we have to buy the CAT scan machine, so to speak. Now, we need to create the thing that we think that some people think is maybe real in case it is real. And thus, we create the thing. And that's sort of what happened here. There's no real proof that the Soviets ever cracked this any more than we did. We just felt like they must have, because we were seeing a lot of inexplicable things. There was also a whole other story. I forget the guy's name or even what country it was, but there was some Eastern Bloc country where, when they brought the dictator in for his trial, he acted robotic in front of everybody and started confessing to all these things that people never thought he would confess to. And that was another big flashing light that the CIA pointed to as like, hey, wait a second, what'd they do to that guy? Because there's no way he'd confess to any of this. They're going to kill him. So that was like what launched this whole thing.

That just makes me think of, I don't know if like, when like the New Jersey drones were happening and like how aliens, maybe not particularly aliens, but like UFO ships have become more commonplace. Nobody is really financially capitalizing on it that I've seen. Were there like homes that you see home security? Have you seen anything about like drone or home security from like alien stuff? Like how many years down the road are we going to buy into it even more? Were you sort of companies like selling something, you know, trying to capitalize on simply save drone capture machines? Yeah, something like that.

You know what, Bezos isn't going to let that happen. I think they're still trying to get that Amazon drone delivery going.

Yeah.

He's like, Oh, I can't just have houses shooting nets at them.

That's true.

I'm sure somewhere deep in the bowels of simply safe, someone is negotiating with some war torn country for a shipment of 80 million rocket launchers that they can sell.

Oh, you mean all the ones we left in Afghanistan?

Yeah, but not sponsors.

And then we'll all be promoting that on our show.

Yeah. 15% off. So use our use our code fucking scared of deliveries.

Ed and I were looking up at the sky the other day, and we thought, damn, brother, I'd really like to shoot that thing down. Well, we called simply safe.

Used to code to death.

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Go to shopify.com/scared. Again, that's shopify.com/scared. So there's evidence that there was there, you know, there were there were scientists like this guy Robert J. Lifton, who was a psychiatrist who worked with returning Korean veterans and later studied doctors who aided Nazi war crimes. And he created a list of eight criteria for thought reform, which was the term that Mao Zedong's government used. They didn't call it brainwashing. They called it thought reform.

It seems like a lot of work to not talk about or treat PTSD.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

That's gross.

This is like MLM to pyramid scheme. It just sounds better. You bring in like, well, multi-level marketing.

There was there was sort of this belief of like, you know, kind of the direction that our government went, maybe unsurprisingly, wasn't so much that we needed to treat the problem that we saw our guys coming back with. The thought was, we need to make our weak men tougher to resist this, so there are no problems, which is insane. And we don't have to, we won't have to go into this whole thing in detail, but there is this list of eight things that are used as real sort of brainwashing techniques on CAPTRS. So there's milieu control, which is when CAPTRS tightly manage what you see, hear, read, and who you interact with until their version of reality is the only one you have, which I think is scary because that's what social media does now. That's what social media does.

That's what algorithms are. It's why we all get different things.

We are all under step one thought reform has been forced upon us by social media companies.

Yeah.

Echo Chambers.

Yes.

Anyway, you can find us at at scared pod. I don't even know our fucking handles.

It's you can find search scared all the time.

They know. They already know.

Number two, mystical manipulation or planned spontaneity, which is when captors literally stage signs, miracles and perfect coincidences to make it seem like a higher power has chosen them.

There's your online dating. Jesus Christ, is there anything the internet didn't take from these eight?

Like a good relationships if you're spontaneous, keep the spark alive.

The demand for purity, which is just the idea that the world is split into us.

Christian online dating, continue.

The world is split into pure people, us, and impure people, them, and you're pressured to purge your impurities with guilt, shame, and self-correction. Confession, which is just constant calls to being confessed.

Catholic online dating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sacred science, the captor's doctrine is treated as sacred absolute truth and questioning it is morally forbidden. Number six, loading the language, which is basically just big brother thought crime, new speak kind of shit, you use special jargon and catch phrases that simplify big ideas into catch phrases that kind of shut down thinking doctrine over person. If the prisoner's own feelings or experiences clash with their captor's doctrine, the captive is wrong by definition and dispensing of existence in which only true believers in a project or belief are seen as fully real or worthy.

There's your blue checks. I'm losing my mind. I have been keeping my mouth shut for the last like four or five because I didn't want to make this into a 20-hour section. But I will be doing a separate podcast about how the eight rules of Korean War mind control created Silicon Valley.

Yes, it's not great. It seems bad. But we don't know, you know, the reason I bring all this up is just to say that there is, it is, this is sort of one of the first attempts to explain how you might control a man's mind. But even these eight steps didn't really seem to explain how deeply some of our men had been corrupted or may have been controlled. And then, of course, in 1959, the book The Manchurian Candidate came out, which suggested that you could literally create a feeling, an emotionless super soldier through advanced brainwashing techniques.

Or one of my favorite movies, Zoolander.

Oh, yeah. Yes.

That was also an early MK Ultra.

Either one of you. And this is like, I can't speak to it because it's been so long since I played the game. But it's been one of my favorite games or series for a long time. But did you guys ever play Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty?

Yeah.

A little bit, yeah.

Is Raiden MK Ultra? Because wasn't he like a child that got recruited and turned into a super soldier, that like his memory and background was erased?

Yeah, it's pretty similar. I mean, I think you see this trope a lot in science fiction and the trope probably existed before even the Manchurian candidate, but the idea that you could, you know, erase a mind through some kind of program was out there and continues to be out there, whether it's called MK Ultra or not.

It just always makes me think of Raiden when I think of like Super Soldier, like child taken, transformed.

I mean, you even see it in like John Wick, the ballerina school where they train all the ballerinas to be warriors. Like even that, they don't, you know, they don't suggest actual mind control, but the severity and the difficulty of ballet training and the way that you have to conform your body and mind to do it is, you know, almost a similar psychological torture.

I feel like I should watch Ballerina.

Even though I've never read it or seen the film, I obviously reference Manchurian Candidate like everyone else in the world does when it comes to any kind of mind control situation. I just found out like watching a YouTube video like two weeks ago that Manchuria is like a real region between like China and Russia.

Yeah.

And that there was like a lot, it was a hot, it was a hot zone for crazy shit.

Yeah, especially during the Cold War.

Yeah, exactly. Pretty wild.

Part of the reason that people bought into this so deeply during this time is that the era's dominant theory of the human mind was called behaviorism. And we don't need to go into all of it. But more or less, think Pavlov's dog, the idea that you could train a dog to salivate, even if there was no food.

I can't turn my dog to do shit, dude.

You got to get a bell.

You got to get his frogs.

They don't listen.

When his frogs go, the dogs sit down and the dog goes to bed.

The basic assumption was that the mind is blank at birth and is shaped through social conditioning throughout life. So Russia had Pavlov, we had BF. Skinner who used the Skinner box and suggested psychology.

I prefer Pavlov weirdly.

Yeah. They both suggested that psychology could help predict and control behavior. And some of Skinner's experiments were considered so extreme as to be unethical, but this was the Cold War. And our operating phrase was, what are ethics? We had never heard of them all of a sudden.

Great slogan.

Yeah. Dulles, Alan Dulles, was also well aware that the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, had been in search of a truth serum as far back as 1943. We know this now because references to a search for a so-called T-drug that might break down the psychological defenses of Axis agents subjected to questioning by allied counterintelligence are contained in diaries and correspondence of a man named George Hunter White. Remember that name. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the OSS and after the war ended, had a flamboyant career as a senior federal narcotics official. According to his wartime diaries, the hunt for the T-drug began in Washington in 1943 in the first experiment centered on a marijuana derivative White identified as Tetrahydrocannabinol acetate. And the Colonel himself volunteered to smoke a cigarette laced with the chemical. He's like, oh dude, oh no, it's terrible.

Just stole my wife in here.

The result of that test he reported was to knock myself out. So I think he just means he passed out after smoking.

So he did a bunch of bong rips and passed out.

Yeah, more or less. He turned into a frat boy. Further experiments with this marijuana extract concerned the feasibility of administering it to an unknown subject not only in ordinary cigarettes, but also in candy, in a vapor composed of carbon dioxide gas.

So ahead of time.

And apparently, in specially impregnated, impregnated, they called them, impregnated facial tissues to be thrust upon unsuspecting enemy agents. So basically, you know, like when they put a...

Napalm? Is that, or not napalm? Napalm? No, no, sorry. What is it where they put on the rag?

Yeah, they make you pass out with the rag.

I don't know. Chloroform. Chloroform.

Which doesn't really work like that.

Oh, no.

He's like, trust me. That's why there's no guy in his car anymore.

It's like when you watch movies, when people get strangled and die real fast.

Yeah, I know.

I like that, man.

I like that real life, guys.

I could take all those arrows like Boromir.

In August of 1943, a quantity of this extract was carried by Colonel White on a train from Washington where it had been produced under elaborate secrecy to New York City and guarded during the journey by a contingent of armed counterintelligence officers. Also, I love that I'm 99% sure I can walk to the dispensary on the corner and buy whatever this was.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. You don't have to have it like handcuffed to an attache case.

I know.

With three guards. Here, man. In Ohio, you could buy that, I think.

Yeah. But so he brought it to New York City and then in rooms rented by the OSS, the Belmont Plaza Hotel in New York, the tea drug was tested on seven commissioned and non-commissioned military officers. Colonel White's papers make no mention of whether the subjects were aware of the nature of the tests, nor do they contain any indication the chemical was ever used operationally.

What are ethics?

That's another month this month.

One of George White's documents does maintain, however, that a mobster named August Delgracio, whom he identifies as a quote, well-known New York hoodlum, was used as an unwitting guinea pig in these experiments.

Oh, that's an interesting term for him.

Yeah, I know. Seriously. Excuse me, George White.

Only we can use that word.

Yeah. Drop the hard D in there, too.

I can't use that word for you guys.

I can use that word.

He's a guinea pig.

We prefer the term Guido Mouse.

It's more acceptable.

That's an Italian-American. I appreciate it.

Yeah.

They just use one letter code names. It is A.

Yeah. A. He actually, interestingly, and I didn't write this whole story down, but he knew this guy and invited him to this because White had been involved in trying to negotiate the release of Lucky Luciano with the mob to use him as an intelligence asset during World War II because the OSS used the mob to keep an eye on the docks to make sure that Nazis weren't trying to get shipments of things or U-boats into the New York docks. And so they tried, at some point the mob was like, well, if you let Lucky Luciano out, he'll be an asset. And I don't think it ever came to fruition with him. But that's how he knew this guy.

So we need more mob names like that. We're all the Lucky Luciano now. Like that's like dead in prison.

Anyway, this marijuana derivative, according to an OSS report in Colonel White's files, was not a perfect truth drug in the sense that its administration was followed immediately and automatically by the revelation of all the secrets, which the subject wishes to keep to himself. No shit, you guys just hotboxed a hotel room. That's all you did.

I just give him alcohol. That's the truth serum. I really get him drunk.

I really care about Cindy. And they're like, okay, but what about the files? Yeah, I love Cindy's legs.

Yeah.

Lucky's actually not that lucky.

White's papers show that a few of the people involved in these experiments, including Colonel White himself, continued after the war to aid the CIA in its search for a workable method of psychological command and control.

The search for more cookies.

Yeah, we've created an army of hungry dudes.

Yeah, more cookies means a lot now, though, in the data age, because there's cookies on computers. Got exceptions.

Oh, shit. That's probably why they called them that.

This work was conducted under such code names as Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke.

They were obsessed with blue. Everything was blue back then.

Yeah, blue. What was the UFO?

Project Blue Book, Blue Bean, Blue Beam, Project Bluey, where you mind control children, that little dog.

That one's been officially approved.

Not everyone was as sure as Colonel White that the goal of a perfect truth serum was out of reach. In fact, some of his colleagues thought the problem was just that White was using the wrong drugs. One of those people, perhaps the most important scientist in the history of MK Ultra, was a man named Sidney Gottlieb, born in the Bronx in 1918. Gottlieb was a chemist who believed that true mind control was not only possible, but that American mastery of it would secure a victory against communists. Gottlieb was also just generally a strange man.

Yeah, he's a fucking Captain America villain so far by the way he talks.

He, before and even during his work on MK Ultra, lived by himself in a cabin in the woods with no running water and woke up early in the mornings to milk goats. Unabomber? Yeah, basically he was a Unabomber type guy who got put in charge of a major psychological operation. Although, depending on what conspiracy theories you believe, maybe the Unabomber was doing the same thing.

That's a good introduction to a movie though, where a helicopter lands in a field by whatever and this guy is milking a goat and it was like, we need you to come back. He's like, I'm out of that life. I don't brain control no more or whatever. He's like, you're the best. The Russians are doing something that, we need your expertise.

Well, he was also really interesting. I didn't go too far into his biography, but a lot of people at this time in the CIA were very much Silver Spoon. They were the Yales. They were the Skull and Bones and Gottlieb was not. He was born in the Bronx. He was never particularly well off. I don't even really know how he crossed paths. Originally, it was some of the guys who brought him in, but he was considered a brilliant chemist and they wanted him involved in this. So according to journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating MK Ultra and its architects and who eventually wrote a book about Sidney Gottlieb called Poisoner in Chief, Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds and he realized it was a two part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into the resulting void. We didn't get too far on number two, but you did a lot of work on number one.

Especially taking a memory card out and putting a new memory card in.

Down is always the fun part of construction though. You want to blast it away, but building the new part, that's stupid.

The building the new part is so much harder than destroying the old part. The main way that Gottlieb tried to blast away the mind was by administering large doses of LSD, which was a mysterious brand new drug that had only been synthesized about a decade earlier. If you go listen to our Bad Trips LSD episode, we talk about the entire history of the drug and some of the many ways it influenced culture once it got out of the lab and onto the streets.

Just a quick tie in to the Montauk project. I want to say allegedly, but well, I'll say this. Some of the people that came out and said that they had been involved and they had been taken captive and induced in these.

Crunchy Internet Audio.

Oh, he's like, I'm gonna go fuck about Montauk.

That was there.

They were saying there was an acid room where the walls were painted like psychedelic and these kids were just given large quantities of LSD in aid of the mind control. And allegedly, people, I don't know if they, like, I think it was the 90s or the early 2000s where these kids, like teens, would sneak in to Montauk like once it was out of commission and apparently, they stumbled into a room that had, like, all this psychedelic wallpaper and paintings.

What does that mean, psychedelic wallpaper? Like, just flowers?

Spongebob, Skye, I don't know, just, like, dope.

I don't know.

Yeah, colors and swirls and hands and...

Like 70s, Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer, weird cosmic.

Yeah, but allegedly, that room was proven, proven, in quotes, to be true.

I wouldn't doubt it based on some of the shit that... So, wait, what were the years that the Montauk Project roughly took place?

Are you gonna do me like that?

Do you remember? I'm just curious.

Okay, well, okay, so I think it was like the 60s to the 70s, because it was in the 80s when the dude...

This is not my episode, I don't know, guys.

Well, you were there for it. You were from the same seat. Come on. I think, okay, it was 1990 when they gained their memory, and I think it was the 80s when the dude was saying the test he was... He was like working with psychics, and he realized at the same time every day, these psychics were like they lost all their abilities. So he drove around trying to find out where this radio signal...

That was in the 80s, I think, right?

Yes. Yes. This guy was driving around with this thing on his car, trying to find out where this radio signal was that was disrupting these psychics he was working with consistently, and it was the tower from Montauk. But then... So that was the 80s. So I think it was the 60s into the 70s that the...

Yeah...

.experimentations were taking place.

So I was just asking, like, loosely, it seems like it was taking place post-MK Ultra. So possibly... Correct... .the MK Ultra science, like, flooded into whatever that...

This was... I think this was a... It's also tied in the Philadelphia experiment, you know, like the whole boat thing. But I think, yeah, I think this was a continuation of MK Ultra being a little bit more underground, I mean, literally, but like, yeah, a continuation.

That's crazy. At this point, the US government knew very little about LSD, other than the fact that, again, rumors had made their way back to the CIA that the Soviet Union had engaged in intensive efforts to produce LSD and that the Soviets had attempted to purchase the world's supply of the chemical. One CIA officer described the agency as literally terrified of the Soviets' LSD program largely because of the lack of knowledge about the drug in the United States. Quote, this was the one material that we had ever been able to locate that really had potential fantastic possibilities if used wrongly, the officer testified. And this guy apparently had never heard of Atomic Energy. This would have been very much the second material that we've ever located. Partially due to Gottlieb's advocacy, Dulles saw potential in the drug and wanted to beat the rushes to the punch. So he tasked Gottlieb with developing and running MK Ultra, which was actually not a single project, but a collection of 149 sub projects that were covertly funded and run out of universities, research centers, prisons, and even medical clinics.

Stanford, right? Stanford is a big one, I think.

Oh, the Stanford experiment. Is that a thing?

I don't think it's tied to this, though.

Yeah, the Stanford prison experiment is a thing. I think a lot of the higher end universities had at least a building where some shady shit was going on connected to this.

Berkeley, because that's where Unabomber was.

Yeah. One of the first things Gottlieb did was pull the trigger on the American version. Once again, we did the same thing we were worried the Russians may have done, and he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD.

That is seems real low.

Well, yeah. That's like how much a football player makes in one game.

Yeah. But like scaled for time, that's a million dollars.

But yeah, they bring it to the universities. They are. You want to earn your scholarship?

Yeah. Well, and also, though, at the time, I don't know. I think it's Eli Lilly at some point contracted with the US government to create LSD in tonnage amounts. But at the time, the world's supply, I don't know how much it was. It may not have been a lot.

Yeah, it's so crazy. It's not fucking plutonium. Somebody had to pull them aside and be like, you can make this in like 11 minutes, right? This is like you're buying all the cookies in the world. Like bake more.

No, it's good. We're good. Don't worry. All those.

Yeah. The guys from the first session who did all the weed, they were like, yeah, let them buy it. But it is just like, dude, someone hustled you. You don't need to buy all this. Unless they just mean to get it out of the hands of other people. But again, just fucking make it.

I think it was more that it was a preemptive, let's track down as much of it as we can and make sure that it's on our shores and not in someone else's hands. Anyway, he brought all of this LSD that he probably overpaid for and was hustled by some burnout guy to the United States and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them through bogus foundations to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control and quote gaining control of bodies whether they were willing or not. The CIA envisioned applications that ranged from removing people from Europe in the case of a Soviet attack to enabling assassinations of enemy leaders. On November 18th, 1953, a group of 10 scientists met at a cabin located deep in the forests of Maryland. After extended discussions, the participants agreed to truly understand the value of the drug. An unwitting experiment would be desirable.

All of this was written down? It's so crazy.

I don't know how much of this was written down and how much of this was testimony, how much of this was like people's private diaries that came to light later.

I just feel like if this ever went to like a trial, they'd be like, is this your handwriting where you write, unwilling participant would be desired like with or without their consent? Where did you get a wink emoji in 1950?

He's like, what? Ethics, huh?

Yeah, exactly. There you go.

According to NPR, Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early 1950s. And therefore, Gottlieb didn't have to worry about any legal entanglements in these places.

Oh, man.

Thank goodness.

CIA officers in Europe and Asia would capture enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called expendable. They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of drug potions and other techniques like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation, and all while bombarding them with questions trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. And that made Gottlieb, although by some descriptions, a very compassionate person, one of the most prolific torturers of his generation.

I was about to say, that's like terrible.

Well yeah, I guess maybe he felt like he wasn't doing it personally.

He was just milking the goats.

He's milking the goats and the screams of his victims were so far away, he couldn't even hear them out there.

It wasn't even the screams, it was the screams of the goats. That's like that Taylor Swift video.

Kinzer, the journalist notes that the top secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. We don't know how many people died, Kinzer says, but a number did and many lives were permanently destroyed.

They didn't write that down, they documented their feelings and everything. They didn't do like a tally for like, oh, Frederick didn't make it.

Yeah, they didn't keep a body count.

That might make them feel bad, though, so.

Yeah. To give you an idea of what these LSD experiments entailed, I want to take a look at what happened at the Federal Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky, a prison hospital for drug offenders that was, you guessed it, secretly funded by the CIA. There, Dr. Harris Isbell, hopefully no relation to singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, would be a real bummer to lose listening to that guy's music.

I don't know who that is.

I don't have any idea, man.

I'm like, he's great.

Oh, go listen to Jason Isbell. He's like an Americana country singer-songwriter.

He's-

Crunchy Internet Audio.

Yeah, if they are related, I can't, I just can't. I don't want to get mind-controlled. Yeah, it's too late.

It's not worth it. Juice ain't worth the squeeze.

Dr. Harris Isbell and his colleagues recruited incarcerated heroin addicts as test subjects, coercing their participation by offering injections of morphine and other drugs as, quote, payment. I said, okay. In one especially extreme LSD experiment, a group of African American male inmates was given LSD every day for 77 days straight. The goal was to observe the drug's effects and build tolerance, but the human cost was enormous. Many prisoners experienced terrifying prolonged hallucinations and psychotic breaks as the drug warped their reality day after day. According to reports, at least one inmate reached his breaking point after a high dose of 180 micrograms convinced he was dying or permanently insane and begged to quit the experiment. Rather than release him, the researchers noted he just required, quote, considerable persuasion to continue participating, which I assume means they cut off his heroin supply until he said that he'd keep going.

That's like ego death though, right? Like he died.

Well, that was sounds like was one of their goals. The beginning of Chris's thing was to get rid of the ego.

I mean, honestly, 77 days straight.

I like so hard not to have a bad trip when you're doing it behind bars, behind bars on withdrawal withdrawal from hard drugs. Yeah.

So this was known then, right? Like it wasn't like other people that worked there had to know that he wasn't because they went there to get clean, right? Or to like rehabilitate.

Well, they went there because they were drug offenders.

Well, yeah.

I don't think there was a rehabilitation aspect at this time period.

A lot of times what would happen at these hospitals and research centers and stuff was that the CIA would fund all of it or part of it. And then as part of the funding, they would request like, I saw a couple places where they asked for a sixth of the rooms or a sixth of the beds that would be for them to do their thing with. And so I think a lot of people suspected that there was some shady stuff happening in those wings or rooms or whatever, but nobody asked too many questions because that was sort of the agreement of what was going on.

So I think most prisons come, especially now with privatized prisons, I think most prisons come with like some caveat, including, it blew my mind. I didn't even know this, that like, so prisoners can't vote, obviously, but when the census is done, they count in that district. So you can technically get more like seats in government by having a higher population, but then you don't ever have to worry about which way they vote. And so I think part of that is like, oh, we'll build this prison in areas that we, it's like a weird human suffering way of gerrymandering.

I think Arizona was like, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Yeah, and so it's like, it's like, oh, so it sounds like all prisons come with some like thing.

Like altruistic benefit or motive.

There's some benefit to it for somebody, yeah.

Yeah, and in this case, the inmates who were almost all black Americans were a captive population that CIA doctors considered ideal test fodder because, quote, they could not fight back, as one official later admitted. Indeed, an investigative study found early LSD trials overwhelmingly targeted black prisoners and patients who endured higher doses and torturous treatment compared to white subjects. Some experiments forcibly addicted volunteers to drugs like morphine or barbiturates, then subjected them to sudden withdrawal crises to study their agony. Shockingly, the CIA at least reported no deaths during these experiments, though they acknowledged they came close at least once. By the end of these studies, many survivors were left permanently scarred, psychologically shattered by repeated LSD trauma or the physical torment of addiction and withdrawal and addiction and withdrawal.

I do think it's weird that there's so much stuff from the CIA. Every seems like every time these guys show up in one of our episodes, your guys as well, probably, it's like, aren't you not, isn't like your whole thing you don't operate in America, but like every single time, it's like, oh, here's the thing we were doing in America. By their own admission, from their own paperwork, it was like, oh yeah, we came close to killing some people, but we didn't kill anyone. It was like, hey, where did that happen? It was like, oh, funny thing about that was, it was right here in the States.

I mean, particularly the OSS into the CIA era, the Dulles era, I mean, the 40s through the 60s really, the CIA was like, some people would say, running the country for the most part, that they had far more control than anybody wanted them to have, but they had created a network of government and business ties that just could not be stopped. And that's why there's, I think, some credence to the idea that, you know, Kennedy maybe got wrapped up in some of that stuff somehow and that it's possible that they could have done it. And the CIA has continued to be pretty shady over the years, but those early years were really a free for all of, we just do whatever the fuck we want. You can't stop us.

And the Dulles is not the same Dulles that's like the the airports named after, right?

That might be named. He had a brother who was Secretary of State.

OK, it's named after that guy. He's named after that guy. OK, so it's just one more thing where it's like, yeah, these Skull and Bone families, clearly, we're all in high positions.

I should have been in one of those families.

I know.

Yeah, I didn't.

We all lost that lottery.

Lucky Luciano.

No.

Speaking of guys with surprising brothers, though, similar experiments were carried out in prisons all around the country, many of which researchers think have probably still not come to light. Some researchers also suggested the sudden wave of violence and serial killers that swept America in the 1970s could have been an unintended result of these experiments breaking the brains of previously small-time offenders who wound up in the wrong prison at the wrong time. Charles Manson has long been rumored to be one of these subjects. Again, read Chaos. That story is way too long and complicated for this episode, but is fairly well documented that at the very least Manson had a number of connections to the CIA. Whether or not he had been brainwashed or was an informant or whatever is tough to prove, but certainly there's a lot of smoke to that fire.

Dude like acid a lot.

Yeah, and he had a lot of it.

Yeah.

Yes.

Which is like at a time where it sounds like they're buying it up and keeping it off the streets.

Yeah.

Weird that this guy seemed to have an unlimited amount to hand out.

But an even more surprising name came up in my research. Whitey Bulger.

Oh, Black Mass.

For those. Yes. For those unfamiliar, James Joseph Whitey Bulger was the boss of the largely Irish mob in Boston from the 1970s through the 1990s. His life was crazy. His brother, William Bulger, served as a member of the Massachusetts Senate for 25 years and president of the University of Massachusetts for seven years after that. And Whitey survived and thrived as a mob boss for as long as he did, not because of anything to do with his brother, supposedly, but because he spent years as a high level FBI informant while he was running the mob. But before any of that, Whitey volunteered to take part in MK Ultra experiments when he was in prison in Atlanta. He volunteered for what he thought was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long term reactions to LSD was.

As a member of the Irish mom, he's not allowed to say guinea pig.

He later wrote of the experience, Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state, total loss of appetite, hallucinating. The room would change shape, hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane. Weird.

I wonder why.

Yeah, that will do it. You know, the Stranger Things tie-in is in the movie Black Mass. One of the best scenes is the dinner scene where he's like, what's your secret recipe for the steak? The guy that gives it is David Harbour. It's in Stranger Things.

Oh, there you go. Good connection. I saw that movie, but I don't remember much about it other than Johnny Depp tying it really hard. I really liked it.

I was a big fan, actually. I got to rewatch it.

I think I watched it during COVID maybe. Anyway, Whitey Bulger participated in MK Ultra Experiments long before he was the head of anything, which ties into that idea that he was just a guy who had been in and out of prison, and not every famous serial killer, but a number of famous serial killers had similar histories where they'd been being arrested for smaller things, and then all of a sudden turned into these serial killers and who knows? I mean, Whitey Bulger was in a way also a serial killer. He just generally did it for money, although who knows? He probably enjoyed some of it too. Probs.

I don't get into this because I just knew it for the money.

He didn't keep a journal where he's talking.

Well, there was the other Iceman, the assassin.

Oh my God. The last podcast had an amazing series of minds, man.

Yeah. The interviews with him on HBO are really good. It's an old, old HBO series that interviewed him for a couple of hours, and it's not completely uncut, but it's a pretty just uncut interview with him about his life and murders and why he did it and all that.

I just saw a reel where Stone Cold saw that, learned about that guy and was like, that's how I want Cold to be part of his name because he's just Steve Austin. And then it was actually. No, well, because he was supposed to be a heel. But then apparently his wife at that time made him tea. And she.

Crunchy internet audio.

And like that's how he became Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Yes, I've I he he was I forget what name Vince wanted to give him.

But it was something finger finger. Oh, my goodness. It was something. Or no, I know what you're talking about.

It was something ridiculous. And he was like, I need I can't make this or something like that.

Or like, I think fingers is bad.

Yeah.

Other MK Ultra experiments were conducted out in the real world, so to speak. And those were often even more insane. One of these, the most famous, might be Operation Midnight Climax, which is steeped in every bit as much drugs and sex as it sounds.

So every night in college?

Yeah. Well, I mean, you would think How many years?

First experience, Charlie.

By myself.

I mean, guys, a lot of operations are unsuccessful.

Yeah.

You would think given the color schemes that we discussed earlier, they might have gone with Operation Blue Balls. But no, Operation Midnight Climax. Enter 81 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village in 1953. This apartment was rented to a man named on the lease as Morgan Hall, an artist and seaman. Morgan spent $4,000 equivalent to over $45,000 today. So, there's a conversion for that $240,000 of LSD. I can't do this. Well, it's 10 times as much, so loosely, roughly. He spent $4,000 of yesterday's money, $45,000 of today's money to transform the apartment into a safe house, complete with two-way mirrors and surveillance equipment, and then spent the next couple months luring people back to the apartment with CIA-paid sex workers. The sex workers would then give their targets LSD, sometimes with consent, usually without, so that Morgan could record their drug-induced behavior. It's reported that Morgan Hall would often watch these encounters from behind a two-way mirror while seated on a toilet, staring as the action unfolded.

Why doesn't, I guess that's where the plumbing was. Build around the plumbing. That's a pure power truck.

They put a chair in the corner of a hotel room.

Yeah, right?

He's like, don't lie to me.

I bring up Midnight Climax because there's one other thing that we know about Morgan Hall that's worth mentioning. And that is Morgan Hall was not his real name. His real name was George White. That George White, the very same George White who was trying to learn about secrets of the mob by dosing them with compounds derived from weed. The guy that we talked about earlier.

This is just his favorite activity.

I think that's a person who however many years earlier realized that if you just say the craziest thing, someone might give you money for it. And he's just been riding that for this whole time. Pitching the idea of like, listen, I need a little cash. What are you going to do with it? I'm going to convert an apartment into like an insane voyeuristic.

I'm going to open a CIA whore house.

I'm going to convert this into, what are you going to do with it? I'm going to watch a bunch of people fuck on a toilet, like while I'm on a toilet.

He's also the founder of Pornhub.

Yeah, and it's just like this is the first person to pitch the idea of like incognito mode on a browser. Like that had to be the weirdest meeting for everyone in that building, being like, why do we need that?

And he's like, he should have turned incognito mode on his diary because they eventually found that and that's how we know all this.

Why it must have been not a diary, right? It must have been something clinical for this that he had to do to get the money.

He left a lot of notes. He left a lot of, I don't know if it was official. It was referenced to as a diary at one point, but it may have just been a technical collection.

He just needed one friend that he could have told all this to, that he wouldn't have had to write it down.

Yeah.

I mean, no one wanted to be friends with him.

If you looked at my notes app in my phone, like it's insane. So I kind of get it.

Oh my God.

He did have one friend, Sydney Gottlieb.

Yeah, we know that last name.

We do. And he wrote, Gottlieb hired him for this job because of his experiments with that weed compound and Lucky Luciano's associates. Gottlieb thought that that was a really interesting experiment that White had run. So he gave him the okay to do this.

It's all about who you know, guys. That's true. Networking who you know.

Really, truly. Their work together didn't last long, but we know that George White and Sydney Gottlieb remained friends because we have access to a charming letter that George White wrote to Sydney Gottlieb years later in 1971, in which he says, quote, Of course, I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest?

Sounds like it's everywhere.

Yeah, that's straight out of the Notes app.

But also, bro, you licked a stamp and put it on the front of this? This is crazy. Just burn this or tap this off.

He's like, it's illegal for other people to look at your mail, so they wouldn't do that.

The difference between us and Russia is nobody reads my mail before it gets to you.

That's a federal offense.

We have a little thing in America called ethics.

Yeah.

The thing about the way these guys work and these big ideas they had, I do wonder now, when was It's a Federal Crime to Read Your Mail implemented? Was it this guy who was like, it would be a good idea if no one can read our mail?

Yeah.

Another great idea from the Goat Man or whoever the fuck he was.

So what did all this cruelty achieve? Was any progress made in the ability to brainwash or program a human being? That's where things get really hazy because officially, no.

The government shut down up its day.

Yeah. According to Politico, a decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. The grail he sought eluded him. MK Ultra ended in failure in the early 1960s. The conclusion from all these activities, Gottlieb admitted later, was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way. So MK Ultra ended in failure, and the records of it were burned by Sidney Gottlieb in January 1973.

Let's have a look at the Journal of Fine.

Yeah, exactly.

But not all of them. Though the destruction was ordered by then CIA Director Richard Helms and overseen by Sidney Gottlieb himself, the purging of records didn't work out quite the way they intended it to. In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that 20,000 pages of documents survived from MK Ultra because they had been some people, it's a little unclear whether they were misclassified or just nobody thought to burn these as either budgetary or fiscal files instead of project files. So they burned the big box labeled project files and left the other big box labeled budgetary files and didn't burn that one, not realizing or just mistakenly leaving those. And those are the papers that we have pieced together the history of MK Ultra from.

All the receipts for two-way mirrors?

Yeah.

And toilets?

Congress?

Why does he need more?

What's happening to these toilets?

Maybe the plumbing.

We've got a toilet for Mr. White in every state in the country. Congress launched an investigation into the materials. And according to Princeton University, based on recovered materials, we know the program involved 185 non-government researchers and assistants, as well as 80 institutions. These institutions either conducted MK Ultra related work or were affiliated with individuals involved. The list of institutions included 44 colleges, 15 research foundations or chemical or pharmaceutical companies, 12 hospitals or clinics, and three penal institutions. None of these records indicated any successes. But who knows what documents might still be tucked away in some dusty corner of the CIA's basement. Maybe labeled, like Ed suggested, toilet receipts or... Maybe there are secret experiments yet to be discovered. Assassinations that Gottlieb and White and Dulles would never take official credit for. Murders perpetrated by men whose minds were no longer their own. But we are out of time. We have to let our guests, Believing the Bizarre, go. So what do you guys think? Before we hit the fear tier, do we think MK Ultra was ever successful? Or do we think that we know pretty much all there is to know?

Well, I feel like those are two different things.

I are. I feel like it was successful. I feel like otherwise, there's just lots of corpses, husks of people around. I feel like they have implanted something.

Well, successful or existent.

What?

I think it existed, but you think it was successful?

Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like they're like, can't put on the record, but we absolutely. Oh, Zoolander.

I think they Zoolander some people.

I think it depends on what level of mind control, because I think mind control, like my day job, my life is in marketing, and the level of how to write certain things, color scheme to evoke certain emotions.

What?

You know what I mean? When it comes to your restaurants, having a temperature set a certain way to make you want to eat more, there are ways that people try to influence you. I mean social media is huge when you get into politics and the echo chambers. And I'll just keep it vague on both sides, but the way that some people idolize politicians and stuff like that, it does seem to be that a certain level of brainwashing is possible and is existing in multi-facets, at least in America. But I think if you think of like the erase the memory, make somebody like your super soldier or something like that, I don't know if it's succeeded in that.

I definitely believe, like the biggest example for me is, we didn't want to talk about it too much. I mentioned it like three times for the Unabomber. Like, absolutely. But the Unabomber is like a real life example of I think someone that got flipped so fast and hard because of this, because of this MK Ultra, that he became him and lived in the country and sent bombs. Yeah.

So if only there wasn't a law that said you federally couldn't open someone's mail.

Yeah.

Once again, another person from this group who was protected by you can't open your people's mail law.

I mean, we're making points together.

Yeah.

I feel like this is not necessarily related, but I feel like I walked into a higher level course of the same program that I'm attending and I was just barely able to keep up.

Well, hopefully, hopefully your mind is still intact after this experience.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Hopping.

A lot of flies. For my part, I would say I think that we learned a lot from MK Ultra and I think there's a lot of ways in which whether some of those tactics seeped into marketing or torture in the Middle East in the early 2000s or what have you, I think we've continued to push the boundaries legally and illegally of how to do some of these things. And I do, it's funny, we were joking of going through those eight mind control techniques about how many of them relate to social media. But it does kind of make you wonder, how easy would it be to manipulate and pull the levers and see desired results that could be quantified and studied on an unwitting populace at a scale that MK Ultra never could have attempted to do that uses no drugs at all, but it just uses this different network.

Many people would say that social media is a drug and that it's more addictive than the drugs.

I mean, I think you could say this, it's happening currently, it is happening.

So yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that MK Ultra may have been a little bit more successful than anybody led on. But in any case, where do we all place MK Ultra on our fear tier? I would place it at a six, I'm gonna say a six, if I knew they were successful, I would put it at a seven or an eight. But since we don't know, I'm gonna put it at a six. What about you guys?

Do you say successful? You mean you're afraid of it existing in the world and there are Manchurian candidates, or you're afraid of like being a subject to like an experiment?

I'm putting it at a six that it existed and that I could be an unwitting subject and I would put it at a seven or an eight if there were Manchurian candidates programmable walking around the world.

Winter soldiers.

Winter soldiers. What about you guys?

I have such a I have a fear of like not being mentally in control. Like I'm not big on drinking or drugs in general because I don't I like being aware of my surrounding.

Loser.

I know, yeah, yeah, I just shit in my house and look at the snow and I just think. I don't know. It's like there's a fear of like not being in control. And even with like social media and stuff, I try and like check myself on certain things. And I like the fear of not being completely in control. And it's like when you catch it, like you see like crunchy internet audio, lemonade. And all of a sudden it's like the only thing in the world you want. Like I fucking hate that. And I'm not going to get myself any because fuck you. I want lemon. I know. See, sorry.

Use our code. Fucking scared of lemons.

Seven and a half. Because if it like happened to me and I discovered it happened to me, like if I look back and if something was like revealed and it's like all these personality traits that you thought were yours, here's where they were implanted in you. And here's exactly how it happened. That would terrify me. Like if I don't like, you know, I mean, other than like the Browns being instilled to me by my father, which that's probably the hardest thing to accept. But, you know, it's like if you if you like at the end of your life and like, hey, these things that you thought were your own things, like they were actually implanted in you and you actually never even really liked it. It was just like that stuff terrifies me because really at the end of the day, it's like all you have is like you, you know, your belief, your personality. And so I'm going to say seven and a half regardless. Just the idea of mind control in general is, you know, personally terrifying, but also, yeah, there are these super soldiers out there that you can just, you know, like flip us.

Are there halfs on the fjords here? Can he do it?

I can do seven and a half. Do it.

Yeah, we'll give you a half. I think that might be our first half, but sure.

Seven point eight.

I have a bigger fear of this. I feel like this has been instilled with me since I was in fifth grade in the DR program.

Like when they were talking about it, it turns out it was an MLM, right? Have you been seeing that?

Crunchy Internet Audio.

Cracked bunny.

I mean, they told me about LSD and they're like, if you do it ever, you're going to have flashbacks for the rest of your life. And young me is just like, and now, and even hearing about all this stuff, and I do truly believe that the, you know, Unabomber is the best example of it, but like more people, I'm sure, have come out and been assassins, that it's a big fear for me. So I feel like maybe I'm not who I'm supposed to be, you know? So I'm going to go like maybe like a nine.

Nine.

Big guy.

What are jellyfish, bro? Ten?

Nine.

Yes, jellyfish are like 12 on the scale.

12. Okay. No breaking the scale.

Yeah.

All right.

All right. Ed, what about you?

Oh my gosh. I'm not going to go nine, but that's I've ever done a nine.

But yes, you have.

I ain't afraid of shit. I've been seeing this guy in a weird hotel room, and now I'm not afraid of anything anymore. Yeah, I'm going to go. Yeah, I think five, six is good. I don't think I'm going to end up as one of the experimented on. I think maybe I mean, I am one of those 80% of Americans who's two paychecks away from ruin. So maybe I will end up one pretty quickly. Free toaster. But yeah, I'm not too afraid of being it, but I'm definitely. Yeah, I question everybody who's been killed ever.

The bigger you guys get, the bigger audience gets. They're going to be targeted.

Yeah.

Yeah. Hey, if you guys think you're in the actually, this is a dangerous thing to say, but don't say it.

Don't say it. Just don't say it.

I'm not going to have to say it.

Yeah, it's if you've been mind controlled, hit us up.

Let's go six, seven.

I think we've got we've gotten a couple of emails already that I'm glad we have a PO box and don't have our personal addresses out there. So all right.

Well, I think that's seven, six, six. Oh, I can't say that because the kids have it.

No, no, no. Shit. We'll have no six. Seven.

Do you think that it is?

Oh, I don't know.

What have you done? We do. That's if we see a rise in what am I going to say? A rise in mass shootings is America. It's every fucking day. You wouldn't even know there was a riot like we did it.

They're like, what? It's just Tuesday. Yeah, it's sad.

Well, with that guys, Believing the Bizarre, Tyler, Charlie, thank you so much for joining us. Go check these guys out anywhere you get your podcasts, Believing the Bizarre. We are Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed, and that was a frog.

And until next time, stay scared, everybody. Bye bye.

Bye bye. Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

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We are in this together.

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