38: Project MKUltra | Red Thread
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At 2:30 AM, a man's body hits the sidewalk outside the Statler Hotel, followed by a shower of broken glass. The doorman shouts that someone has jumped and the night manager rushes out to find a man, around 40, lying in his underwear, blood pooling around him. 13 stories up, an open window's curtain flaps through the broken glass. Despite his injuries, the man was still alive, choking on blood, and trying desperately to speak.

A few minutes later, he took his final breath.

What he was trying to say remains a mystery, but we know one thing for sure. It was about the CIA. Welcome to the Red Thread, where it's conspiracy time. I mean, I think it's a conspiracy. I don't actually know. MKUltra, I'm pretty sure it's all confirmed at this point. There's been reports that have come out about it. The government themselves confirmed that MKUltra was a legitimate thing. So does that even really count as a conspiracy at this point?

I don't think so. No, I think it's legit. It's a, it's a conspiracy what they did with it because like, yeah, we know it existed. It's how much it existed is the question. Um, right. So some parts of, I can certainly make it conspiratorial. Um,

But no, it is a thing that existed. People were called conspiracy theorists for believing it. And then when the reports were opened up, it's like, oh, well, you know, we like to play pal around, you know, like to kill a few journalists every now and then just for funsies. Occasionally.

To put it into perspective, it would be like if in six months' time, the government came out with a report that said, you know what, actually, the Earth is flat. That's what the 70s would have been like for conspiracy truthers of the MKUltra theory. Imagine how vindicating that would feel to believe in a conspiracy and then the government to just straight up admit it. That'd be crazy. Such a cool feeling. Yeah, I remember there was a bunch of hearings back during the time MKUltra was still happening.

into, you know, if it was...

If the public should know about it or not. And a bunch of suits got mad. And then it was like early 2000s that it was like, actually, it was real. I know we lied and said it wasn't for a really long time. But look, we were just we're different now. That's what kills me about the CIA. It's like, look, 60 years ago. Look, we we've we've learned what 40 years ago. Well, we've learned then to eight months ago. Learning different people. We're changed. Yeah.

I mean, is there any truth? Like, who chooses the CIA? It's like its own institution and agency, right? Like, separate to the government, ostensibly, right? It runs independently at this point. Yeah, it's like an independent branch. It's still like American intelligence. So it still answers to the Pentagon and High Command and stuff like that. It's still like military intelligence, basically.

But compared to like three letter agencies, it certainly kind of operates in its own direction, like separate of FBI, stuff like that. What I'm thinking is like people don't necessarily change in the CIA, like unless something really drastic happens. Oh, no, it's the same top brass. The new president comes in and then clears it out.

Right. Okay. And if, like some, depending on who you talk to, maybe the CIA clears out a few presidents. Yeah. Oh, we'll get to that at some point in the future on Red Thread. But hello. Welcome to the Red Thread. My name is Jackson. On this show, we cover, you know, all kinds of crazy things. It's been a bit dark the previous few weeks, mainly because we wanted to traumatize Caleb here as an inductee of the Red Thread. We had to break in our new guest. Yeah, we had to break him in right.

We had to make sure that all the life left his eyes very quickly. But we're going kind of goofy mode this week. I mean, it's MKUltra. There's nothing like super over the top depressing about it, at least compared to the previous weeks. As a top down summary, I guess, of MKUltra, what it is was a brainwashing, um,

a project from the CIA designed around brainwashing people, basically, through experimentation. They wanted to be able to control masses of people using brainwashing and manipulations. So that's what that is. And the question for a long period of time was...

you know, is MKUltra real? And then it was, it turned out like we just said that it was real. The government confirmed it. But it's still, there's still a lot of interesting things here to go over. It's still, you know, a hotly contested and talked about topic that I think is a pretty good topic to cover on Red Thread. And like I said, it's not too, it's not too fucking depressing, which is nice for once. So we're

We're going to hit MKUltra time. It's just good old-fashioned homeless people being manipulated by their government into committing atrocities while under the effects of hallucinogenics and then being blackballed by the government in years to come. So it's a very happy topic. It's very, you know... Well, when you put it like that, now I'm sad again. What the fuck?

Why can't you go like they took goofy LSD juice and shot each other with drugs? Sure, buddy. Whatever you say, champ. It wasn't just homeless. They were doing it on each other as well. That's what's crazy to me. They were literally poisoning each other in the CIA, which is just a new level of craziness, which is so great.

Hey man, you should probably go vote harder. That'd probably help. Yeah, that'll fix it. That'll fix these ages. I don't fucking care. Well, I do care to some degree, but it doesn't affect me as much as it affects you guys. So this is, again, pretty hands-off for me. I get to enjoy not being in the country that the CIA routinely fucks with. Well, that's not true, is it? Yeah, they've got their own facility down there, don't they? Yeah, they do. Pine Gap or whatever the fuck.

Yeah, alright, never mind. Vote harder. Someone vote harder for me, please. Alright, Red Thread, a few quick notes before we really start the episode. Notes in the description below. My girlfriend, who is the writer of the show, did an incredible job this week compiling the notes. So the show notes below for you to read through as well as sources on the information and stuff. Really interesting document this week, so...

You know, it's there if you want to go click on it. Other than that, we're on audio platforms and it would really mean a lot if you guys, you know, checked us out on Spotify and iTunes. It just helps out the show a lot when you do that. So thank you very much as well as subscribing and all that kind of stuff. You know the drill. Yeah, but let's start. Who wants to start it seriously this time? I can start it off if we want. No one dies in this intro, so I think he'll be fine. I think I'll be able to save my laughter for a later episode.

I think I'll be able to wait until they start dropping like flies, and then I'll come in. Yeah, exactly. I look through this doc, not that funny like the other ones, guys. Where are we at? Where are we at? Where are we at? Just go from the intro. From the top. It's uncertain what year it may be, but many seem to think it's 1984. The mysterious Big Brother keeps everyone in check under their brutal regime with surveillance, propaganda, and brutal repression. You are scared. You are scared.

you are afraid. Someone is always watching your every move and worse still, if you step out of line, you will be reprogrammed. Released in 1949, the novel tells the story of Winston Smith. That is 1984, I assume, right?

Yeah, 1984, the book. Yeah, I did appreciate that joke, by the way. What year is it? Perhaps 1984. Yes, very good. This is literally 1984. One of these Red Thread episodes is going to be us dragging your girlfriend out here for a public flogging of just like, explain this joke about this dead person. All right, next evidence, explain this joke about this dead person.

Hey, she's a very funny person. She's not here to defend herself, because we're misogynistic, I guess. But she is a very funny person. Yeah, why isn't she on this show? Kick this jack the guy off. She should replace me. Put her on. Yeah, fuck me. What does this guy do? I would never expose my girlfriend to the internet, Jesus Christ. I apologize. Continue. You can continue, Caleb.

The story of Winston Smith, who becomes disillusioned with the world he lives in and begins to rebel against its control. Spoiler alert, the book does not have a particularly happy ending. This novel, released 75 years ago, has been seen by many to be a sort of forewarning at best and an ominous prophecy at worst.

Its words warn of the dangers of totalitarianism and the fragility of freedom. Themes of mind control are littered throughout 1984. There is no space for individuality. You must conform to the expectations of the party. You must think like them and act how they want. All of your own personal thoughts, desires, and relationships are eliminated, and the truth around you is constantly manipulated and rewritten. How do you even know what's true and what isn't?

You are monitored constantly, even with your thoughts. Even your thoughts can be a crime. And if you resist, you are inflicted with psychological torture to break you down and reprogram you. Dude, we are literally living in 1984. Wait a way.

Literally. That's so deep, bro. I've never thought about it that way. The ministry of truth. Guys, it's almost like we have our own ministry of truth, like the book 1984. Oh my God. Whoa. That's crazy. I love seeing those tweets. You should go on a Manosphere like Red Pill podcast and say exactly that and make a million dollars. It would be so easy. Isaiah, it's 1984. It's literally 1984. Whoa. Comment down below if you agree.

Comment if you smash that like button. Hit subscribe. Barack Obama is the Ministry of Truth. Barack Obama. The cabal. If the federal government controls your thoughts, free your mind. Open your mind. Take the red pill. Become stronger. I need a pair of sunglasses and a cigar. Be aware of the programming, man. Know your strength and get bigger. Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Eat raw meat.

Eat raw meat for some reason. Also raw milk, I guess. That's a thing. Also reject anything that isn't hyper-masculine. Don't ask any questions about where those traits came from or why they're valued in society. Just accept them blindly. Don't incorporate any of the foundation for them. Exactly. Winston Smith's issue was that he didn't drink raw milk.

That's true. 1984 literally wouldn't have happened if he drank raw milk. If he drank raw milk, the book would be three pages long. Exactly, yeah. The potty would crumble. It'd end with him as the new fucking, he'd be the dictator. He'd be the fucking dictator. He would mandate raw milk for all. But he drank raw milk and now he has a podcast and everyone's cool and has eight wives. Babies. Babies. Babies drink raw milk. Babies all over the place.

1984, A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Manchurian Candidate. All these works of media attempt to show how the ruling class view the concept of brainwashing, not as a danger, but as a tool. A tool that they would never pass up the option of using if it kept them in power. A damned useful tool to keep you compliant. You, viewer. Damn, I went deep on this one. You. She's mad. Yeah.

This is great. She doesn't want to be controlled. She wrote this with the sunglasses and the cigar. Swallowed the red pill. Literally took the red pill. Jackson's going to get home and she's going to be like bench pressing in the living room. Exactly. I've never seen this side of her.

The pieces of fictional work were intended to be a warning for us, though, so that we may never fall victim as a society to a tyrannical entity. I combined entity and tyrannical. My bad. A tyrannical entity. Tyrannical entity manipulating our brains against us. But have we really heeded the warnings? Have we?

Yeah, I don't. I'm never controlled. I say no to control. Usually I do as well. Yeah. Well, I know when they're trying to manipulate me. I'm pretty smart. Well, the unpunished existence of MKUltra seems to suggest otherwise. So you're wrong. You're wrong, Jackson.

I was proven wrong immediately. You son of a bitch. If only I had been around in the 70s, I could have punished MKUltra. Proven wrong immediately, dude. Jackson couldn't pay attention. He was too bricked up thinking about his girlfriend typing all of this. Yeah, it's getting hot in here. This is really exciting stuff. This is better than 1984.

Because 1984 wasn't written by my girlfriend. This is their foreplay. He just sits across the room and she reads anti-government literature to him. And he's like, oh yeah. I sit on the couch and watch her type up red thread documents. And I'm like, yeah, this is hot. This is so hot.

Six Semper Tyrannus, my brothers in Christ. Six Semper Tyrannus, brother. MKUltra was a covert CIA project initiated in the 1950s aimed at developing mind control techniques. MK.

primarily through the use of drugs, hypnosis, and psychological manipulation. Created by the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, it sought to understand and explore the methods of controlling human behavior, largely in response to concerns about Soviet and Chinese brainwashing during the Cold War. The program involved secret experiments on unwitting subjects, including the administration of LSD and other substances. Sounds like a good time to me, am I right, guys? Sounds like a hell of a time, bud. Yeah, brother.

At a surface level view, MKUltra seems like a project with enormous consequences. They're talking about mind control, brainwashing, scientific hypnosis, concepts with enormous and society-altering consequences. There's clearly a lot to dive into here, and the conspiracies run deep. First things first, though, let's figure out where and how MKUltra began.

God, I love the sentence, the conspiracies run deep. That's exciting stuff. That is, they do. He's getting a little too excited. I think we need to put a leash on Jax and get going. Yeah, I can't do this episode. I'm getting too bricked up over here. You gotta go jacket. Sorry, guys. Alright, Isaiah, how did MKUltra begin? Only you have the answers, my friend. Please, enlighten us. Oh, boy, you ain't gotta tell me twice.

All right. Where did it begin? When we look at the origins of mind control and brainwashing in the modern sense, we really go back to 1940s Germany. Oh, no.

It was those damn Germans. Damn Nazis. She, uh, man, you're, you got, woo, alright. Can we go even further back than, like, shortly Germany, the Nazis didn't invent the concept of mind control and brainwashing. I feel like this has to be a thing that's been, like, sought after by, you know, tyrannical people since well before that. Uh, I mean, it depends on what you're talking about, because if we're talking about, like, consumerism,

controlling another person like you know uh haitian culture had like um stories of zombies and stuff like that right like being able to possess someone spiritually or something like that all the way back since you know uh the the place first started becoming a nation so that kind of idea of controlling another person's been around but i would say 1940s germany was probably the first time people thought about it in a scientific sense you know

Or in the sense of controlling a real living person, like actually altering their brain chemistry to make them do things. Like when you're talking about voodoo rituals or whatever, I'm assuming that's like controlling their spirits or something. The spirits of deceased people, like you brought up zombies. Oh, there are... I am...

Unless I'm way off, I am almost positive there is some ritual stuff about controlling a living person, at least temporarily. But there was necromancy, like corpses being brought back or whatever. Like a dead person being under control. Isn't that somewhat similar to voodoo dolls as well? Surely that's where that idea stems from? Well, voodoo dolls are like... It's not controlling another person, it's affecting another person with their doll. Yeah.

So it's a little bit different because with a voodoo doll, the other person would still be conscious. Yeah, true. At least. But yeah, there's been stuff about taking over other people's bodies and stuff. I would say 1940s Germany is probably the first time it was thought of scientifically, though. Look, I'm fine with giving them the credit. It feels a bit weird, but you know what? They can have it. Well, it's not credit. It's not like a plus. In spite of everything, this was kind of cool. It doesn't have to be a...

No, it's additional admonishment, right? It's an evil thing to seek, surely. I think we can all agree with that. Controlling another person? I would agree with that, yeah. Yeah, so fuck Nazi Germany. Brave red thread statement right there. Only brave statements on this podcast. Remember to thumbs up this video if you agree with the statement. Remember, only people who like this video are people that don't like the Nazis. Otherwise, we'll have to assume the worst.

At this time, prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Dachau were used in interrogation experiments with the aim to create a sort of truth serum. To accomplish this goal, drugs like barbiturates, morphine derivatives, mescaline, and other hallucinogens were used to try and remove a person's will while being interrogated.

Stephen Kinzer, an American journalist, author and academic, later spoke out about how MKUltra was a continuation of the experiments conducted by the Nazi regime in the concentration camps. I'll take this quote.

So this quote is from Stephen Kinzer from Poisoner in Chief, which is a book from 2019. Quote, Strange Lovian doctors who had worked in Nazi death camps were brought to the United States to share what they had learned. The CIA's mind control project known as MKUltra was a continuation of the work

End quote. It's not new information, like...

uh the u.s government took a lot of things from nazi germany in terms of research yes including including the german nazis yeah paper clips bud paper clips yeah paper clips yeah so we uh it is a known fact that at least on the rocket program uh we gave a bunch of them amnesty if they agreed to work at nasa uh like thousands of scientists who participated in the uh

and stuff like that in administrative roles and whatnot. We gave them a freebie if they helped us what we wanted.

um so like if we did that i a million percent believe that we would have done the same thing when it comes to mind altering especially considering what the cia was doing like 10 years after world war ii so uh yeah it's well within reason i mean they didn't care they just wanted they wanted the research they wanted the you know mind control abilities of course they wouldn't care where the research comes from it's national security

The idea was that Germany lost, right? Now our biggest concern is the Soviets. So anything we can do to get ahead of them is worth it. Yeah, and the Soviets were thinking the exact same thing. Yes. Actually, I've never looked into that. I don't know if there's any stories about the... I mean, hold on. They were doing the same thing mind control wise, but I don't think there's any stories of them like pardoning Germans for information. Maybe a couple, but it at least wasn't as large scale as the US was.

Yeah, I believe they had their own. I think they had their own wing of their version of paperclips. I'm pretty sure. I read that somewhere, but I need to...

For people listening, when we say paperclip, for those few that probably don't know, Operation Paperclip was a project by America after World War II where they hired, in quotation marks, more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians that previously worked in Nazi Germany to then work in the US government on those projects.

It was called Operation Osu Vyakim. It was a secret Soviet operation. They took 2,500 former Nazi German specialists in 1946. The NKVD... Did you say 2,500? They took more than us. 2,500 and then 4,000 family members. Said the FBI agent pretending that he's Australian. You guys. I wasn't there. I didn't recruit them.

Yeah, the NKVD, though, Stalin's special guard took them as war reparations. Interesting. Well, did they pay them? Did they treat them better than the US did? Did they give them? Yeah. So they were slaves in Russia, whereas you guys gave them houses and stuff. Yeah, that was like the beginning of the Gulag archipelago that they I'm sure as soon as they stopped working, they were sent to fucking labor camps.

I'm sure. I don't know that. It was better than getting a 401k or whatever that you guys gave them. We gave them a lot, bro. We treated them like fucking kings. I think we issued wives to them. We gave them property. We gave them jobs. That's actually pretty ridiculous. USA! USA! USA! Frankie loves it when I start chanting.

All right. So, yeah, the U.S. government wanted to gain their knowledge, their knowledge being Nazi Germany, and keep snowballing the research that the Nazi regime had been desperately working on throughout the waning years of the war. As they saw the research as being a war treasure of sorts, something they could use to gain an upper hand in the future, especially against the Soviets. A particular key interest from the CIA's perspective was mind control.

During the Cold War, the public's fear of mind control and brainwashing was deeply rooted in the geopolitical tension between the U.S. and communist nations, especially the Soviet Union and China. These fears were fueled by reports that communists had developed advanced techniques to manipulate minds, stripping individuals of their free will. Man, it's a good thing we never did anything like that. The concept itself, that of brainwashing, entered the public consciousness, particularly after the Korean War,

when American POWs were accused of being indoctrinated by their captors. The term itself became popularized by journalist Edward Hunter in 1950, who wrote articles like, brainwashing tactics force Chinese into ranks of Communist Party. It's a banger headline. Or maybe they were literally just forced into the ranks of the Communist Party. Maybe there wasn't brainwashing. Maybe they were just held at gunpoint. But yeah, it's kind of...

He's kind of mental, right? Imagine going to fight in the Korean War as an American soldier, then coming home and being told you were brainwashed by your captors. Actually, I know you think that you were in the war and everything, but...

Yeah, you're actually a Korean brainwashed spy. We want these American POWs coming over. These Koreans, man, they had lives. They had families. It's like, all right, quit it with that hippy-dippy nonsense. Yeah, sympathizing with the enemy. You must have been brainwashed. Must have been brainwashed, yeah.

Meanwhile, nowadays, soldier POWs that come back are singing Caramel Dancing and stuff. I think that's far more damaging to the psyche. It's just like an underground, in a cave, a prisoner camp, and you just see the flashing lights and hear like, Dance on me, bonecap. Yeah.

If you came back from a war, like the Korean War or whatever, and you were unchanged and you were just like super patriotic Americans, I would think you were brainwashed by America at that point. Like, you should come back from a... Well, not you should, but like, it's perfectly rational and reasonable to come back from a war, like completely shell-shocked, right? And yet these people were coming back from the Korean War in that state and they were immediately labeled as brainwashed, like, sympathizers.

Especially one without a clear end. Because the Korean War, often referred to as the Forgotten War, is forgotten. And then right after that, Vietnam. Instantly after World War II, we got such a huge dub with World War II that was such a clear victory. And there was so much amazing Uncle Sam propaganda for World War I. Exactly. World War I, World War II, back to back. You just didn't know when to quit. And then you got the consequences of the Sino-Japanese War.

And then you have the Korean War, which is basically a war against China, in a sense, and communism. And the Soviets, yeah. Yeah, and then there's no victory. We didn't win that war. It's like they haven't signed some fucking treaty. I think Russia's technically still at war against Japan from the pre-World War II Sino-Japanese War. But there's no victory, and then people are told that they're being brainwashed. Yeah.

Because they're just like... People who fought in the war. Yeah, why are we doing this? Why did we do this? And then we do it again! USA! USA! It never ends. Keep going. Ship off a new batch.

More, more, more. You're going to do the exact same thing over again in Vietnam. Like, no, we're going to go there. We're in Vietnam. We're really fine. The Russians, if you think about it. And then that was an absolute disaster every way you look at it. And it's like, well, we learned something with this one. And now to the Middle East. Teaching moments.

USA! USA! Anyway. Yeah, I love that, dude. USA! USA! USA! Newspaper headlines from the era reflected these anxieties. The anxieties of the general public, such as, Communists brainwash American POWs, and are we defenseless against brainwashing?

Public concern was exacerbated by stories of U.S. soldiers returning home as unrecognizable due to supposed brainwashing techniques, leading to sensationalized depictions in pop culture, including movies like The Manchurian Candidate. They were just, they had PTSD. It doesn't go deeper than that. That's really funny. Someone comes back like those were people with lives and their family's like, oh, it looks like the Russians got them. Okay, my turn, Ray.

I gotta piss really hard Meanwhile that person claiming that they're brainwashed or whatever has never stepped foot in war or conflict guaranteed Just like Just seeing someone with PTSD and being like What's wrong with you? Are you a commie now? They got to him They goddamn got to him His brain's been befuddled

A 1953 New York Times article titled "The Brainwashing Battlefront" further intensified the fears, stating: "There is no guarantee we can protect ourselves against this invisible war." Such reporting painted a picture of an overwhelming threat, a more personal threat than just an atomic bomb.

The people were rightfully terrified by the idea that their minds could be controlled by a foreign entity. The U.S. government, however, wasn't scared as such that they could have their minds controlled. No, their fear was that they couldn't be the first to control minds, hence the desire for MKUltra. They wanted that good mind control shit.

how would you feel right now if it came out that there was a way to control minds from like you know a foreign government or something how scared would you be about that I mean there is a way for it TikTok there's ways of controlling minds now break through the seal and break through the clock are you talking about like magic like something that just they can use it

Yeah, they shake their wizard wands, they go, brain is control-less, and then your brains are theirs, or whatever. Interesting. Yeah, I can understand the anxiety of the time, especially since it was, at that time, it was definitely a very new...

concept, right? Like now, like you said, we've gone through like 10 years of being told like, yeah, these companies, these entertainment companies are controlling our brains to some extent. So we're kind of familiar with the terminology now. But back then, it would have been pretty terrifying, the idea that your brain can be controlled by someone else. Yeah, I'd have diarrhea running down my leg for sure.

Yeah, well, that's what the government would want. That's what they were controlling you to do. For sure, yeah. I'd be like, oh my god, I'm so scared right now. Use brain control powers to make Caleb shit his pants. Yeah, exactly, bro. I do that every episode. Whenever I'm like, don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh.

Yeah, that's true. I'm so easy. I'm like a big panel with buttons on it and you can press buttons to make me feel certain emotions and react. Don't think about a white bear, Caleb. Do not think about a white bear. Fuck. I just thought experimented him. It's over. I win. You bastard. Everyone always thinks that their brains can't be controlled. We're the ones that won't be conditioned by society or other influences, but

It's always a lie. You can always be manipulated. Sorry. Brains are simple things at the end of the day. I mean, well, not really, but emotions are simple things to control by these big companies and stuff that pour a lot of money into it. All right. Let's talk about now the foundation of MKUltra. Caleb, I want to hear your sultry voice discuss MKUltra, please.

MKUltra officially began in 1953, around the same time as the conclusion of the Korean War, which saw America and the Communist coalition between the Republic of China and the Soviet Union fight for control of the Korean Peninsula. It was officially sanctioned by the CIA director at the time, Alan Dulles.

Allen was an American lawyer who went on to become the longest-serving CIA director still to this day, serving from February 26, 1953 until November 29, 1961. He ended up being fired from this possession by President Kennedy after the failed invasion of Cuba, which was also known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

I remember that from the Call of Duty campaign. Exactly. Yeah. And he assassinated him. He assassinated Kennedy. There is a conspiracy theory that Allen was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But that is the whole extra deep dive, perhaps for a future episode of The Red Threat. That's true. I think he did assassinate him. I think him and Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird. He pulled out a gun himself. Exactly. I think Lady Bird, Lyndon B. Johnson, helicopter war makes sense.

Anyways. I won't disagree with you. You sound very passionate about that idea. Regardless, Dulles was already deeply interested in exploring mind control techniques to counter perceived threats from America's enemies at this point in time. He was a handsome guy. He was a... Dude, he looks so suave. I'd let my mind be controlled by him. Same. This guy's a damn genius. I love the guy. He's got a little red nose too. He's a good fit.

Dude, is this a controversial opinion? I think pipes look way cooler than vapes. Just gonna say it with my whole chest. Does anyone think vapes look cool in general? I don't think so. I don't think it was ever like, man, you look so cool with that vape. Dude, you look cool with that vape. What are you talking about? Zoomers absolutely do. Zoomers are fucking stupid. I mean like adults. Just kidding.

At what age is it alright to start smoking from a pipe like that? Shit, bud, I used to. Fucking pipes are awesome. For audio listeners, this is a super old dude. Well, he's not super old, but he's an old dude smoking a pipe. You know, imagine 1950s and that's the picture. And he's like, transatlantic, director of the CIA, or whatever. Anyways. Yeah, see? We need to control their brains. Control their brains, see? Give them LSD. Interesting. Interesting.

That's so crazy, it might work. They were all cartoon characters back in the 1950s. The project itself was to be overseen by Sidney Gottlieb. How do you say that last name? Gottlieb? Gottlieb? Gottlieb?

Gottlieb? Gottlieb. Gottlieb, I'd say. Yeah, whatever. What the fuck? Sydney Gottlieb, an American spymaster and chemist. Sydney, born on August... Well, that's definitely not how you say that word. Oh, really? If you want a pronunciation guide. Oh, really? Yeah, it's like chemist. I didn't know that. Sydney, born on... I'm sure you didn't. Sydney, born on August 3rd, 1918 in the Bronx, New York, was academically brilliant, but

He earned a degree in chemistry from, there you go, Jackson, chemistry. You mean chemistry? No, no, no. From the City College of New York and later obtained a PhD in biochemistry from California Institute of Technology. During your early 50s, Dulles was searching for someone with a strong enough scientific background and a focus on chemical and biological experimentation.

Gottlieb, after being introduced to the CIA through his work at the Department of Agriculture and with his expertise in biochemistry and pharmacology, emerged as the ideal candidate in Dulles' eyes. When he was first recruited, Gottlieb was attached to the project called Project Bluebird, which would become Project Artichoke and then would ultimately become MKUltra in 1953 when Gottlieb took full control.

Interesting. Who's this guy? Who's Gottlieb? Sidney Gottlieb? Is this him? Handsome guy. That's him sitting there. He seems nice. He would look way more handsome if he had a pipe.

True. He seems like a nice guy, though. I'm sure he never did anything untoward. Ever. No, no, no. He seems like a nice guy. He seems like a nice guy, I think. You can read it from his eyes. They look like very caring eyes. He's kind of sitting off a little bit, and his eyes give me... His eyes give me a lot of

Energy. He's very... Not really. He just looks fucking evil, is the joke. He looks terrible. He looks like a piece of shit. Anyways. For audio listeners, it's a suited guy with nice glasses, evil look, kind of sitting at a... Like a court...

What do you call those? I don't fucking know. Senate hearings? Bench or whatever? Yeah. He's chilling. Papers in his hand. What you don't know is he's tripping hard off LSD right there. And he's got like the half moon glasses too. The half moon glasses for evil people that evil people wear. Together, Alan and Sidney fully believed that there was a way to control the mind of the person and this would lead to global domination. That's crazy. Is that actually true that Alan and Sidney both believe that?

Yeah, of course. They wouldn't do it otherwise. There's no quote of them being like, we both believe. I don't think there's a quote of them confirming that they did this for global domination. We both stayed clearly plainly for the record. Let it show. We did this for global domination. With Nixon, it's just like footage.

There's definitely a way to control the mind of a person. And then Alan chimes in, and that would definitely lead to global domination for sure. After he was brought in, Sidney completed his training and then was named the Chief of Technical Services Staff's Chemical Division.

a very newly formed section of the CIA at that time. How many sections does the CIA have? There's so many of them. There's a section for each person at this point. There's dozens, and there's also, I think, 20 or 30% of them still now. We have the acronyms, but we don't know what they stand for. We don't know what they stand for. It's so weird. Hey, we learned in the past 20 years, but that's classified. Don't ask about it.

The scope of Project Arctic Choke, and eventually MKUltra, was controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation. Interesting. That means you can force a person to commit suicide through the brain. That's crazy. That's crazy.

This is a direct quote from a book called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA and Mind Control by John Marks and Alan Lane. It was a book published in 1979 and was created after the authors combed through 16,000 pages of documents that the CIA released under the Freedom of Information Act.

This is unbelievably hosted on CIA.gov forward slash library. They've got that document that says that quote on the CIA.gov website. Oh, I'm sure they... They're proud of it. Yeah, well, I'm sure they're like... They're probably fucking... There's a bunch of books that are on the CIA.gov website. There's one about, I think...

I think the fucking... What's that theory? The Borean Peninsula? The Hyperborean Peninsula or whatever? Hyperborea? Yeah, there's like a land up north. Some guy wrote a book about it, and then the CIA...

Has it or something. I forget. I'm just fucking talking on my ass right now. Yeah, they've got a CIA.gov slash library, so I guess they host a bunch of books related to them on that website for people to access. I would assume to give the idea would be to show that they're being transparent, I guess. Well, the way it works is if the CIA internally references something, then it's kind of like a...

What's the word for it? What's the thing you put at the end of a paper that's like, oh, your bibliography. It's kind of like a bibliography. Where you preserve the data you're talking about. So for example, there's this book I'm reading called Chaos that is about the connection between MKUltra and the Manson cult. And

Whenever I was looking up stuff for it, it's on the CIA's website because they have several internal documents discrediting the book itself, being like, it's ridiculous, it's foolish, whatever. But because they are talking about the book, it is also hosted on the website as a resource, basically. So they could have it on the website to bully it, basically, and pick it up and put it in their own documents. Because it's public. It's supposed to be a public entity.

So they have to do stuff like that. Sidney used a combination of substances in the development of his eventual truth serum.

Cocaine, marijuana, heroin, peyote, mescaline, and the growing in popularity LSD were frequently and often utilized in various cocktails to varying degrees of success. The goal was simple. They were trying to induce states of confusion, opening up their patient to vulnerability that they could then exploit, and if a person is confused or otherwise disoriented, it

It disrupts their ability to think critically, make decisions, and ultimately maintain a sense of self-control. In this state, they become more vulnerable to suggestion as their usual cognitive defenses such as skepticism and logical reasoning are weakened.

Due to the lowering of defenses, individuals are more likely to accept external guidance, pressure, or instructions as they seek to regain clarity or stability. We are all social creatures, after all. This is a key characteristic in almost all psychological tactics used in interrogation or manipulation.

So they're just, you know. See, this is why you come to the Red Threat. You learn how to manipulate people. We give you the guides. First up, make a cocktail of cocaine, marijuana, mescaline. Find as many drugs as you can find and pile them all into a cocktail. I got a local apartment complex. Don't do that. I got a local apartment complex. What the fuck? Why are you barking, Frankie? I got a local apartment complex. Got a bunch of cactus outside. They won't know. We can go in there. We can gather it. We can make mescaline.

Alright. I know a guy. I got an in. Alright. I know a guy. I know a fella. We can get this whole operation running tonight. What do you say? We can get this whole thing going tonight. Alright. We can send some fucking masculine around and start manipulating people. It's like breaking bread but a lot more low stakes. Yeah. Yep. Trying to get my wife to change the color of the kitchen.

I'm going to have to manipulate. Yeah, it's easier to make a drug cocktail than it is just to hash it out. Yeah, exactly. For people like me. I mean, I don't know about normal people, but...

This would be paired with electric shocks, snapping the person back from their weak state. For those who claim to have been a part of these experiments, their memories are vague as the various drug abuses and psychological manipulations left many with amnesia. So there are permanent effects from these experimentations.

But Sidney, while toying with his LSD cocktails and experiments, was becoming increasingly frustrated. He wasn't getting the results he had ultimately wanted, and he was feeling pressure from above. He enlisted the help of Richard Helms, who at the time was the chief of operations for the Directorate of Plants, yet another fucking agency within the CIA. He asked Richard to write up a proposal to further expand their research to send to the director, Alan Dulles,

I said that like it was a question. Alan Dulles? Alan Dulles. Is that how you pronounce it? Dulles? Yeah, it's probably Dulles.

Okay. Alan Dulles. Sydney and Alan had similar goals, and Sydney knew that this project would get approved, which it then did on April 13th, 1953. Later, when Alan spoke to the alumni of Princeton University about the future projects of the CIA, he described what they were dealing with as a, quote, battlefield of brain warfare, end quote, which is the coolest fucking thing I've ever heard, but also bad for us.

This speaks to the degree of seriousness of which the CIA as an agency thought of the research and of its importance. After the expansion approval was given by Alan Dulles, Project Artichoke would be renamed MK Ultra. It's Alan Dulles, by the way. It's Alan Dulles, by the way. Dulles? No, no, no. I think it's Dulles. There's an airport back home in Virginia and it's called Dulles Airport. Yeah, that's what I was basing it off. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't care. Dulé. Dulé Dulles. I don't fucking know, dude. Who gives a fuck? I think we're being brainwashed. He was a bad dude. We're being brainwashed right now. He wasn't pronounced his name a certain way. Who wrote this?

She's good at brainwashing, trust me. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of the experiments was that the CIA desperately wanted an understanding of how unaware individuals would be affected post-brainwashing. So they tested their various experiments on involuntary subjects like prisoners, mental patients, hospital patients, and also CIA employees and military personnel who were unaware of the scope. Yeah, me too. They fucking just turned on each other immediately. Took their own.

who were unaware of the scope of the experimentation being conducted on them. What'd you say, Sir Isaiah? You guys can keep talking for a sec. Someone's at the door. No big deal. Oh, no, it's the CIA. It's Sidney. It's Sidney Gottlieb. He's returned for the dead. It's Sidney Gottlieb. Yeah, he's definitely dead. He was handsome a long time ago. He must have been dead now. Prisoners and patients were seen as the most desirable test subjects because they were vulnerable and in situations where they had limited ability to refuse.

And for those wondering, as I was, it says this in the document, but I genuinely was wondering this, about what the MK in MKUltra stands for. It's a rather boring answer, which is great for content. MK is an arbitrary prefix standing for the Office of Technical Services, and Ultra is simply an arbitrary word.

pulled from the dictionary there's no real deep meaning here which is that's fucking lame that ruined it for me fuck MKUltra what Ultra that it just came from it's just a word well did you think that the original one had something to do with artichokes I thought no shit I thought come on MKUltra that's such a cool fucking word it sounds like something from Iron Man

Yeah, that's what I thought. That's genuinely what I was telling my girlfriend. I was like, it probably stands for mind control. And they spoke control with a K to be super cool. But then I realized that was way too cool. I spread false rumors all the time. That's what I say it stands for. That's a form of brain control. Hey, everyone start believing MKUltra stands for mind control ultra, please. Start spreading that. I made an MKUltra video and I did that. I did say that.

I got surprisingly few comments, too, by the way. I thought people would be like, actually, but I didn't. They just fucking took it. In the video, you like pass it off as truth. Yeah, yeah. I was like, it stands for mind control. And I looked at the camera. Me when I knowingly spread misinformation. Evil man.

Yep. But yeah, there's no real deep meaning here with the name. It's just good old fashioned United States government agency bureaucracy that somehow turned out to sound really cool. Yeah. Isaiah, talk about the expansion experiments of MKUltra. So in 1973, most of the MKUltra documents were destroyed.

Yeah, they can just do that.

Was this a time before paper shredders were invented? Although I guess burning them is more effective than paper shredding them. Never mind. There were hundreds of human experiments conducted, some by volunteers of their own free will, some volunteering under pressure, and others who had absolutely no idea they were involved. As previously mentioned, a favorite volunteer utilized in MKUltra was that of prisoners who would exchange partaking in experiments for an easier time in prison, extra recreation time, etc.,

An organized crime boss, James Whitey Bulger, a criminal mentioned in a previous episode of the Red Thread, the Boston Art Museum heist. Look at that, our connected universe building together. Hey, he's back. I love that guy. He's back.

What did he do? Like kill 18 people or something, I think? No, he was the guy. I think he was the guy during the Boston art heist who kept claiming that he had done it, but there was no evidence. No, I think he was like genuinely a big crime boss that killed like a bunch of people. Oh, well, ignore me. Hey, I love that guy anyway. Fuck it.

He was caught in an attempted robbery and truck hijacking. Later in his life, after being released from prison, he confided in friend and fellow mobster Kevin Weeks about what exactly happened to him when he went to Atlanta Penitentiary. Whitey, while incarcerated from 1956 and 1965, had been convinced to take part in a medical experiment under the guise that they were finding a cure for schizophrenia.

This, of course, was not the case, and he was instead used as a guinea pig for MKUltra. That's pretty mental that this dude from a previous Red Threat episode is an instrumental part of MKUltra. It can't be a coincidence that just this one guy is involved in both cases. This shows the scale of experiments conducted by the CIA for MKUltra. Oh, yeah. It had to be hundreds and thousands of people. Yeah, yeah. It seems like it.

Over like a decade and a half, two? Yeah, a couple decades. A good two decades, I'd say. Because what it became, it went from Artichoke to... It was Bluebird first, right? It went from Bluebird to Artichoke to then MKUltra. But that's all we know. But I'm saying it became Ultra in 1953, right? And then they started burning stuff in 73. So there's a good 20 years. 20 years for just that. Yeah.

So it's not like Whitey was the only one who got the bulk of this. They just really hated Whitey. The entire project was set up to brainwash Whitey for some fucking reason. So the story of Whitey Bulger is another crazy one. A life of crime, being an experiment in MKUltra, leading Irish gangsters, being an FBI informant, and ending up being a wanted fugitive on the run for 16 years before he was caught at the age of 81 in California.

At his old age, Whitey was found guilty racketeering and 11 murders. There's your hero, Jackson. God bless Whitey Bulger. Hey, we don't know who he murdered. They could have been other monsters who were just as equal. Hold on. If this is the guy I'm thinking of, this guy was like... Johnny Depp played him in a movie. He did? Yeah, he was infamous. Yeah, I believe Johnny Depp played Whitey Bulger in a movie. But all I think of is Bulger Wheat.

No, this isn't the old guy I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of another old guy that was arrested in California who was like a serial killer. The Golden State Killer? Yes, that's what I'm thinking of. Yeah, yeah. He was super old when he finally got caught, right? Yes. He was just like living in a damn suburb. Yeah, this is who I'm thinking of. And the reason he got arrested is because he started yelling at kids or something. Get off my lawn or I'll serial kill you.

It led to a series of events that got him arrested. Who was the serial killer? There was a serial killer who sent in a USB or something to the government claiming to be him or whatever. He did it as how the Zodiac Killer used to, just bragging and stuff. But he didn't realize that they could reverse engineer the USB or whatever to pinpoint where he came from. It might have been the printer. The ink of the printer that he used or something dumb.

Dennis Raider? Yeah, yeah. It was the BTK killer. Oh, Dennis. Oh, Dennis the dumbass. We kill him colloquially. Wait, when did he get caught? Huh? Wait, Dennis Raider's the BTK killer? Yeah, he is, right? It looks like to me he was arrested in 2005. Yeah, whenever I searched USB serial killer, that was the first thing that came up, so I imagine that's right.

Yeah, I think it is. I think that sounds right. Anyway. Modern technology can't even do a good killing. Can't even send in your... Can't even brag about your killings to the government anymore. Can't even brag about your killing. Why does this country come to? This is what Silicon Valley has taken from us. Used to be a decent country. Alright, so anyway, sitting on the jury for this trial was a woman named Jeanette Ullar.

Whitey sent a letter to Jeanette from prison, which turned into a five-year friendship where they exchanged over 70 letters talking about their various aspects of their lives. In these letters, Whitey spoke about MKUltra and what it was like living through the experiments. Whitey believed that participating in the LSD experiments that comprised the project may have contributed to the violent man he became.

Janet has also said herself that if she knew about these experiments, she would have voted differently to his murder charges when he was on trial. Okay, so that sounds like a guy kind of manipulating someone a little bit. Also, how did it start that someone on the jury became pen pals with a guy that she helped convict? And also, if you were a part of the LSD trials, then...

You started the trials while you were already in prison, I imagine, for some violent crime. So there was already some violence. I'll trust this guy. I'll trust this guy. Whatever I said about that previous episode, I stayed by. Bit of a rascal. A little bit of an untrustworthy subject, if I say so myself. A little bit of a nefarious ne'er-do-well.

Wait, but if he was mind-controlled by the CIA to kill 11 people, do you think he's still guilty of that then? Or is it the CIA? Because he's ostensibly used as a weapon at that point. I mean, is he permanently broken? Because at that point, it's just a tragedy. He's lost as a human. Hold on, hold on. This isn't to...

release wrongdoing. I'm just talking hypothetically. I'm just talking hypothetically. Like, this isn't what happened. Yeah, I know. I'm saying this isn't to release wrongdoing on the CIA's behalf. But we know nowadays that, like, if you take LSD, you don't become...

A monster, inherently, right? Even with mind control and stuff like that. I don't think the CIA was so successful that they were able to completely convert him into a weapon to kill people, right? It's not inconceivable to me at the same time that they could have really mentally fucked

this dude or people in general in their experiments because it wasn't just taking LSD it's not like they just had a bad trip or they just you know took a regular dose of LSD from what we know of the experiments they were subjected to like inhumane treatment for you know days and weeks at a time of just these ridiculous experiments that were akin to torture and when combined with like

electroshock treatment as well as things like the LSD cocktails of large doses in conjunction with other drugs at the same time, it's not inconceivable to me to think that they really could have mentally fucked these people beyond repair.

Whether it's to the degree where I would, you know, absolve guilt from them for killing 11 people. I don't think so. I think that this dude is probably, you know, using it to his advantage, like by claiming that, you know, he was that mentally broken where he needed to kill 11 people. And it was the CIA's fault for that. I don't buy that necessarily, but...

But I definitely think that they did lasting damage to people in these experiments, right? Yeah. Maybe. I don't know. I think if...

It's kind of the way I hear about a lot of stuff, because you'll hear things like... I was listening to this the other day, talking about pornographic material. But most serial killers you talk to, or have done interviews, were addicted to porn at a young age, which led to a hatred of women to themselves and stuff. So it's like, okay, does...

Does that mean anyone who watches porn becomes a serial killer? No. Yes. But... No. Out of 50-50 then. But there are people who already have these violent tendencies, perhaps are predisposed to it in some nature way, but in my opinion, more so from nurture, who that kind of thing doesn't help, right? So do I think that the CIA holding Whitey down and forcing LSD and mind control on him helped his mental state? No. No.

But I think that he was still on the path of that violence beforehand. Probably. I mean, he was a mobster before he went into prison the first time. So he wasn't a good person. Could that have made him more reckless and more angry to cause violence? Sure. But it's still, again, down the path he was heading. Yeah. Do we got anything about old Ted Kaczynski? He was also in the MKUltra shit.

There's something about Ted Kaczynski in here. Kaczynski, Ted K. Yeah, he was part of the early side of it, though, where it was all about conditional conversation, where he just spent the entire time he was in college getting berated by a professor over and over as part of an experiment for years straight. That's another example of...

I don't think that that experiment caused Kaczynski to do what he did, but certainly didn't help. If anything, it just made him even more antitrust of establishment and authorities and stuff like that. So I think he was already on that path, but didn't help.

At the very least, some level of complicitness has to be acknowledged, right? Like if you're just, if like that's the, if you, they have to know that these people are, have like a massive potential to do, to do wrong or evil. And then, and then like, I don't know. It just doesn't seem like they're really that concerned with the result of, you know, after we mind control this guy,

They're introducing an element into their lives that could exacerbate their existing recklessness, which is crazy for a rehabilitation aspect. They've got to know. It doesn't work. Or at least they should be held responsible for it. Again, I don't think it absolves the guilt of Whitey Bulger in this case. I don't think it was a thing that caused him necessarily to kill 11 people. That's such a crazy jump. Bulger wheat. Yeah.

So these are some quotes. I'll read these quotes out. This is a quote from Janet Ulla on the experiments Whitey was involved in. Quote, had I known, I would have absolutely held off on the murder charges. He didn't murder anyone prior to the LSD. His brain may have been altered. So how could you say he was really guilty? So we know where Janet lies on this. Again, super weird that she stayed in contact with him too after voting guilty to him. Was she trying to get those conjugal visits? What's going on there? Why, Janet? Why?

Maybe she felt guilt. I don't know. And then here's a quote from Whitey specifically recounting his experience of the treatment. So, quote, in minutes, the drug would take over and about eight or nine men, Dr.

Pfeiffer and several men in suits who were not doctors would give us tests to see how we reacted. 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.

Yeah, I mean, if they didn't know what was happening, if they had no concept of LSD at that point, and they were just told that, hey, this will fix your mental illness or whatever, and they were experimented on in that way. Yeah, they have no concept of hallucinogenics. Oh my god, dude. Dude, that would be terrifying. Yeah, they go through ego death. They come out the other side like, whoa. Yeah, change, man.

I mean, it would be a life-changing event. But again, I don't think that would lead to you then killing 11 people. I'm sorry, I just don't buy that. If anything, I think that'd make you a better person. You'd get some perspective on stuff, but apparently not.

I don't know if I'd gain perspective from seeing a camera change into a dog. I don't know. That's what all those people who go out west and do shrooms for a couple weeks, they come back like, I learned empathy and whatever. Yeah, I don't buy that, though. I simply don't buy that. I'm sorry. I don't buy that you suddenly became a good person because you took shrooms out in the desert. Ah!

I think what it can do sometimes is people who are like incredibly narrow-minded and like one way of thinking are like, oh, you know, the world's bigger than I think. And I think it's kind of dumb to do it that way instead of just lived experience. But if it works, it works, I guess. I have absolutely zero interest in any drugs of any kind. So I can't relate. But you do you, bro. Same.

I think, yeah, I'm not saying don't do it. If you want to do it, do it. Whatever. I don't care. I got some cactus out by apartment complex. We can make some mescaline if y'all want. I'm just saying. We can get it cranked real quick. We can really get this mescaline thing going. This is the next business. Isaiah, you can be here in eight hours. We can get this shit done. Let's do it tonight. I'll see you tonight. Let's get it chalked up. Let's serve intense prison sentences for absolutely no reward.

He's getting out of the sour candy business. He's getting into the candy business. I'm getting into the mescaline business. That's where the money is. Yeah, exactly. New flavor every week. All right. So in the experiments, Whitey and the others were given LSD and other drugs for just under two years. That's not much LSD.

Give me more. Whitey said that he had never been the same after the experiments, plagued with nightmares and constant recollections of the supervising doctor at the time, the previously mentioned Carl Pfeiffer, asking repeatedly, quote, would you ever kill anyone? Maybe they were trying to get him to kill 11 people. What a weird experiment. I do that whenever Caleb's asleep. I stay next to his bed like, would you do it? Would you do it? Would you do it? Yeah. Kill someone. Would you kill someone?

Is this a violent murderer attempting to rationalize or absolve his own misdeeds? Or is it possible that the various cocktail of drugs administered to him and others truly did have a sort of permanent mind-altering effect that led to some being more violent? The current science suggests that LSD does not inherently make people more aggressive. If aggression does occur, it's usually due to external factors such as

psychological distress, their environment, or the circumstances surrounding the LSD experience as opposed to the drug itself. However, that doesn't mean much when we don't know the specifics of the experiments themselves. The dosages, the additional drugs administered in combination with the LSD and other factors make the idea entirely possible. So it is possible. I agree with that. I agree with that paragraph. It is possible that they did completely brainwash

melt this dude and he did become like a murderer because of it again we don't know the details of the experiments because they burn all their documents as a habit at the CIA so we don't know the specifics of like what they actually did out

outside of YT's testimonies. Another thing to factor in is it's not even precisely what they did. It's just the fact that they threw so much against the wall to see what would stick, you know? Yeah. Like, if you take someone who is already, like, a violent person, potentially murderer, and then you throw all these drugs at him, right? Regardless of...

if that person is like uh if your experiment works like maybe go the other way with it maybe they're trying to make him better maybe they'd be like you don't want to kill anyone you don't want to kill anyone you're still being reckless throwing like all these variables into a person so how they come out however different uh you don't necessarily have control over even if you think you do this is why you're not meant to test on humans i'm pretty sure yeah yeah

Well, I mean, there's several reasons not to test on humans, but that is part of it, yeah. I'd say the ethics also take hold in that it is a human you are testing on, but yes. All right, so one of the major players behind the MKUltra experiments was a man named Donald Ewan Cameron, a psychiatrist who worked out of the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. That's in Canada. Yeah.

His work was a subproject. Fucking plot twist. Canada's involved here. His work was a subproject from MKUltra called Subproject 68. This subproject was funded covertly by the CIA through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which was itself a CIA front organization. While Cameron's research was focused on

de-patterning terms he coined as a means of treating mental illness, the CIA saw it as an opportunity to explore methods of mind control for MKUltra. And for those wondering, the United States conducted this without telling Canada, who were themselves also funding the experiments anyway. That's crazy. They were both co-funding these experiments together without knowing that they were both involved. USA! USA! USA! USA!

Who can fund it the best? Let's find out. Canada! Canada! We can buy control ten times as many people as they can. Give me a subject right now. Yes, sir.

Dr. Cameron himself did not know that his funding was connected to the CIA's MKUltra program. He believed the money was coming from legitimate research grants. In effect, the CIA was able to carry out the project on Canadian soil without informing Canadian authorities by masking their involvement entirely. That's like being streaming and getting a ton of live viewers only to find out that someone boughted you. Yeah. Doesn't China do that? Yeah.

China does that a lot with research grants like they'll they'll pay. Yeah, I think there's a big thing going on right now with China and research grants and then like funding specific research and through like shelves and people don't know where their research money is coming from. It's really weird.

I mean, yeah, their influence is kind of crazy in general with like the Belt and Road Initiative and stuff like that. But I mean, that's not covert. That's them directly investing in other countries to get a benefit out of it. But yeah, they absolutely do it covertly as well through the same means. And I'm sure that's... That'd be a pretty hard thing to weed out as well. Yeah. Chinese operatives everywhere. One of us, statistically speaking, is most likely a Chinese operative. It's not me. It's not me either. Yeah.

I'm the FBI operative or whatever, so I can't be both. Glory to the CCP. Oh, fuck. It's him. Oh, fuck. Now, ding dong. One out of every three podcasts is a CCP spy. Now, ding dong.

I'd do it if they offered money, by the way, just straight up. Overall, Subproject 68 is one of the most controversial projects within MKUltra. Ewan, the guy that made the subproject, had a particular interest in schizophrenia, thinking that he could cure it by the de-patterning, which what started as focusing on curing schizophrenia soon turned into a series of experiments that many would simply describe as torture. Ewan would use Thorazine, an antidepressant,

an antipsychotic medication, to put his patients into an artificial coma. They would be left in this coma for varying amounts of time, some a few days, others weeks. This was mixed with the injection of LSD, electroshocks, and pre-recorded messages playing repeatedly on loop, similar to what Whitey described. If they weren't induced into a coma, Ewan also used sensory deprivation in his experiments, covering their eyes,

covering their ears and eyes, and he also limited their water, food, and oxygen and kept them paralyzed by administering drugs. He wouldn't just use electroshock therapy during drug-induced comas, but had years-long treatments that patients were subjected to. Electroconvulsive therapy is used to help treatment resistant depression, but it is very regulated and is used when a condition is deemed severe.

Most of these patients did not fit into this category and a lot of the experiments committed by Ewan are seen as inhumane and they often resulted in severe psychological damage. His disregard for informed consent and the well-being of his patients violated fundamental ethical standards and the scientific community, especially modern psychiatry, largely regards Cameron's methods as reckless. I will also say that I feel less bad about the CIA view botting him.

Yeah, he doesn't seem like a very good person now, does he? We'll hook him up to a car battery and see what happens. Yeah, give him electro... That's what I always wish for these mad scientists who overstep ethical boundaries. Do it to them as punishment. Fucking, yeah, hook the 54 high voltage shock treatments up to him. See how he goes. We're doing it for the good of society. Um...

Ewan played recordings of himself speaking, repeating almost all the time through speakers around 16 hours a day. He would be split 10 days of negative messages followed by 10 days of positive. See what I mean? It's not like healthy people. It's just like, let's see what changes. It's literally just mad scientists, like, just fucking going wild.

If a patient became anxious or nervous, they were given drugs to sedate them. We don't know how many patients were involved in the experiments in Montreal, but it was in the hundreds. Many years later, hundreds applied for compensation for what they went through. The patients, children and adults, went into the experiments thinking that the experiments would help with their minor mental health issues and did not consent to what they endured. You know what's great? Like if, what's his name? What's this guy's name? Ewan was around now. He'd probably like,

I'm not saying MrBeast does this, alright, but he probably would make MrBeast videos. This does sound like it'd be good content.

Yeah, this would be like last 16 hours listening to me play messages through a speaker in a trap room. Mr. Beast cures schizophrenia. I can't imagine what kind of evil person would strap their friends into a chair and put them in a sensory deprivation unit while playing loud noises for YouTube content. Isn't that right? It's never happened.

Yeah, we would never do that. I think it's cruel. And I think whoever orchestrate whoever would orchestrate something like that should be beaten with hammers. But I think he's also I think he's also a beautiful, well-meaning man who should be heard out. Do you guys hear that he got beat with hammers? Do you hear about that? What? Nothing. We can move on. The fuck you're talking about? The alien? What are you talking about?

We can just move on. You can't talk to him when he's like this. So this is a quote from Lana Mills, speaking of her father who went through the experiments. My dad was at the Royal Victoria Asthma Clinic and they told him if he went to Allen, they could cure his asthma. Well, that didn't happen. He went in there and had 54 high-voltage shock treatments followed by 54 grand mal seizures.

He has been put in an insulin coma with the recording going around. Your mother hates you. Wow. I'm sure that'll fucking cure asthma. Yeah, that's not even for like a mental thing. Like, I need help. He's like, hey, I got asthma. They're like, we got just the thing, buddy. He went into the chair.

He went in there for one of those fucking asthma puffers, like, hey, can I just get this replenished? And they strap him down to a recording that says, your mother hates you. Aren't the Montreal experiments, isn't that what Stranger Things is based on, specifically? I don't know. I think so, I'm pretty sure. That sounds right.

I didn't watch past the first season, but that sounds right. Oh, but that's when it gets good. Not really. It gets progressively worse past season. In my head, it's still a good show because I watched one season. I was like, that was good. And they never picked it up again. So.

just like from my current perspective the Marvel Cinematic Universe ended at a tasteful and mature level with Iron Man for me Iron Man, the first Iron Man movie that's where it ended I hope he teams up with someone eventually he seems lonely for me it ended in Infinity War I like it ending in Infinity War I don't want the satisfaction of Endgame I want it just to end with them all disappearing that was really cool

It's true. Yeah, everyone dying. Oh, yeah. So as another example, in the 1990s, a woman named Elizabeth Nixon released a book titled Monkey Puzzle Tree, detailing how her mother was a part of the MKUltra experiments. The mother had been admitted to the Allen Memorial Institute as she was dealing with postnatal depression.

There, she was placed under the care of Ewan Cameron, who promptly re-diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. She then suffered through... He diagnosed her with asthma. Funny enough, paranoid schizophrenics, he diagnosed with migraines. So, interesting turn of phrase. She then suffered through his harsh treatments, including de-patterning, electroconvulsive therapy, and sensory deprivation.

Elizabeth tells how her mother was one of the lucky ones, released from the hospital relatively unscathed, but forever affected. We've discussed the project using facts and reports, and these aren't conspiracies. These are things that have been admitted to by governments and corroborated by victims of the experiments themselves. We know they happened. We know why they happened. We know MKUltra was a real thing. But what we don't know is this.

How far did the CIA go to cover up its existence? Put another way, in the worlds of Carl Pfeiffer, Dwight E. Bulger, would they ever kill someone? Ah, clever turn of phrase there. I like that. Yeah, it's very good. So now we move on to The Death of a Scientist. That's a good album name. That's a good album name. You may get this one. This guy's got a dead guy in it. I'll read it. Yeah, you'll learn if you can make it. It's right up your alley. We got a jumper!

That's the first line. We got a jumper! No, that's me being afraid. That's me about to see someone jump. We got a jumper! Internally laughing. It was around 2am on a Saturday morning in November 1953 in New York City when a man... Oh no. Yeah, you happy you took this one? No!

What did you think? He said, when a man, and I just heard him burst out laughing. What did you think the death of a CIA scientist would entail? This is actually insane. He just read when a man, and he realized it was about the title card was dead.

The word plummeted is kind of funny though, to be honest. It is. Okay, I get it. It's been 70 years. It's funny. Yeah, it's not too soon. When a man plummeted from the hotel, Pennsylvania Hotel,

The man was Frank Olson, a bacteriologist and biological warfare scientist working for the CIA. When the manager on duty ran out to check on Frank, who was only wearing his undershirt and shorts, he discovered that he was still barely alive. He heard him mumble something undecipherable before he passed away. Frank was only 43. To those who knew Frank, it was unbelievable that he would throw his life out of a window. Why?

Why would she write that? That's funny. She's special. She's special. Yeah, that's a pun.

She put a pun in there. She knew I was going to read that. She made this specifically for you, no doubt. I don't know what's so funny, Caleb. Nothing. This guy had a family. This is not funny at all. It's just plummet is a funny word. Caleb, don't laugh. Okay, keep going. Please. He had been at the height of his career.

It's more puns. What is going on here? Dude, come on. This is crazy. A career that involves, you guessed it, MKUltra. He was one of the few people who knew about MKUltra, and while this meant he was a trusted figure, it also put him in an arguably dangerous position.

Yes, on the top floor of a large building. Yes, true. That's three puns in one paragraph. I love that. That's great. It's good writing.

Frank had been given a dose of LSD around a week before he died without his knowledge. He had been attending a meeting when his and others drinks were spiked with the drug. His body did not react well and reportedly he became very jittery and could not concentrate. And between this and his death, he barely slept. His wife, Alice Olson, said that at some point he said to her, I've made a terrible mistake.

but he never elaborated and we will never know what he meant or what mistake he made. Have you guys ever heard, do you guys have any friends who are like psychonauts who like delve into psychedelics? I have a buddy who's really into it. I know a couple guys. Mr. Shrooms especially, not really much other stuff, but Shrooms for sure. LSD, yeah.

I know people have done LSD. I can't think of anyone I know who's into LSD. Well, I take that back. I got a couple frenzied micro-doses publicly sometimes. Never mind. That's pretty awesome, though. There's a guy who... I know through him a couple people who were entered into psychosis, essentially, when they took their doses of LSD.

Um, which I wonder, I've never looked into the statistics of that. So I don't know if that's like a, I think how often that happens. Cause I know people can go into a psychosis from any sort of drug that changes their brain or whatever. So brain chemistry. Yeah. Yeah. So a psychosis, I just can't imagine being, you dose a whole office building full of LSD. What happens?

everybody just said i've never heard of lsd being kind of like a permanent trip thing but i have heard of shrooms uh having that effect on some people like being permanently in a state of psychosis after like bad shrooms i'm not sure if that's like just a rumor or whatever but i've heard that more so than lsd

Yeah, I feel like a lot of that's probably just fear-mongering or just anecdotes. I'm too straight-edge. I don't know. I've never done a single drug in my whole life. Not once. I've done weed. What? Twice. I've done it twice, Caleb. You fuck. Isaiah, you should have told me that before I joined this podcast. I'm sorry!

He's left. We're masculine only on this pod. Red thread's over. I couldn't stop myself. I can't continue the show anymore. That's fine. You guys leave. I'm rebranding you to the green thread and I just constantly talk about it twice. It's just two stories. Like, yeah, I got pretty hungry anyway. And then another time I smoked that reefer and went crazy, I bet.

put three puns my office is just gonna be a hot box come get me pick me up oh I'm scared wait so you guys neither of you guys have done smoked some weed at all ever not even once I never have I've never done a drug in my life wait Isaiah you're being quiet no I have not I was around it a lot in college and stuff but it always freaked me out I always saw people like lose their minds and stuff

Yeah, I got peer pressured into it and I had like an anxiety trip, I guess you would call it, where I just did not like it. So I never did it again. Now, CBD oil, on the other hand, pretty helpful with migraines. Well, by God, that's the Lord's plan when you do it that way. Of course. That's hemp. No THC. 1%. 1% THC. You wouldn't snort...

You wouldn't snort Dr. Pepper, would you? That's another one of the Lord's plans, but when you use it the wrong way, it don't work quite right. Exactly. That is incredibly correct. Y'all listen to this feller. He's very smart, like Frank Olson. When the police arrived at the scene and made their way up to the hotel room 1018A, they found a man named Robert Lashbrook who was simply sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands. Robert was associated with Ewan Cameron. What's that?

I said, I've been there, sitting on the toilet with my head in my hands. That's good. Robert was associated with Ewan Cameron and assisted in conducting experiments under MKUltra. The man who went out of the window, what is his name? The police demanded from Robert Olsen. Frank Olsen came to reply. No, you can't do the whole Bond James Bond shit to a guy who just jumped out the window. That's too cool. Frank Olsen.

When later asked about the incident, the night manager pondered on the fact that Frank ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds that were in the room and then jumped out of a closed window with both the shade and curtains closed. It seemed like a particularly unique way of taking your own life. Yeah, that is really odd. He just fucking Kool-Aid manned it through the damn window. Yeah, surely you open the window and have a moment where you stand there on the edge kind of like,

Daring yourself to do it all Wait what Wait hold on what building did he jump out of again Short one because he was still alive

Okay, a hotel. Okay, I was going to say if this was like an office building, those are like hurricane-proof windows, but a hotel might have like regular glass panes. Okay, okay, never mind. A bro-tel. But it's still ridiculous. Like he jumped out through a closed window like the glass. Yeah, yeah, it's still unlikely. It's still strange, but it's at least physically possible. Not to say he wasn't coerced out of a window, but yeah. Yeah, he was persuaded. Yeah.

With hands. Yep. As all good men are. Persuaded with force.

What was I going to do? I was going to read more. That's right. What was I going to do? So true, Cade. Yeah. So not long after the police arrived, the same manager on duty went to the phone operator and asked if there had been any calls from the room. He had a strange feeling that compelled him to check. It turns out there had been. The phone operator had heard the entirety of a very short call.

Someone in the room had dialed a number in Long Island that was revealed to belong to a man named Dr. Harold Abramson, another key figure in the MKUltra program.

Someone in room 1018A simply said, well, he's gone. And on the other end, someone said, well, that's too bad. Wow. What? Well, that's too bad. I hope my eventual death is summed up like that. Well, let's try it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The room that he was thrown out of, right? Yeah.

Okay, the room that he died in. Don't you understand? It was a hotel. He jumped out of the window that was still closed. And then there was a guy sitting on the toilet with his head in the hands. In the room that he jumped out of, someone picked up the phone, called someone else at MKUltra and said, well, he's gone. And then the other line said, that's too bad.

Well, it was clearly a hit then. No one's just like, well, he's gone. And it's all like, oh, what happened? What do you mean he's gone? You know, what went just, he's gone, like, job's done, completed. And that's it. Like, what? Well, no. He said, well, that's too bad. Clearly, he didn't want him dead. Yeah, I see a bit of empathy in that sentence. Of course. Is this pre or post-jump?

I think this is post-jump. That's post-jump. How would he say, well, he's gone up pre-jump? The guy's just sitting there depressed on the bed and you pick up the phone while he's gone. Oh, actually, no, that's a compelling point. Yeah, he's gone mentally, right? Well, he's gone insane. Even then, what would that be? If I called you, Caleb, it was like, Jackson's insane. Would you go too bad and hang up? Is there no further clarification? Caleb would say, find the nearest window and push him out.

I could see us having that conversation. Okay. All right. Specifically about Jackson. Yeah. Just Jackson. No, that's too bad. What the heck? Police first felt this was just another tragedy, the kind they see too often. When colleagues of Frank drove to his family's home to tell them the news, they were told that Frank had fell or jumped

His family never really knew the true details behind his death. They agreed when they were told they should not view his body or have an open casket due to the nature of his death. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission report was released. This was an official investigation that was led by the vice president, Nelson Rockefeller.

with the intended goal of investigating the illegal actions conducted by the CIA. This commission was ordered by President Gerald Ford in response to the growing public concern over abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies. In particular, it was an investigation into domestic activities conducted by the CIA that violated U.S. law.

President Gerald Ford ordered the commission to be established after Seymour Hersh, a journalist, revealed CIA misconduct around illegal surveillance of American citizens and operations like MKUltra. Bro, so this has been, like, repeatedly coming out for the last hundred years. Since 1953. Caleb, they've learned their lesson, okay? They're improving. Different people. Yeah, but now, thanks to the Patriot Act, we voluntarily let this kind of thing happen. How does Seymour Hersh die?

I don't know. We're probably going to find out. Let me look it up. Actually, you know, hold on. Let's play a game. Let's play a game. Let's just see. Seymour. True. I'm surprised Ford didn't get assassinated. Good Lord. Okay. Seymour. Oh, he's still alive.

He's 87 years old and he's still alive. Controlled opposition. Controlled opposition. They're just playing the long con. Exactly. Controlled opposition. Exactly. No, I shouldn't say that. We should get Seymour in on the show. Seymour, we've got a few questions for you. Yeah, hit us up. Hit us up on the green thread.

Shut up. The report confirmed that the CIA had conducted extensive experiments and unethical mind-controlling experiments under the name MKUltra and often on unsuspecting subjects. That's right. As said previously, the United States government itself admitted to MKUltra.

Yowch. Yowch.

So Frank Olsen's death was a result of him being dosed by LSD. So they claim, unknowingly, because they kept dosing everyone in the MKUltra program with LSD. That's the most that you could accuse them of, yeah. And everything else would be nebulous, because there's no one who's willing to admit if Frank was going to be a whistleblower or had linked information or stuff like that. So maybe he was murdered, but in some way, it was a part of MKUltra that got him killed. Yeah.

if he was a test subject that's their story that's the most they could yeah that's the most they're willing to say out loud yeah MK Alcala

Piles of dead monkeys.

That's real funny, isn't it? Isn't it, Caleb? That's crazy. Why would they dispose of the dead bodies? They just fucking piled up in the hallway. That's why they piled them up, so they could dispose of them. That's fucking sad.

Where'd they get all these monkeys? Yeah, what the fuck? According to Eric, it had permanently broken his father. He just wasn't suited for a position like that. News articles began to come out and the CIA were put under pressure to answer questions about everything. Alice and her family knew something was suspicious about Frank's death, but now they had something concrete to use. So they filed a lawsuit against the CIA.

This was extremely alarming for the White House and the CIA. If the family was successful in their litigation, then it would be the cause for their deepest and darkest CIA-oriented secrets to be revealed, and they didn't want that. The Rockefeller Commission was intended to show transparency to the U.S. public, but in a controlled manner. They were still very much so secrets. There were still very much so secrets that the United States government did not want to make public. The chief of staff at the time, Donald Rumsfeld,

knew that this could be very bad and proposed that they instead make a public statement expressing their regret of what happened and meet with Frank's wife and family. So President Ford extended an invitation to his family to meet at the Oval Office, which they accepted. They met on the 21st of July that year.

uh president ford apologized to the family calling the incident a terrible thing and something that should not have happened the family was offered three quarters of a million dollars as part of a settlement between the parties which they reluctantly accepted holy yeah i mean realistically what are they going to get otherwise like they're going up against the literal cia and government i'd probably take the money too so this like this raises some interesting points right so it seems that ford

Okay, so the CIA typically operates as its own branch normally, like with internal memos and stuff outside of like, you know, presidents or whatever. Like sure, the president has oversight, but it's not like the White House is updated about every decision they make. So Ford's in an interesting position where he has called out the CIA publicly. He has called for this Rockefeller Commission to be put together and

to try to hold someone accountable. And over the course of this, they determined that the CIA was responsible for Olson's death. So now Ford's in a weird place where it's like, okay,

Yes, I did not want... I did not know of the series of events that happened. Nevertheless, the CIA is still a branch of the government I preside over. So I need to be the one who's responsible for it. So I apologize on their behalf. And we offer them money. Right. And I will give them credit for this. Publicly admit to it. Now, I don't know why this didn't result in a change. I understand...

Okay, so it's easy to be like, just admonish the CIA, which at this point they should do, and just the important parts of it put somewhere else. But the CIA is pretty much our main resource for monitoring other nations when it comes to potential attacks or forewarnings. Anytime there's an attack on a NATO power that's about to happen or something, the CIA always is the one who gives the heads up of that. So there is...

stuff they do. CIA is always going to exist or something like the CIA will always exist. There will always be some shadow, right? My question is, how does something like this not result in extreme table flipping, right? Of

of like, there is a group within power that's using taxpayer dollars to get American citizens killed to perform mind-altering experiments. How does that not result in the most extreme level of changing of power? Well, yeah, because like the script said, there were very deep, intrinsic secrets involved.

the government didn't want exposed of the CIA and not even in a nefarious way of assassinations on people of their own nationality. It's just actual national security level secrets that they probably didn't want revealed. Not only this, this is post LBJ, post JFK assassination with Gerald Ford when all this stuff's happening. All this stuff's coming out.

this is post Operation Northwoods post like there's so many massive intelligence failures and suggestions that are just like each table flipping moments. This is like the cherry on top. It's crazy that it's right. I mean, that it lasts so many. There's so fucking many of them like this is this is just like I mean, and they're still just hanging out doing it. Awesome.

Well, someone's got to do it. Somebody's got to do it. USA. USA.

So this wasn't the end of the saga, however. In 1984, Frank's family traveled to meet with Sidney Gottlieb at his office. Sidney had previously extended an offer that if they had any questions, he would be happy to answer them. So Alice, Eric, and Frank's other son, Nils, went to seek answers. Sidney began to tell them about what happened that night when Frank was dosed with LSD. His family would later claim that they saw a strong manipulative power behind Sidney.

He described how the scope of this particular experiment was to see if a scientist who was drugged and taken prisoner would reveal top secret information. This turned into quite an interesting conversation with Sidney admitting to the family that, quote, we, both him and Frank, went a little too far and did things we probably shouldn't have. Is he admitting to a relationship? I think they got a little too into the role play, if you know what I mean. I'll never talk. Too much.

But it was something that Frank said towards the end that stuck with one of the family members, Nils, for a long, long time. He said, quote, you are obviously very troubled by your father's suicide. Have you ever considered getting into therapy group for people whose parents have committed suicide? Nils later said this was the moment that Sidney overplayed his hand and it was the moment where he himself knew how much was at stake for Sidney.

After that conversation, Nils knew that Sidney was guilty of something, and so, after years of confusion and sadness, Nils found the determination to discover the truth about his father's death. I don't quite understand how that particular quote shows that Sidney overplayed his hand to Nils. Because it was supposed to be a conversation, right?

About like, I'll answer any questions you want about the experiment. And then as they're asking questions, he's like, you look pretty troubled. I think that you're pretty sad. Have you ever considered? And he's like trying to divert. So it's like there is a clear manipulation happening, right? He's not answering questions. He's trying to convince him that he's not in the right state of mind, basically.

Right. So yeah, it's showing that then, um, Sydney was trying to hide something still. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like in this supposedly tell all conversation, he is still trying to hide information. Yeah. And this is well after where they know they're there. They know that they are obviously very troubled. Like they're the reality has crashed in for quite a while. So there's no reason for, uh, that's like a purely defensive thing to say. Uh,

I mean, he's straight up, like, the previous sentence was, we went a little too far. You know, we dosed your dad with LSD. Like, he's admitting two pretty deplorable things at that point. So, like, why would there be some kind of level of diversion? Yeah. I see now. Nils was patient, however, and it would be another decade before he went any further. He was waiting for one thing in particular, his mother's death, because he knew she wouldn't like to see what he was about to do. Yeah.

On the 2nd of June, 1994, Nils exhumed his father's body and requested that a second autopsy be performed on the cadaver. The first had ruled his death as a suicide, but with the second, a man named James Starr spent weeks inspecting the body. There were no toxins in the body, but there was something very interesting about the wound pattern. No glass shards were found in Frank's head. Strange considering that he dove out of the window headfirst.

Additionally, even though he landed on his back, Frank's skull was wounded severely and disfigured above the eye. They could not sue the CIA. They had given that up when they had accepted the money in 1975. But they now had answers. Frank was the man who knew too much. He was to be reburied in 2002. Eric and his brothers called reporters to make a statement. The statement was as follows.

The death of Frank Olson on the 28th of November 1953 was a murder, not a suicide. This is not an LSD drug experiment story as it was represented in 1975. This is a biological warfare story. Frank Olson did not die because he was an experimental guinea pig who experienced a bad trip. He

He died because of concern that he would divulge information concerning a highly classified CIA interrogation program in the early 1950s and concerning the use of biological weapons by the United States in the Korean War. Hmm. Okay. So then finally... Go ahead. Wait, wait, wait. Let's just go back briefly to the... So he... There was no glass in the body, in the head of the body of Frank. Yeah.

But he still... Like, everyone heard the glass shatter and saw him jump out the window. How could there be no glass in his head? Even if he was pushed out of the window, there would still be glass in his head. Is it not just possible that the glass was removed? I feel like this is a little hard to do years later. You know? Because he's been in the ground a while at that point. Yeah. And also, the mention about, like, his head was damaged and his eye was disfigured. Typically, when...

probably from impact yeah yeah even if they land on their back uh typically their head lands pretty quickly afterwards i think i talked to my girlfriend about this uh when i read over the document previously um i think she described it as more of like an actual indent in the head like he had been bashed in the head by something on the front of the head and he landed on his back so i guess that's possible that he was

you know, beaten and then they threw the body out maybe. Yeah. To make it look like it. Cause no one looks for a head injury, you know, when someone falls from a roof or it's explained away. So I mean, look, I'm not going to put it past him being assassinated by the CIA for, uh, threatening to speak out about something. Right. I think it's entirely possible that they did. It's a CIA. Um, they killed a fucking sitting president. Um,

Yeah, but I don't know about that particular evidence proving it. The glass, not so much. The head indentation, I could kind of see. But anyway, MKUltra was terminated in 1973 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. President Nixon's administration had been attempting to hide its involvement in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building located in Washington, D.C.,

It was this that pushed the new CIA director, Richard Helms, to order that all files related to MKUltra be destroyed. This was largely a reaction to the growing fears of public and governmental scrutiny, particularly as broader investigations into intelligence abuses were beginning. Only 20,000 pages survived due to being incorrectly stored in a different building. Oh my god, are you fucking serious? The only reason we know about MKUltra in any degree is because of their own incompetence?

Yeah, that sounds about right. That makes sense though. The only thing more powerful than government is government oversight. Oh, that is so funny. Those 20,000 pages would have been burned if they weren't stored in the wrong place. That's fucking hilarious.

They were discovered in 1977 after a Freedom of Information Act was requested at the hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Then the news articles came accusing the CIA of conducting illegal experiments. This snowballed into the United States Congress conducting an investigation into the allegations, which was the previously mentioned Rockefeller Commission. The report confirmed that the CIA and Department of Defense had been conducting unethical experiments, but they struggled to find details about MKUltra after the document purged.

When they interviewed Sidney Gottlieb, he coincidentally couldn't remember much about what happened during his time at MKUltra, even though he was a project director and chief architect and overseer of MKUltra. Yeah, seems true and honest to me. Sidney Gottlieb would never lie.

The Church Committee, officially known as the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Jesus fucking Christ. That can't have been what it was officially known as.

The United States Senate Select Committee to study government operation with respect to intelligence activities. Oh my God, I hate your government. Had one purpose, to investigate their widespread abuse of power by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other government agencies. They put pressure on President Ford to issue an executive order to prohibit, quote, experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party for each such human subject, end quote.

I like how that had to be written out like you can't. Guys, you can't do this anymore. Without informed consent, of course. Look, the LSD was fun for a bit, but it got out of hand. It's now illegal. You can't dose people without their consent anymore.

This was issued in 1976 and was later expanded by future presidents to apply to any type of human experiments, which is good. But again, the CIA operates on a whole different wavelength. They killed a sitting president.

I believe that was against the law too. So they could do anything. It doesn't matter if this is like legally now a thing. I don't think that will stop the CIA from stepping beyond that line in the future. What do you guys think? Do you think the CIA is going to stop thanks to these laws? Probably.

Yeah, I fully trust my government and I think that they're very safe and trustworthy and I think they've learned their lesson. And most importantly, let's keep some perspective here. Most importantly, they're not Australian. Yep. So it's a win at the end of the day. I don't even know what the Australian CIA is. So who knows what they're up to. That's how good they are.

It's just two dudes out of the shack somewhere with like a little spyglass. In 1984, the Canadian public became aware of MKUltra being conducted within their borders as well when the Ewan Cameron experiments first came to light.

Jesus, everything happened in 1984. An investigative documentary program called The First Estate covered the case, and it was here that they first revealed how the CIA and also the Canadian government was funding Ewan Cameron's torture experiments. The Canadian government ended up settling with 127 victims of Ewan's, with the victims receiving $100,000 each. When Ewan died due to a heart attack in 1967, his family destroyed all of his personal records that connected him to MKUltra.

That's a good family. Well, I mean, you know, that's for one that is good family ride or die. But also like, you know, that fills me with confidence that, you know, they're like, we didn't do it. And then every single record that they didn't misplace was burned. And everyone who was established with it said they either forgot or their family destroyed the records after their death. So, yeah, I think I don't think they would do anything like this again. They seem like the kind of people who have nothing to hide. They seem like good, honest people.

they seem very honest and forthcoming about it i'm glad that we continue to uh send our best young men off to fight in their forever wars and also give them half of our income through tennessee so usa usa usa usa usa yeah hey i'm just glad they keep finding more documents to burn

Moving forward, on top of restricting the CIA's ability to conduct human experiments, there were also permanent congressional oversight committees because the government loves committees. There were multiple of these established with the goal of keeping government agencies in line. And what a job they did. They were great at that. Whether these were a success or not, well, that's up to you, the American public, and not me, an Australian man, to decide. That's true.

There had been severe damage to the CIA's reputation globally, though. That is without a doubt. The CIA became a symbol of unethical conduct and an almost comical lack of accountability. Most people, perhaps rightly so, still believe to this day that the CIA is more in control than the U.S. government. Do you guys believe that? Which one wins in the power battle?

Okay, so that's relative. It's not like the CIA has access to the entire military industrial complex and like, you know. Yeah, but they have the LSD. Super destroyers or whatever, right? But you're right. They do have LSD. So it's not like they have more control. It's not like they manage roads or infrastructure or anything like that. It's just the fact that they can step out of the control whenever they want. But it's not like the CIA is as large as like the entire federal government or anything. Yeah.

But it's kind of like Dune. He who controls the LSD controls the fate of the world. He who controls the spice controls... That's funny. ...Aragas. Yeah, you've got...

You have like, what was the CIA director's name at the time? I forget. I don't remember now. This Ewan guy, you've got Ewan floating in his room. He's like, my Arrakis, my dude. Who's Timothee Chalamet in this situation? I guess it would be the son, Nils. Yeah, it would actually be exactly Nils because they killed his father.

Yeah, Niels is a big fan of this book. I am Niels Olsen. God, this is so cool. This is exactly like Dune. This is just like Dune, so true. I finally get what he was on about writing that book. Yeah, he was on LSD too, believe it or not. He was also on LSD. Coincidence? I think not.

every great man has been on LSD there continue to be investigations into MK Ultra but many questions still remain about the experiments to this day and of course there are you know of course there's questions because I burned all the papers we don't know but

So questions about the experiments, victims and long-term effects. Due to the purging of documentation, we may never fully know the full extent of MKUltra. But what we do know is this. MKUltra will forever be a stain on American history. It's not a conspiracy. It's an open wound declaring to the world that America's greatest enemy is always itself. I agree with that. Good end. So true.

Yeah, so I guess the conspiratorial element of the document. No, that was a great document. I love that one. That was a great document. No, I'm just saying it's depressing how it's just like, well, you know, things were bad and they never got better. So have fun, kids.

Hey, no, I don't believe that. Vote harder. Okay. I don't believe that. I think you're in a very fortunate position where your biggest enemy is yourself as a country, right? That's a pretty fortunate position to be in. That means there's room for you to not be your enemy in the future and to genuinely have no enemies. Like, America...

could be a truly great country where you should feel proud like proud to chant usa usa usa over and over again like you've been doing this entire episode so more power to you and the one before that and every episode and all of them like you put one you put one other mount boy on here with me and it's over it's gonna keep happening it won't get better it is over

That's also right, you Australian. Keep gassing us up. That's what we like to hear. I love you. I love you, Americans. Yeah, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So the conspiracy element, right? Because this is a conspiracy-based show where we talk about conspiracies. Do you guys believe, after hearing all this information, after reading through the document, do you guys believe that he was assassinated by the CIA or not? Yes, undoubtedly.

Yeah, no doubt. No doubt in my mind. Yeah, well, I mean, he was like he was drugged at the least, right? Maybe not assassinated, but the cause. The conspiracy is he was pushed out of the window. I think, okay, I will at the least he was killed because there was the other experimenter in his house and the person who made the call. So he was killed while under observation by the CIA, if nothing else, if not pushed. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

No, I think he was definitely... I think he was straight up killed by them. At the very least, they were complicit. He died because of the CIA. Undoubtedly. Yeah, one way or the other. Well, he was either dosed to an extreme degree where he then killed himself, which is, again, the CIA's fault for dosing people without their consent and knowledge. But no, I honestly believe that they straight up killed him because he was getting cold feet about whatever he had seen at MKUltra. Yeah, it could have been what he was about to blow the lid or something, for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I definitely think that they were for sure complicit in all of this stuff. Really interesting period of time. I love diving into this case. I love conspiracies like this. They're very...

Very interesting at the end of the day. But that's going to do it for this episode of Red Thread. Thank you all very much for joining us. Like I said, we're on audio platform, so you can listen to us while you're in the car or traveling to work and stuff. I hear that this show makes great travel aid for when you guys are going to work and stuff like that. So head on over to Spotify and stuff like that in the description below. There'll be links so you can find your way over there.

other than that sourboys.gg right? sour.gg fuck I keep fucking it up yeah every time sour.gg do you have sourboys.gg? yeah yeah it's all good but sour.gg is our branding now it's like on the bags and stuff okay well sour.gg where the fuck did I get sourboys from then?

that's the name i mean that's the name of the product uh that's the that's the name of of the the business uh man it's easy to confuse these australians i'll tell you what there's too many words the company is sour boys the website sour.gg yes okay sour.gg go to sour.gg check out uh all the delicious flavors do you have like a hint for what flavor is coming next uh when is this release

This will come out in about three days from now. Then, okay, we release on that day that this comes out. So the day that this releases, 3 Central Standard, we will release a flavor called Sunset Sangria that will be around for a limited amount of time, and it is delicious, and it looks really cool, and the bag is awesome.

All right. First person to buy that direct, that exact bag of delicious, you know, sour treats, and then take a picture of you eating them while you're listening to this episode of red thread. You get a shout out next week. Okay. Whenever, whenever you received, whenever you receive the snacks, we can see, we can see Isaiah. What about you? What have you got for us? Any shout outs for anything? Uh,

I'm posting a video today, which people will probably already see by the time it goes up. So it's a very rare occasion for me to post something on the main channel. Yeah, you've become a podcaster instead of a main video poster. Entail his oldest time. All roads lead to podcasts. All roads lead to podcasts. Dude, I love podcasts. They're just fun and they're so... They're fun, yeah. I don't know. It's like just chilling. I love chatting with you guys. It's much less isolating.

Yeah, I agree. Agreed. Yeah. All right. Let's go do it for this episode. Links below for everything that we talked about. Really appreciate you joining us. I appreciate you, you gents for joining me for this episode. Hope you guys enjoyed it again. Enormous. Thanks to my girlfriend. I do thank her privately, believe it or not. So she does get her praise and also she is paid for the work, but,

But yeah, huge thanks to her for putting the document together. It was a really great read this week. So big thanks to her. And yeah, we'll see you next time for the next episode of Red Thread. Thank you very much. Bye. Cool. See you all in the next one. Bye.