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Real-Life Mind Control Experiments Exposed · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep dive. Today. We're going beyond infographics,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: really diving deep into something pretty unsettling.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that whole story of the US government's secret
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: attempts to well understand and maybe even control the human mind.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Exactly. It gets talked about you see the infographics, but
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: the actual details, the stuff buried in the records, that's
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: where it gets truly disturbing.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's complex, ethically just fraut, and that's putting it
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: mildly right.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: So our mission here is to unpack that. Look at
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: the specifics, you know, the insights from projects like mk Ultra,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Project Artichoke, not just the what, but.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: The how, the why, and the human post that's critical.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: We can't forget that part, definitely not. And to get
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: there you kind of have to picture the time early
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: Cold War, massive paranoia.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Fear of the Soviets, China, North Korea.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, especially these stories coming out of the Korean War
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: about you know, mind control being used on US prisoners
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: of war, whether true or exaggerated, the fear was real.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: So it sparked this race, a desperate search really into
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: how human behavior works, how to manipulate it? Could they
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: copy these techniques, counter them, use them for spying, maybe
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: even turn foreign leaders. It was this plunge into the unknown,
• 1:25
  Speaker 2: and we need to.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Say it up front. The ethics here are just non existent.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: This is an easy stuff.
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  Speaker 2: To talk about, not at all but necessary, which brings
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: us to the projects themselves. Artichak kicked off around August
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: fifty one, then MK Ultra, which was actually a CIA
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: code name that officially started April fifty three.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: So fear was the engine trying to counter a perceived threat.
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: Pretty much. The materials strongly suggests it was a direct
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: reaction to those fears about what other countries might be doing.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: They were chasing shadows, almost determined to get those capabilities themselves,
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: or at least become immune.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Who is pushing this any key names jump out?
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: Well? CIA director Alan Dellas gave the order for mk Ultra,
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: But the guy really running the show, the hands on person,
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: was Sidney Gottlieb.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Gottlieb, I've seen him described as a chemist.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: A chemist, yeah, and sometimes described as the CIA's poison expert,
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  Speaker 2: which tells you something. He was central to a lot
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  Speaker 2: of the most controversial experiments.
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  Speaker 1: And this is where it gets even darker. Isn't it
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  Speaker 1: the link to earlier history.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is for me one of the most chilling parts.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: It looks like mk Ultra wasn't starting fresh, it was
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: sort of picking up threads from some truly horrific earlier experiments.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: You mean Unit seven thirty one in Japan, Nazi concentration camps.
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  Speaker 2: That's what the documentation points to their reports suggesting the
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: CIA actually recruited people who'd worked in those.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Places, recruited them to learn their methods.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Seems so, to learn about things like, you know, mescaline
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: experiments the Nazis did at Dauchaw, or information on poison gases.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: They were apparently tapping into that horrific knowledge base.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Wow, that connects post war US intelligence directly to access
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: war crime experimentation. That's staggering.
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  Speaker 2: It shows the lengths they were willing to go, and
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: Project Artist showed its stated goal was incredibly blunt.
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  Speaker 1: What was specifically the.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: Records say it was to find out if someone could
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: be involuntarily made to carry out an attempted assassination.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: Made to kill against their will exactly.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: The phrasing is stark, do our bidding against his will
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: That was the actual question they we're trying to answer.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: That's horrifying. Okay. So with that goal and driven by
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: this fear, what methods did they actually use? It wasn't
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: just one.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: Thing, right so far from it. It was a huge,
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: almost scattered down approach anything that might break down or
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: control the mind. Drugs were definitely a big part, but
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  Speaker 2: not the only part.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: LSD is the famous one. Yeah, mk ultra and LSD
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: seem linked in popular memory.
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  Speaker 2: It was definitely a focus, especially early on. Records show
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  Speaker 2: the CIA bought up huge amounts of it. But look
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: at the list of other things they tried, barbiturates, amphetamines, heroin, morphine,
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: temisabin wow, mescaline, psilocybin, segalamine, marijuana, alcohol, sodium pentathal. I mean,
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  Speaker 2: it goes on and on.
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  Speaker 1: So it wasn't just finding one magic drug.
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  Speaker 2: No, it was like a chemical toolkit they were trying
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  Speaker 2: to build.
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  Speaker 1: And how were these administered people signing up for studies?
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  Speaker 2: Uh? No, that's the core ethical violation. The material talks
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: about surreptitious administration giving drugs to people who had no
• 4:28
  Speaker 2: idea to anyone. It seems like it people at all
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  Speaker 2: social levels, the documents say, in everyday situations, maybe at
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  Speaker 2: parties or even giving it to someone daily for weeks
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  Speaker 2: on end. There's one report of an agent unknowingly kept
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: on LSD for seventy seven.
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  Speaker 1: Days, seventy seven days without consent. The psychological fallout unimaginable.
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  Speaker 2: Exactly, and they combined things too, like using a barbiturate
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  Speaker 2: to knock someone out, then an amphetamine, using chemicals as
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  Speaker 2: weapons basically for disorientation manipula.
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  Speaker 1: Did they stick with LSD They.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: Found it too unpredictable for reliable control apparently, so it
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  Speaker 2: has shifted focus towards other things like super hallucinogens. BZ
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  Speaker 2: was one, but LSD definitely stayed in the toolbox for
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: certain uses.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so beyond the drugs, what else? What were the
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: physical or psychological methods?
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  Speaker 2: Equally brutal, if not more so. Electroshock therapy was used extensively,
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  Speaker 2: but not like yeah, therapeutically yeah no. The reports described
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  Speaker 2: shocks thirty or forty times normal levels, sometimes one after another.
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  Speaker 2: Just think about that kind of assault. Then there was
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  Speaker 2: sleep deprivation, sometimes for extreme periods, or the opposite, keeping
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  Speaker 2: people drugged almost comatose for up to sixty days. Sensory
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  Speaker 2: deprivation isolation standard tactics to break someone down.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: I've also read about psychic driving and deep patterning. Those
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: terms sound ominous.
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  Speaker 2: They are psychic driving. It involved putting people, often in
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  Speaker 2: drug induced chromas for months and just playing recorded messages
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  Speaker 2: over and over, like brainwashing, trying to drill messages into
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  Speaker 2: their heads, sometimes the same phrase repeated half a minas
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  Speaker 2: million times. Depatterning was linked using extreme drugs and electroshock
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  Speaker 2: to try and wipe the mind clean, reduce it to
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: a childlike state so they.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Could rebuild it, reprogram it.
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  Speaker 2: That seems to have been the horrifying idea, make them
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  Speaker 2: blank slates, then implant new instructions. Hypnosis was another area.
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  Speaker 2: Early fifty studies looked at creating anxieties, messing with memory,
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  Speaker 2: making people vulnerable. Artichokes specifically researched using hypnosis for amnesia, and.
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: The records mention other abuse too.
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  Speaker 2: They're quite clear verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse, even
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  Speaker 2: things like dislocating limbs. It wasn't research. It was tortured
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: disguised as research aimed at control.
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  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the victims who are they subjecting
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: to this.
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  Speaker 2: This is where it gets truly sickening. The records confirm
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  Speaker 2: unwitting American and Canadian citizens, not just foreign spies or
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: something no included. CIA's own employees sometimes dose without knowing
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: military personnel, doctors, government agents, but also deliberately vulnerable groups, prostitutes, prisoners,
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: people in mental institutions.
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  Speaker 1: Why them.
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  Speaker 2: Some documents actually referred to them as expendable.
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  Speaker 1: Expendable just tools to be used and discarded.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: That phrase says it all, doesn't it. And this wasn't
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: just one secret lab. It was spread out over thirty
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: universities and institutions across the US and Canada. Hospitals, prisons, clinics,
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: hidden plain sights.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: Sometimes any particular place stand out in the records.
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  Speaker 2: The Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal that was Subprojects sixty eight,
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  Speaker 2: run by doctor Donald Ewen Cameron. A lot of the
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: really extreme stuff, the depatterning, the psychic driving, happened there.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Angular patients, people who.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: Came in for things like anxiety depression. They ended up
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: in these experiments without any.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: Idea, so seeking help and getting that. Yes.
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  Speaker 2: Fort Detrick and Maryland was another hub, and chillingly that's
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: where some reports say Nazi doctors were brought in to
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  Speaker 2: lecture CIA.
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  Speaker 1: Officers, reinforcing that connection again exactly.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: And there's mention of secret detention sites too, black sites
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  Speaker 2: in Europe and East Asia in the early fifties West Germany, Japan,
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: the Philippines, places where they could conduct torture and experiments
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  Speaker 2: on captives, perhaps to avoid scrutiny back home. It was systemic, targeted.
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  Speaker 1: And global, just devastating. What happened to the people who
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: went through this. The long term effects.
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  Speaker 2: Horrific, often permanent. The material is blunt. People left emotionally crippled,
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  Speaker 2: suffering permanent.
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  Speaker 1: Effects like what specifically.
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  Speaker 2: Urinarian continence, severe amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting family,
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  Speaker 2: sometimes thinking their interrogators were their parents, deep psychological disorders,
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: emotional instability, trauma, suicidal thoughts, just shattered lives.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: The individual's stories are heartbreaking.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: They really are. Salarliko went in for depression, got massive
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  Speaker 2: LSD doses, said he felt his bones melting, health destroyed,
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  Speaker 2: left with his words a piece.
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  Speaker 1: Of a rag to live, just completely broken.
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  Speaker 2: Robert Logi went for leg pain, ended up with electroshock,
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  Speaker 2: psychic driving LSD said his brain, felt virtually paralyzed with drugs,
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: haunted by it decades later, couldn't trust doctors. Yeah, doctor
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Mary Morrow, a physician herself, sought help for depression, got
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: excessive electro shock other treatments. She said, she lost her identity,
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  Speaker 2: felt trapped in a deep black hole, heard confusing voices,
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  Speaker 2: suffered permanent brain damage, called her life afterwards misery.
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  Speaker 1: It's hard to even comprehend that level of violation.
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  Speaker 2: And Esther Schreyer, after depatterning incontinent mute, couldn't remember basic
• 9:27
  Speaker 2: things like how to boil water. They succeeded in breaking
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: down her mind, all right. And Frank Olsen, the civilian scientist,
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  Speaker 2: dosed secretly with LSD.
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  Speaker 1: He died right. The official story was suicide.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: Officially an alleged suicide jumping from a window, but the
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: context strongly suggests his death was directly linked to the experiment.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: So with all this horror, this damage, what about accountability?
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Did anyone face consequences?
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: That's another tragic part of the story. Most of the
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: mk Ultra records intentionally destroyed in nineteen seventy three, destroyed
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: by whom ordered by the CIA director at the time,
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Richard helms. It was against regulations, but it happened.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: Well.
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  Speaker 2: Cover up seems like a panic move. Yeah, to protect
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: the agency, protect careers. It makes getting the full picture
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: almost impossible now.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: But some things came out later. Investigations.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, the Church Committee, the Rockefeller Commission in the seventies
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  Speaker 2: exposed parts of it. They recommended compensation for victims, but
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: prosecutions No, none happened for the victims largely left to suffer.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Some tried suing, like Canadian patients from the Allen Memorial,
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: faced huge legal hurdles trying to prove the link. Decades later,
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: the US Supreme Court even ruled against one Army sergeant involved,
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  Speaker 2: citing military discipline despite the clear ethical violations. Yeah. Though
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: the dissenting justices specifically brought up the Nuremberg Code, the
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: rules against involuntary human experimentation set after World War II,
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: saying victims absolutely should be compensated, but systemically accountability just failed.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: It's a grim picture, and it connects to broader idea
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: like psychological warfare.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, cy war or psyops is about influencing how people think,
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  Speaker 2: feel behave to achieve strategic aims, often without physical force.
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  Speaker 2: Mk ultra fits right in trying to manipulate leaders, breakdown individuals,
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  Speaker 2: counter perceived mind control. That's turning the mind into a battlefield,
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  Speaker 2: and it's.
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  Speaker 1: Part of that larger awful history of unethical human experiments globally.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: Definitely the lack of consent, targeting the vulnerable, causing harm
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: or death. You see echoes in the Nazi experiments Unit
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  Speaker 2: seven thirty one, but also later things like the Tuskegee
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: Syphilist study in the US, the Guatemala std experiments, some
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: drug trials. Mk Ultra is a really prominent, disturbing American
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  Speaker 2: example focused squarely on mind manipulation. It highlights that pattern
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: of ends justify the means, trampling human rights for perceived
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: knowledge or advantage.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Which unfortunately feeds into some modern conspiracy theories that still circulate. Right.
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  Speaker 2: The idea you sometimes hear online that celebrities are being
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: mind cure controlled today using mk ultra techniques.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: That they're puppets and weird behavior is proof. Yeah.
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: The theory claims they're being used to push agendas, and
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: any strange moment caught on camera a glitch is evidence
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: of the programming breaking down.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: But the actual history the science it tells a different story, a.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Very different one. What the mk ultra research actually showed
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: and what neuroscience tells us is that true mind control,
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: like overwriting someone's free will completely making them a puppet,
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: isn't really feasible. The brain's too complex.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: Influence maybe manipulation, sure, but not total control like a
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: ropot exactly.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: You can push, persuade, maybe coerce to a degree, but
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: that absolute control, the science isn't there. And those celebrity
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: glitches there are much simpler, sadly plausible explanations. Pressure of fame,
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: immense pressure, constant scrutiny, no privacy, exhaustion, losing control over
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: your own life. These are known intense stressors.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: You mentioned examples like Katie Perry collapsing from exhaustion, Britney
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: spears is public struggles often following intense personal crises.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: Right, we know severe psychosocial stress can trigger serious psychological issues,
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: even psychotic symptoms. That's a documented reality for some under
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: extreme pressure. It's a far more likely explanation for strange
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: behavior than a secret government mind control program carrying on
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: from the seventies.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: So the conspiracy theory grabs onto the real horror of
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: mk ultra. But misses the actual limitations and realities.
• 13:25
  Speaker 2: Precisely, it misunderstands what mk Ultra actually tried and often
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: failed to do, and it ignores the very real, documented
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: psychological toll of extreme fame. It ends up trivializing both
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: the historical victims and the current struggles of real people.
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: You know. It speaks more to how people process information
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: and maybe distrust institutions today.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: It twists a genuine, horrific history into something sensationalized and
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: ultimately inaccurate. Well put, okay, let's try to wrap up
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: this deep dive beyond infographics. We've looked into this really
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: dark chapter. Ka Ultra artichoke driven by fear borrowing from
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: horrific past experiments, unleashing brutal techniques on unwitting people.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the consequences We're devastating and lasting lives ruined,
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: and the cover up, the lack of real accountability. It
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: raises huge questions about government secrecy, power, research ethics, and
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: just how vulnerable people can be.
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: It's heavy, heavy stuff, hard to look at, but important
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: not to turn away from.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, and maybe the thought to leave everyone with is this,
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: considering this history, this documented secret attempt to manipulate minds
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: and behavior. What does that really tell us about how
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: important it is to think critically, to question the information
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: we get, especially now in this age where everyone seems
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: to be trying to shape our perceptions online offline. How
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: do you draw the line between influence and manipulation in
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: your own life.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: That's a crucial question, definitely something at CHE want. Thank
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: you for joining us for this deep dive.