The MK Ultra Project, A Mind Control Program
Even today the experiments that the Nazis carried out on human beings make our hair stand on end. Several of them were oriented to find the mechanisms to control people’s minds. What not everyone knows is that similar and even darker experiences took place in the United States. One of them was the MK Ultra project.
World War II represented a change in military strategy. Until then, espionage had never been given such importance. This happened because the contestants were aware of the value of the verified information in planning attack tactics.
Likewise, Hitler himself proved that you could control the human mind and manipulate millions of people to perform actions that they would otherwise have rejected. That is why, at the end of the confrontation, the issue of obtaining information and manipulating the mind was one of the great concerns in the United States. Thus was born the MK Ultra project.
What was the MK Ultra project?
It is actually very difficult to know precisely what the MK Ultra project consisted of. When the press discovered it, in the late 1960s and part of the 1970s, the CIA, which ran the program, gave the order to destroy all the files on it. The only thing that could be rescued was a small group of documents.
From that very small database, what happened began to be reconstructed. Added to this was a large number of testimonies from the victims. However, strictly speaking, it will never be possible to know for sure how the MK Ultra project developed. It contained 150 lines of action and only two or three are known.
However, what little is known tells us about experiments with psychoactive and neurological drugs , as well as other methods. They were applied to thousands of human beings, without their consent. The purpose was to observe the effect of these drugs on people; to know if they were being induced to reveal what they knew, or to determine if it was possible to change their minds at will.
Experiments with humans
According to the available data, the “researchers” of the MK Ultra project administered drugs, such as LSD , in different ways and in different doses to determine how “contaminated people” behaved.
Methods such as electric shocks and hypnosis therapies were also used. In the 1950s, when the project started, there was a lot of talk about “brainwashing”. That is, a kind of reprogramming of the mind from those special “treatments”.
The CIA is also known to have tested the effects of various torture techniques. Sometimes they left the “volunteers” without sleep for several days and meanwhile repeated subliminal messages incessantly. Other times they systematically applied electroshocks or synthetic test drugs in high amounts.
The psychiatric “volunteers”
The most heinous thing about the MK Ultra project was that they tricked thousands of people into participating in it. They basically got their guinea pigs through two methods.
The first was aimed at psychiatric hospitals. In them, patients were told that new therapies were being tried. None of the inmates of these hospitals was informed that it was an experiment directed by the CIA and that among the “experts” who were at the head were several former Nazis.
In fact, one of the most active collaborators of the MK Ultra Project was the psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who happened to be the first president of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as the president of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Association.
Other “volunteers”
The experiments were not only carried out with “mental patients”, but also with thousands of citizens considered “normal”. They were recruited from the military, universities, public hospitals, brothels, hospices, and everywhere else really. In exchange for a few dollars, they agreed to take part in those tests. However, they were never informed of the real purpose.
Many of them did not survive the cruel experiments. Others were left with permanent damage. The most publicized case was that of Frank Olson, in the United States. In Canada, for its part, the government ended up compensating hundreds of people to drown out the scandal.
What happened was known thanks to a press investigation. Later, a commission was formed in the United States Congress to inquire about the facts. An independent commission was also set up. In the end, they managed to have the documents declassified, in 1973, and that is why the CIA gave the order to destroy the files.
The MK Ultra Project shows how far the organisms of power are able to go to obtain what they propose. It did not take place in a dictatorship, but in a country that prides itself on being the champion of democracy in the world. Now the disturbing question, will there be similar experiments, in other places, that we still do not know about?
