Project MKULTRA

"We are in the battle for the control of men's minds."
-Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, April, 1953

Project MKULTRA was a CIA mind control program that began in the early 1950's and which reportedly ended in the late 1960s. However, according to ex-CIA special assistant Victor Marchetti, the mind control programs continued into the 1970s and are likely to exist in some form at the present time.

"Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation?"
-CIA Secret Memorandum, January 1952

Some of the tactics employed with MKULTRA include, but are not limited to:

-LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs, often administered unknowingly to people.

-Chemical exposure

-Isolation

-Hypnosis

-Abuse

-Electro-shock therapy

-"Psychic Driving" - strapping a person down to a bed and forcing them to listen to repeated recordings such as, "You are a bad mother but we will make you into a good mother".

-Drug cocktails

The public was first officially informed of the mind control experiments in 1977.

"The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over thirty universities and institutions were involved in an 'extensive testing and experimentation' program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens 'at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.' Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to 'unwitting subjects in social situations.' At least one death, that of Dr. Olson, resulted from these activities. The Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense. The agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers."
-Senator Ted Kennedy, Senate Floor 1977

Unfortunately, in 1973 the then CIA director, Richard Helms, ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Perhaps it was a miracle or the work of a good-natured person within the CIA who realized the public needed to know what was going on. As a result, one box of accounting records escaped destruction. The thousands of pages within the box confirm the existence of Project MKULTRA but unfortunately does not document the full extent of the horrors of human experimentation.

National Geographic - CIA Mind Control Experiments


Declassified MK-Ultra Project Documents