21 Facts About Project MKUltra

Project MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U S Central Intelligence Agency, intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.

Project MKUltra's scope was broad, with activities carried out under the guise of research at more than 80 institutions, including colleges and universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.

Project MKUltra was first brought to public attention in 1975 by the Church Committee of the United States Congress and Gerald Ford's United States President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States.

Investigative efforts were hampered by CIA Director Richard Helms's order that all Project MKUltra files be destroyed in 1973; the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission investigations relied on the sworn testimony of direct participants and on the small number of documents that survived Helms's order.

Project MKUltra's CIA cryptonym is a combination of the digraph MK, indicating the sponsorship of the Technical Services Staff, and the word Ultra which formerly designated the most secret classification of World War II intelligence.

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Kinzer wrote that Project MKUltra's use of mescaline on unwitting subjects was a practice that Nazi doctors had begun in the Dachau concentration camp.

Project MKUltra was headed by Sidney Gottlieb but began on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953.

Project MKUltra attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and to explore other possibilities of mind control.

Some historians assert that one goal of MKUltra and related CIA projects was to create a Manchurian Candidate-style subject.

One 1955 Project MKUltra document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort.

Project MKUltra commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University, and was paid $69, 000 from 1957 to 1964 to carry out MKUltra experiments there, the Montreal experiments.

Project MKUltra's "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements.

Project MKUltra's experiments were often carried out on patients who entered the institute for common problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanent effects from his actions.

Project MKUltra's treatments resulted in victims' urinary incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents.

Project MKUltra's work was inspired and paralleled by the British psychiatrist William Sargant at St Thomas' Hospital, London, and Belmont Hospital, Sutton, who was involved in the Secret Intelligence Service and who experimented on his patients without their consent, causing similar long-term damage.

In 1977, Schulsinger completed his doctoral dissertation on the project, but as MKUltra had been officially declared in the U S to have been discontinued with records destroyed, Schulsinger's thesis became a state secret.

In December 2021, radio documentarian Per Wennick discovered 36 boxes of Project MKUltra records stored at a psychiatric center in a Copenhagen suburb, but when he asked for access, the center shredded the records, in violation of Danish law.

Much of what the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission learned about Project MKUltra was contained in a report, prepared by the Inspector General's office in 1963, that had survived the destruction of records ordered in 1973.

Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously and had headed Project MKUltra, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of Project MKUltra.

None of Cameron's personal records of his involvement with Project MKUltra survived because his family destroyed them after his death.

Project MKUltra plays a part in many conspiracy theories due to its nature and the destruction of most records.