Project MK Ultra

When someone hears the term “MK Ultra”, they probably think of the classical tin-foil hat wearing, nonsensical, usually unhygienic man or woman that thinks the sun is following them around, and their dog is a CIA informant. 

But what is Project MK Ultra? To be blunt, it was, and perhaps still is, a government funded project that started in the early 1950s that conducted hundreds of operations, sometimes on U.S. citizens, to test LSD, other drugs, and certain technologies for mind control. It sounds crazy, but it was a real project, by a real government, and had real victims that still suffer from illegal government experiments. 

The reason the project was greenlit was to fight the Cold War. Some U.S. military and government executives thought the Soviets already perfected the art of brainwashing and mind control, so we needed to develop our own. 

According to official CIA records, the agency dosed people from both prisons and the general population with all sorts of drugs and chemicals, LSD being the most prominent. These same records claim that over 130 live human experiments were emotionally crippled for life. 

Officially, the project ended in 1973, and records were released in 1975. But who knows what they’re up to now.