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Hidden files from a secret 1955 government project explain just how the CIA was secretly dosing the American public with various drugs, using spiked drinks, sex workers, and legitimate psychiatric hospitals, and then studying them. All of it done in secret and all of it without the subjects even knowing. And In May of 2026, the agency walked into the Director of National Intelligence's office and reclaimed 40 boxes of undisclosed documents. The documents that were allegedly seized are just labeled like this. MK Ultra. The same MK Ultra the CIA attempted to destroy all the evidence for over 50 years ago. The very same MK Ultra they swore up and down to Congress no longer existed. And today, we're laying it all out. The origin, the drugs, the bodies, the hospitals and the shredder. The leak pages that they didn't realize survived, and the decades of disclosure that keep making the story worse and worse. And of course, we get into the question that every new document keeps forcing back onto the table. What was MK Ultra really trying to discover and did it ever really stop? Well, today we're going to get into it. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from around the world. From all time, forever. Yes. And, oh, boy, this week we have a fascinating one. Let me just begin. Before we start this episode and dive deeply into all things MK Ultra. I want to say thank you to you, dude, and also to you, woman. I feel like that's a little harsh. Some of the women have been saying that they do listen. That is true. So what's it, gals? Ladies? Camper girl? Ladies is kind of nice, I think. Ladies is. It's affectionate, but still professional. Your voice has to drop an octave. Ladies. Well, ladies as well as dudes, I want to say thank you so much for clicking on this episode. Every time you tune in, you help keep the lights on here in this campsite and you keep the fire burning here in the tent. And it truly, it means the world. You've made my dreams come true 10 times over. And I will continue to do this show until the sun turns to ashes. But until then, we have many more episodes to do, so I don't want to waste any more time. But of course, I should say hello and thank you to my dear pal, Christos. What's going on? Christos, I want you. I'll let you talk if you do it in Greek. Yeah. Oh, damn, that gets me bricked. All right, guys, we have an amazing episode. I'm very excited to jump into this if you are new around these camp parts. Well, this is one of my favorite topics, truly. I. I'm fascinated and I love deep diving on MK Ultra, but let the record show I don't think we've ever done a full dedicated episode, only to MK Ultra, which is shocking. Secondly, there's many things that we're going to talk about today that I didn't know prior to doing research on this. And also shout out to Sophia and Zach for also helping me out with the research. I had never fully understood the timeline of MK Ultra and how it sort of conflates with many other things that have happened in American politics, which we'll get into. If you guys probably saw last week there was an allegation that members of the CIA, basically the, you know, Central Intelligence Agency, maybe it was another government body, I forget exactly which one, seized a bunch of files relating to JFK and MK Ultra from Tulsi Gabbard's office. That was the allegation. Since then there has been claims that this didn't actually happen. This is all just a bunch of hullabaloo. Well, I want to go through what MK ULTRA is, what it means, and if it ever really stopped. But where do we begin? Christos, do you have a date? I don't have a date, but we could begin with what a hubaloo is. Wow, you don't have a date? I'm shocked, Christos, truly shocked. I mean, normally you have dates lined up every night of the week. That's not true. That, that is true. I've seen you. I've seen you talking. You're going to get me in trouble. All right, let's begin. 1945. What happens in 1945? Great question. The Second World War is over. The Allies rolled into the camps and they see what the Nazis are doing and namely their science experiments that they're performing on prisoners. And they've also seen the files that were taken from these concentration camps. We're talking detailed records of medical experiments. I mean, brutal, like awful, horrendous things. Hypothermia studies, I mean, twin studies, if you're familiar with, you know, that whole thing, drug trials on prisoners, research into how to break the human mind for the purposes of interrogation, conditioning and, and control. Now, all of those documents should have gone straight into a war crimes tribunal. And effectively this is used as evidence and proof of war crimes that were committed. Because as you can imagine, in a massive scale war and A the type of ethnic cleansing that we saw in World War II. Many of the people that are the victims of this are gone, their bodies undiscovered, buried in mass graves. So there's no one to necessarily speak out. But if you have the evidence of these atrocious medical experiments, you can say, hey, look, these Nazis did this. We got to put them into the galley, fellows. But a lot of these documents didn't. Instead, the United States quietly launched something called Operation Paperclip. Now, I always want to be clear on the show, there are certain things that are conspiratorial, some things that are, shall I say, a little more on the books, okay? And this is one of those things that you can go ahead and look up. This was effectively a program to bring Nazi scientists, including some who had been identified as war criminals at Nuremberg, into American military and intelligence work. I mean, we did a whole episode on Werner von Braun, who was developing the V2 rocket in Nazi Germany, who came over and helped the boys in blue get up to the moon. Now, over the next several years, more than 700 German scientists, engineers, technical specialists were given us contracts. Some of them were sent to Camp Dietrich in Maryland. And this would later be named to Fort Detrick. Probably the. The camp stuff with the Nazis was a little sketchy, right? Best to avoid it. And so they take all these scientists and these researchers, and they put them to work on biological and chemical warfare programs alongside the Americans that were straight up, you know, enemies just a few years before. Now, one of those Americans was a young scientist named Sydney Gottlieb. Now, I need you to do a favor for me. Remember that name and just log it back of your brain, because you're gonna need it. And it's gonna wind up being very central to this whole story. But in fairness, at this point, the program is still right. This is the post war. The world is a different place. We're still trying to figure things out. We're going back to this kind of, you know, like, for a period of time like this monopolar world where, like, America's just running the show, the government's being very reactive, and the real catalyst is about to happen. And it happens in a country we call Korea. Now, in the 1950s, some American soldiers who had been captured by North Korean and Chinese forces were finally allowed to return home. And when they did, something was off. A handful of them publicly denounced the United States. Yeah, some confess on camera to crimes they almost certainly didn't commit, like dropping biological weapons on civilians. They speak in like, this kind of flat, borderline, like, rehearsed kind of voice, like they're being, like, coached to say it. Now, back in Washington, intelligence officials look at all this footage and they come to the conclusion, maybe rightly or wrongly, almost certainly wrongly, that they decided that the communists figured out how to brainwash. They believe the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Koreans, they finally cracked the code on how to overwrite a human personality, how to create an, like an automaton, how to inject ideas into someone's brain. And they fear that America and American intelligence is dangerously behind that. Sure, you know, we might have nukes, but if they can control the brains of human beings, I mean, what chance do we stand? So in 1950, the CIA launches something called Project Bluebird. Now, the mission here is to study the term they use as special interrogation techniques. Now, what is special about them? I'll tell you. Drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, sensory deprivation. And it's all done at black sites in occupied Germany, in Japan. Now, a black site is basically just like a, you know, like a special ops location that is completely off the map. It's not even known by many American, you know, intelligence officials as to what it is or where. It's extremely secretive, and only those who are read in would actually know where the site is. Now they're using captured prisoners as subjects. Now, the next year, in 1951, Bluebird gets rebranded and expanded, as you could say, into Project Artichoke. What is Project Artichoke? Basically the same deal, all right? Same goals, bigger budget, broader scope. And the CIA is now actively testing how to use chemicals to get information and to make people forget stuff and to manipulate behavior and in their own internal language, quote, produce predictable human behavioral changes. Yeah, I mean, we're talking like men in black stuff like beep. Forget everything. Now here's the crazy part. The files from Artichoke explicitly discuss not just dosing individuals during interrogations, but dosing entire populations. So a seven page artichoke memo, which was declassified and then resurfaced in early 2026, lays out plans to administer behavior altering chemicals through food, water, beer, liquor and cigarettes and in their own words, what they call standard medical treatments such as vaccinations, shots and etc. Now, the goal here was to produce slowly and undetectably anxiety, hopelessness, tension and depression in target groups. Now, was this ever taken out? That's a whole different story, but that is in the declassified document. The CIA was on paper considering whether they could use shots, the V word. I don't even know if we can say that word in. In on YouTube. Please don't. Probably not, right? You know the one I'm talking about? So good, so good, so good. Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love, like Vin, Sam, Edelman, Frame and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack other delivery vehicles for substances that were designed to make people more suggestible, more controllable. Now, let's just be very clear here. There's no evidence in any surviving record that we have that this specific proposal ever made it beyond just a research memo. Okay? I think that's. That's fair to say that we don't have any substantial evidence to say that this was ever done. But, you know, the mindset it reveals, I think, is the bigger point. By the early 1950s, the people running this program were no longer just figuring out how to interrogate spies. They were looking to manipulate entire populations. Who are these populations? Where are they? Is it a foreign country we're fighting? Is it a, you know, adversary? Or is it, you know, the men and women of this great nation? Now, at the top of that thinking was the new Director of Central Intelligence. This is a guy named Alan dulles. Now, on April 10, 1953, Dulles gave a speech to Princeton University alumni. And the speech was titled Brain Warfare. And in this speech, he basically described how, you know, the new Cold War is a battle for the human mind. And he framed everything the CIA was about to do as basically like a defensive response to what the Soviets were already doing. Remember, at this time, they think that Soviets, North Koreans, the Chinese, they all got this, you know, brainwashing capability. So he told the audience that the Communists had figured out how to, quote, make a man do anything. And he told them that America had no choice but to catch up. Now, in this speech, is he suggesting that they have straight up, like, a brain control program, or is he saying communism broadly, you know, breaks down the will of the human spirit and that we're no longer individuals, we're just a. Of this broader socialist society where, you know, people are, you know, no longer individuals. Is that. It's, you know, it's kind of open for interpretation. But knowing what we know now about this project that Alan Dulles is, you know, ostensibly overseeing, it changes the framing a little bit. Now, three days after that speech, April 13, 1953, Dulles formally signed off on a brand new program. This was a consolidation of everything Bluebird and Artichoke had been doing, but now with a wider mandate, less oversight, I guess, and a single dedicated funding stream that wouldn't show up in any normal budget line. And he handed the program to a very young scientist that I mentioned before. His name is Sidney Gottlieb, and they called this program MK Ultra. Now, the name itself was pretty brilliant. You know, MK is just the prefix that the CIA's technical services staff uses for sensitive projects. Ultra was pulled basically at random, though it carried an echo of the Allies most secret intelligence classification during World War II. Now, you put that together and the name B basically means nothing, which is kind of the point. It's designed not to attract attention. They could call it like operation steal your brain or something, but that's going to be kind of on the nose. If this shows up in some type of, you know, a file line like, hey, $10 million was funneled here. People can be like, what is that? So MK ultra, they're like, oh, it's a secret thing, don't worry about it. Now, what happens in this program over the next 70 years would, I mean, kill people, destroy lives, get covered up, get leaked, get covered up again, and then get fought over by federal agencies, allegedly in the year 2026 of our Lord. But before any of that, Alan Dulles and Sidney Gottlieb got to work. So the popular cultural shorthand for MK Ultra is the CIA's mind control program. Okay, which is basically true, but it's actually more. That makes it more narrow in the scope of what it was actually doing. The real truth here that I think people miss is that MK ULTRA wasn't just a single experiment. It wasn't just, oh, well, dose a little LSD and control the brain. It was an umbrella and it's way bigger than you might think. So they were quietly funding for 149 separate sub projects and across more than 80 institutions, including, I mean, 44 colleges, universities, dozens of hospitals, federal prisons, military bases, pharmaceutical companies, the works. So at least 185 private researchers were involved. And a lot of them didn't really know that they were working for the CIA because the money was being routed through fake foundations like the Society for Investigation of Human Ecology and of course, the Geshticker Fund for Medical Research. Yes, that is the actual name of the fund, the Geshe Schickter. I mean, it sounds like Some German crazy stuff, right? All roads lead to the same thing. So I'm saying I don't know who the Geshickers are, but I mean, it sounds a little, you know, a little ubermensch to me. No. A little bit. Anyway. Now the goal here in the CIA's own internal language, was the development of chemical, biological and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior. Now, in English, that basically means they wanted a drug or a technique or a procedure or something that would let them extract information from a prisoner without him realizing that he was even talking. So basically, how do we get information from someone and then make them forget that they told us information? Because it's one thing to get a truth serum and someone spills all the beans, but then, you know, that person is now aware that they're compromised. They're aware of what they said, where if you could get someone to leak information, forget that they ever told you, you could send them back. And then that guy's like, nah, I didn't tell him. I didn't tell him anything. Like, I promise I'm, I'm solid. So, you know, you could erase a person's memory of event. You could induce a self deletion. This is a term that I'm using carefully to avoid YouTube's demonetization. And yes, this is in the documents. Literally build a person who could be triggered on command to carry out an act that they would never consent to, and then afterwards retain no memory of having done it. So this is another level where you're. Instead of just getting someone to say something, then forget it, could you get someone to do something like a physical, you know, behavior or an action and forget that they ever did it? And to get there, to get to this point, which is, you know, basically the goal, they tested everything. So a lot of the stuff I mentioned before, we're talking hypnosis, that's obviously on the table, sensory deprivation. You get someone, you know, in a state where like they're not really sure what their senses are doing, you know, then you're not able to remember stuff. Electroshock, drug induced sleep, even like suboral frequency blasts, which is its own crazy thing we can talk about. Heroin, cocaine, thc. They even paid stage magicians to write manuals on how to slip pills into people's drinks undetected. And that's a real sub project on the CIA's payroll. They were paying magicians. They're like, hey, get Copperfield in here. Not literally him. Let the record show this is a joke. But, like, yeah, we're getting Copperfield. We're going to get him to go slip a little thing. Chris Angel. Don't. Don't even put Chris angel on that, bro. I love Chris Angel. I swear, dude, I would watch Chris angel as a kid all the time. Mind free. Oh, don't even get me started. Do you remember when he walked on the pool? Does it in every episode in the intro. God bless him. Anyway, they funded research on bird migration as a bioweapon delivery system. They built a radio telemetry laboratory in Montreal to expose psychiatric patients to electromagnetic signals just to see what happened. But the drug that came to define the program and the one that Sidney Gottlieb himself was obsessed with, was a little thing called lsd. Hey, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about gld. This is an awesome new company that we're working with that I am actually wearing right now. Now, here's the thing. You probably have the basics right. 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The clasp is, like, super solid. It doesn't feel like something you bought, like, in Times Square from a random dude. It doesn't feel like somebody ordered from, you know, some sketchy website on teemu. Like, this is the real simple, clean crucifix. And they've got a bunch of stuff. It's not just religious. Like, I throw it on and it just makes you feel like I have, like, an actual outfit. I just. It makes me feel Good. And they got everything. Chains, pendants, bracelets, watches. Whether you want something subtle or something that's like, yo, I just, I just signed a deal. You know what I mean? If you want like the record deal chain, they got that too. They have official collabs with, I mean, basically everyone. NFL, NBA, mlb, ncaa, NHL, DC Comics, mls. So you can actually rep your team without looking like you bought merch from like a random dude outside the stadium. Plus, they have pieces at every price point. They can get you the entry level, 18k goldplated piece, all the way up to solid gold and natural diamond piece. And they even do fully custom pieces. So if you want a one of one pendant, GLD can actually just do that for you. And every single piece is guaranteed for light. Now, if I haven't convinced you yet, let me sweeten the deal a little bit, all right? For a limited time, be listeners of this program, Camp Gagnon, Religion, Camp, History Camp, and the entire Camp universe, you're getting a crazy deal. If you use the code Camp C A M P when you check out, you're gonna get 40% off your entire order at GLD. That's 40% off your whole order with the code camp at checkout@gld.com and after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about gld. Tell them you heard about them from, you know, the good folks here at the campsite, Mark and Christo sent you. And whenever you do that, it really helps, you know, support the show. And thank you so much to gld and thank you to you for tuning in. Let's get back to the show. So in the early 1950s, LSD was, I mean, basically unknown. So when Godlieb learned about it, he was convinced that he'd found the secret weapon. He was like, this is the thing. And he was so convinced that he arranged for the CIA to buy essentially the global supply of LSD that was available in the world. That's like at the time, $240,000 in today's money. That's 4.2 million. Now, another point, I just want to say here. It doesn't seem like that's that much, right? It's not that much money. But I think what's happening at this point with MK Ultra is that they're saying, hey, we could invest like a couple million, which the U.S. government budget, like, think about what they spent on intelligence and development and R D and, you know, military, all that stuff. 10 million bucks is nothing to potentially have the global supply of what they believe is the forefront of being able to control someone's brain. So for them, it's like, yeah, dude, throw money at it. You know? And so what do they do? They collect the whole world's, you know, entire cache of LSD and they start using it first in credit to them. They gave it to themselves. The early protocol was that everyone in the office had to try the drug at least once so they know they could have a sense of what it would feel like. And pretty soon agents were then dosing each other, like, as a bit. Like they would like, slip acid and like morning coffee. Watching colleagues just like, sitting there at their desk just like, dude, everything's connected. One operative dosed before work ran through Washington, D.C. convinced that every passing car contained a monster. I mean, it's crazy. Like, surprise acid trips, in the words of one CIA historian, became an occupational hazard. Which kind of just sounds like guys being dudes a little bit, you know what I mean? Like, this is the one part of the story where I'm like, it's kind of sick, right? They are just dudes. I mean, look, it's wrong to dose your friends, but if you and the whole squad are like, hey, I got a tab, dude. And you, you sit down at Langley and you're like, yo, let's just pop this. Let's see what happens. Careful, Mark. I'm just saying that part is more cool to me than dosing your friends without them knowing, right? Now this is where it gets crazy. Because after that, then they move it to outsiders. So this is where the story kind of gets a little sad. Federal prisoners at the Atlanta Penitentiary were dosed under the supervision of Dr. Carl Pfeiffer. Now, of course, as it is with, shall I say, American experiments on the public. Google Tuskegee syphilis experiments, seven black men in addiction treatment in Kentucky were dosed with LSD for 77 consecutive days. Now, at Iona State Hospital in Michigan, 142 men were confined and then experimented on at a juvenile detention facility in New Jersey. Pfeiffer subjects even included children. And those are just the experiments inside institutions. Because the CIA also wanted to know what LSD did in a normal social setting. Like a party, a bar, at a beach. So they built a parallel operation, this one off the books, even from most of the people working within the agency, designed to dose unsuspecting Americans in their everyday lives. And this was called Operation midnight climax. In 1955, the CIA set up its first Midnight Climax safe house in Greenwich Village here in New York City. Within a Year they'd open a second one in San Francisco's Telegraph Hill neighborhood, and then eventually a third in Mill Valley. Now what's interesting is that these weren't like CIA black sites. They were apartments. But behind the mirrors, one way glass, hidden microphones, recording devices disguised as electrical outlets. And the man Gottlieb put in charge was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent named George Hunter White, operating under the alias Morgan Hall. Now White, to say the least, is an interesting guy. In a letter he wrote to his old boss after his retirement, White summed up his career as this. I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic. But I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal our word, which I don't even know if we can say, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all highest. Dude, what, why, why, why would you, why would you say that? Like, look, lie, cheat, steal, pillage. It's like, okay, maybe he's kind of using like euphemisms here. Kill and then R word. And people don't do that. Why are you saying that? Why is, why is that a part of this that you're proud of? Like, I hope that I'm. We're pulling this quote like out of context because that's like an insane thing to write down. Bad guy, right? Like kind of crazy. Now White was one of those who actually enjoyed the moral predicament that this project put him in. And here's how his specific operation would work. The CIA paid prostitutes $100 a night with guaranteed protection from police harassment to lure clients back to the safe houses. The drinks waiting for those clients were dosed, usually lsd, sometimes other substances, depending on what Godly wanted to test. The client had no idea any of this was happening. Now, behind the mirror, on a portable toilet that he installed for his own convenience, sat George White. Just posted up, sipping a martini, taking notes and watching the drug take effect. And what he saw was insane. Like, imagine you're a dude, you're in Greenwich Village, you're in San Francisco, you get, you, you know, hire a prostitute. You find a girl working the corner, you say, hey, how much? You get a deal. You go up to the, the room, she gives you a little drink, she's like, hey, take the edge off, have a little whiskey. And then all of a sudden you're blasting off into the cosmos, seeing crazy stuff, literally. White is behind the one way glass and he's observing paranoia, hallucinations, Disassociation. He's watching men lose the basic ability to just tell what is real. Many of them keep in mind, like, if you got dosed with LSD today, most people would be like, oh, I'm under the influence of a drug. These guys didn't even know that this drug existed. So think about that. These guys are just thinking that they're dying. And some of those men, still under the influence of the substance administered to them by the United States government, then walked out of the apartment and then committed crimes because they're losing their minds. I mean, it's crazy. Like, this is the U. S. Government testing this on its own citizens. And I'm assuming, like, they're saying, like, oh, well, soliciting a prostitute is illegal. So technically these guys have committed a law or they've broken a law, which is. This is crazy. Then they were prosecuted for crimes that they committed as if they had been entirely sober. So white's diaries, which surface decades later, describe him dosing random strangers at Bay Area beaches and in bars and in restaurants entirely outside of the safe houses, entirely on his own initiative, with chemicals that he was getting from the CIA. Now, whether those impromptu dosings were authorized or just white having fun, the agency has never really commented on it. Now, these safe houses ran for, like, I don't know, what do you think, a year? Two years? Two years. A decade. Yeah. The San Francisco one closed in 1965. The New York one closed in 1966. But long before those doors shut, 12 years before, MK Ultra had already produced its first body. And this is fascinating because it's one of their own scientists, a father of three dead on a New York City sidewalk in his underwear. And the United States government would then spend the next 22 years telling his family that it was just a silly old accident. You know, it was some crazy thing that happened. The guy in question is named Frank Olson, and he was one of roughly two dozen men in the entire United States government who knew the full nature of what was being actually developed at Fort Detrick. He was a bacteriologist, a biological warfare expert, and he spent a decade building pathogens and aerosol systems for the army. And he traveled to Germany multiple times to observe CIA interrogations at these black sites in Frankfurt and Berlin and Heidelberg. Now, these were interrogations where multiple times, the subject didn't survive the procedure. And by the fall of 1953, Frank Olson was starting to crack. You see, he'd spent the summer increasingly disturbed by what he had seen at these CIA black sites in Europe. And he told his superiors he wanted out, he wanted to quit. And that is when he was invited into the cabin. On November 18, 1953, Frank Olson drove out to a CIA retreat at Deep Creek Lake in. This is like. Like in rural Maryland, basically. And it was billed as just like a routine internal meeting. You know, CIA scientists sitting down with some army guys. Two days at a cabin, having some drinks, talking shop. And about a dozen men were there. Frank Olson was one of them. Sidney Gottlieb was another one. And Gottlieb's deputy, this guy Robert Lashbrook, was also in the room. On Thursday Evening, roughly say, 7:30pm, somebody pulls out a bottle and, you know, pours out some drinks for everybody. About 20 minutes later, the men realized that something is weird. They had been dosed with LSD without their consent by their own colleague. And now what we're. What we understand now is that this was basically a part of an experiment that Gottlieb and Lashbrook had been quietly planning for the weekend. Now, was this them doing a specific experiment on their own people to see what happened? Was it them being like, hey, we got this kind of fun little substance that makes a cool little party. Let's just dose all of our buddies, see what happens? Well, it's not really confirmed. Most of the men that were dosed recovered within hours and had, you know, a strange time, but a reasonable trip. Frank Olson did not. In the days that followed, Olson came home a different person. His wife later said that he barely spoke to her. He stopped eating. He didn't engage with his children. He told his colleagues that he wanted to just get out, leave his job, run away. He told his wife that he wanted to just leave everything. The CIA's response was to take him to New York, not to a psychiatrist, but to an allergist named Harold Abramson, who happened to also be working under contract with the CIA on LSD research. And I think at this point, Gottlieb and Lashbrook and the rest of the CIA boys are like, oh, this is not really going well. One of our own dudes is starting to, like, really come unhinged. His brain is melting. We gotta do something about this. But if we take him to psychiatrist, like, you know, there's a patient client privilege, like, there's potentially, you know, a way that this gets subpoenaed. Let's just take him to a. Our. Our side guy that can, you know, assess him. Now, the man assigned to escort Frank Olson to that appointment was Robert Lashbrook, the same man who helped Basically dose him in the cabin. Now, on the night of November 28, 1953, Frank Olson and Lashbrook checked into room 1018A of the Hotel Statler directly across from Penn Station here in New. And they had dinner, they watched some TV, and Olson reportedly went to bed at 2:25 in the morning. Lashbrook later told police that he woke up to breaking glass and he looked over and the window was shattered and Frank Olsen was gone. Olson's body was found on the sidewalk 10 stories below, just in a T shirt and underwear. And the official explanation almost immediately was that he took his own life. This was a depressed guy. He was in a fragile state. He had a high pressure job. He was having some issues with his family, and he just took his own life. The CIA told Olson's wife that her husband died of a classified illness. And she accepted it. She kind of had to. I mean, there was nothing else that she could do. And so she went 22 years just with the belief that her husband was sick and he had a mental health issue. And this is how he chose to go out. And then in 1975, in the middle of the Rockefeller Commission's investigation into CIA abuses, the Olson family was reading the newspaper one morning and saw a brief mention buried on page 37 of the Commission's report. And this report basically was talking about an unnamed army scientist who had been given LSD without his consent in 1953 and subsequently died. And the family started to put the pieces together. And within 10 days of the story breaking, the Olson family was sitting in the Oval Office while President Gerald Ford personally apologized for basically what had happened to their dad. Their husband, now CIA Director William Colby, also apologized. The government offered the family a $750,000 settlement. This is roughly $4 million in today's money. And in exchange, the family dropped its lawsuit. Now, that should have been the end of the story, but again, this is MK Ultra. And things, of course, get crazier. In 1994, Frank Olson's son Eric had his father's body exhumed. They literally dug it up. And he basically wanted a second autopsy. And the forensic pathologist who performed it was named James Stars of George Washington University. And he found something that nobody expected. He found cranial injuries consistent with a blow to the head that he says occurred before the fall. You understand what I'm saying? The evidence suggested that Olson had been knocked unconscious inside the hotel room before he ever went out the window. Now, in 1996, the Manhattan District Attorney's office officially reclassified the Case from a self taking of the life to a homicide. And to this day, nobody has ever been charged with Frank Olsen's death. Now, that's crazy. Think about that. Like, literally the Southern district of New York, the Manhattan DA was like, yeah, this was not a guy that jumped out of the window. This is a guy that was hit in the head and tossed out the window. Now, things are about to take a turn here. Okay, as horrifying as Frank Olson's story is, you can at least say one thing, right? Olson was a CA guy inside a CIA program. He knew more or less what he was doing for a living, right? Like, he was observing these interrogations. And sure, he had guilt and, you know, felt a ton of remorse for what he was doing, but was he fully innocent of MK Ultra? You know, like, sure, what happened to him was wrong, but many people point out he's still kind of an insider. Well, the people in the next chapter of the story, they didn't know that they were in it. They thought they were just going to a doctor. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because there is a brand that we're working with that I am so stoked on. Truly one of my favorite products, and it's called Ultra. All right? And Ultra just dropped something that is gonna change the game. It's already changed my life. So the way that I would think about this is whenever I'm tired and I'm sleepy and I'm not sleeping well, I am a worse person. Like, I'll literally, I'll sleep bad three days in a row and everything starts to break down. I make worse decisions. I'm less good on stage. I feel like I'm less good on the pod. Like, I eat poorly, I don't work out as much. And as I get older, I'm realizing more and more sleep is, like, the only thing that really matters. If I sleep well, I'm in a better mood. I'm a better husband, I'm a better dad. I work out better, I feel better. I mean, everything stems from sleep. Here's the thing, you take like, melatonin gummies or something. They're dosed with so much melatonin, it actually will make your sleep worse. Sometimes you'll be too sleepy to wake up. You get like an over the counter sleep med. Like, yeah, that's gonna completely nuke your sleep. And you don't want to just be, like, dependent on a heavy duty, you know, like medication just to be able to sleep like a normal adult. And that is why I want to talk to you guys about Ultra's new sleep pouches. This is actually genius. I mean, you probably, I don't know if you saw. Joe Rogan just recently shouted them out on his podcast just organically. And the idea with Ultra is fascinating. Now everyone knows, you know, Ultra has pouches for energy. You know, they are basically have the same active ingredient you'll find in, like, caffeine. And it's a nicotine free boost that just makes you feel good now. It's awesome. And I've been taking the Ultra pouches for a while. This is the new blue raspberry flavor that I love, and I just take it throughout the day. It helps me cut back on my nicotine and I just feel good. It gives you, like, a little boost. But this is where they flipped it. They made a pouch for winding down. This is one that I put in right before I go to sleep. Like, I'm sitting on the couch, my wife watching a show, and I want to pop something in. I'll pop in the Ultra sleep pouch. This is the honey lemon flavor. It tastes amazing, and it's just, you know, it's nice to do something right now. Here's the thing. I don't wake up. Like, I'm exhausted. I'm not popping, like, nicotine or caffeine right before I go to sleep. This actually has an ingredient stack that makes sense. It has 1 milligram of melatonin, which is a much more reasonable dose. You don't have to, like, all of a sudden hit like 10 milligrams or something. It also has L theanine, which helps calm the racing thoughts. It's like, basically it just relaxes your central nervous system and it gives you that thing of, like, instead of late night rumination, you're like, I'm just gonna go to sleep. It also has magnesium, which you should already be taking to help go to sleep. It also has chamomile, passion flower, and lemon balm extracts to actually help you sleep better and sleep longer and feel more recovered. And it's not just one ingredient trying to do everything. It's a full nighttime stack rate in one can. They're super easy. I literally just pop it in my lip before bed, like 10, 20 minutes, and I am ready to go to sleep immediately. And for me, the big thing is that I want to sleep better without feeling wrecked the next day. And that is what is so great about Ultra. So with these sleep patches, I'm getting deeper sleep. Literally, my whoop is Showing me that I'm getting better sleep, I'm not groggy when I wake up. And honestly, track it with your own whoop or like your aura ring or whatever, because this is the exact kind of thing you want to test. Ultra Sleep pouches deliver better, deeper sleep with properly dosed natural ingredients. And the new customers can use the code Camp C A M p to take 15% off when they go to takeultra.com that's takeultra.com for 15% off with the code. I'm telling you, everyone is going to be using these Ultra Sleep pouches as well as all the other Ultra products. And I'm telling you, I'm putting you guys on game before anyone else. And after your purchase, tell them that you heard about them from the good folks over here at camp. Now let's get back to the show. So in 1957, a 41 year old mom from Winnipeg named Velma Orliko checked herself into Allen Memorial Institute. This is a psychiatric teaching hospital affiliated with McGill University. Her presenting complaint was postpartum depression. Her husband was a sitting member of Parliament and she just wanted to feel better. She just had a kid recently. And like many women, they experience, you know, a profound version of the baby blues. You have a kid and all of a sudden your hormones are crazy and you just feel just a deep anguish, humanity in existence. So she wanted to go see a respected doctor and go home. Now, the doctor that she was to be assigned to wasn't just a regular doctor. He was the most decorated psychiatrist alive at the time. And his name was Donald Ewan Cameron. At various points in his career, Cameron served as the president of the American Psychiatric association, the president of the Canadian Psychiatric association, and the founding president of the World Psychiatric Association. I mean, this guy is top right. And he was also, by 1957, the lead researcher on a little thing called MK Ultra Sub Project 68. And this is where things get dark. Cameron had a theory. He believed mental illness was caused by faulty patterns of thinking. You know, psychological architecture that had been laid down over years. And your neural pathways just keep on getting reinforced and it creates a psychiatric state that can either be positive or negative. But if you could erase the architecture, he reasoned, you could basically rebuild a healthier mind, create new pathways completely from scratch. And he called the erasing phase de patterning. He called the rebuilding phase psychic driving. And here's basically how it worked. A patient would be admitted usually for like an ordinary condition, right, something like depression or anxiety or in this case, postpartum recovery and they would be placed into a drug induced sleep using barbiturates and antipsychotics. And they would basically be kept asleep for like 20 to 22 hours a day for weeks at a time. In one documented case, a patient was kept in this basically like a chemical coma for three months. Now during the sleep they would receive massive doses of what they call electroconvulsive therapy, where the standard course of ECT as they call it, electroconvulsive therapy at the time was like six to eight treatments total. Cameron's patients sometimes received more than a hundred treatments at nearly 1.5 times the standard voltage, two to three times a day. The, the intent, in his own words, was to reduce the patient to a vegetable state, to scrub the mental slate just completely clean. And then came this psychic driving. The patient, still drugged, still recovering from these, you know, electroconvulsive shocks, was placed in a small room with a speaker tucked under their pillow. And the speaker played a short recorded message on a continuous loop. Something like, like, you're a good mother, your husband loves you, you're confident, you're not afraid. And for 16 to 20 hours a day, this would continue on a loop for weeks. Now in some documented cases, a single sentence was played hundreds of thousands of times. In one of Cameron's own published case notes, he wrote of a patient who received 35 days of sensory isolation, repeated DE patterning and 101 days of positive driving. His clinical conclusion to all of this was quote, no favorable results were obtained. And then when Velma Orlico came back from Montreal, she could not be left alone. She had lost large portions of her memory, including in some cases her memory of being a mom. She would yell at random strangers on the street. Her granddaughter, decades later described her simply. She was no longer the same person. Now here's the thing. Cameron documented all of this openly. He published his procedures in peer reviewed journals. He genuinely believed that he was curing mental illness, that maybe he could be the one to cure depression or schizophrenia or bipolar once and for all. But most of his patients had come to him for things like postpartum depression. They were not in any way suffering from the severe mental illnesses that these procedures were allegedly designed for. What Velma Orliko didn't know, what none of his patients knew, was that starting In January of 1957, Cameron's research was now being funded by the CIA. Now Cameron died of a heart attack in 1967. His family destroyed his personal records after his death. So we will never actually have A complete account of what he did or how many people he gave this experimental treatment to. At least one patient, identified as Patient 11, died during the treatment. Velma Orliko was one of nine Canadian victims who eventually sued the CIA directly. Her husband, like I said, a Member of Parliament, David Orlico, pursued the case for nearly a decade. It was finally settled in 1988. The CIA came out and admitted no liability. It was also funded by the Canadian government, which was, as I'm sure you guessed, also undisclosed to the patients. Settlements are still being paid out like basically to this day, quietly, oftentimes under like, you know, non disclosure agreements. NDAs to basically say, like, hey, we're going to pay you. Keep your mouth shut. A class action lawsuit on behalf of roughly 60 additional families as of 2026 is still working its way through the courts in Quebec. Now this is what MK ULTRA did. Not in safe houses, not in prisons, inside respected hospitals run by the sitting president of the World Psychiatric association, funded by two different governments, using ordinary patients who had come in asking for just regular help to pretty routine mental health issues. Now the crazy part of this, what we just talked about right there, that was just part of one project, one of 149 sub projects. I mean, imagine what is in the other 148. Well, we're never gonna find out. All we're gonna be able to do is imagine. Because by the time the public ever started asking questions, the CIA had already shredded basically all the evidence. So before we break all that down, we got to go back a few years. By the mid-1960s, even the people who were running MK Ultra were starting to realize something that was strange. They were like, we're putting all this time and energy and money into this program and it's not really working the way they wanted. Years of LSD experiments hadn't, according to them, produced a usable truth serum. The CA had bought the world's supply of acid, dosed hundreds of unwitting Americans and Canadians, and tortured dozens of psychiatric patients into permanent disability. And what did they have to show for it, right? I mean, scientifically, according to them, basically Nothing. So in 1964, MK Ultra was quietly restructured and the new umbrella term was just called MK Search. It was much narrower in scope and had more oversight and was focused on finding new incapacitating agents in partnership with U.S. army Medical Corps. At this point, the hunt for this perfect mind control drug to rival what the Soviets had or the North Koreans had all of that was officially winding down. Officially winding down. MK's search ran until 1971. According to documents that surfaced years later, some MK Ultra experiments quietly continued until July 10th of 1972, when Gottlieb personally ordered the last of them to be halted. And then in 1973, the political environment just completely broke down. Watergate happened. Nixon's presidency is effectively collapsed. The country was suddenly intensely interested in what intelligence agencies had been doing all along. Basically in, you know, the COVID of a badge, just, you know, operating in the dark. Gottlieb was retiring. Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time, the man who had personally signed off on the original MK Ultra funding 20 years earlier. He was about to leave the agency, too. And before he left, Helms gave an order. He told Godlieb to destroy the MK ULTRA files. All of them, everything thrown away. Now, according to internal CIA records, they shredded the entire institutional memory of the program over a period of weeks. Which is kind of ironic, right, that like MK Ultra, part of its, you know, goal is to make people forget stuff. Also made their own agency forget that it ever happened. Kind of funny. It's fitting, right? Now, the story of MK Ultra as far as the CIA was concerned is now done. It's buried, it's out of here. We tried some stuff. We put some money into it. We killed and hurt some people. Didn't work. Burned, you know, burn the boats, get rid of the papers. We're done. Except for one thing. When Gottlieb and Helms went looking for everything related to the program, they searched the active records, they searched the retired records, and they pulled file after file after out of the cabinet. But they didn't search everything because they thought, well, we got all the obvious stuff. You know, we searched our own files and that's where everything is. But they missed one thing. This is the budget and fiscal section of the Office of Technical Services, the financial records. Because back in 1970, for reasons nobody at the Agency has ever fully explained, somebody had filed about 20,000 pages of MK Ultra correspondence with the budget paperwork instead of the project files, and then ship them off to the Agency's retired record center outside of Washington. You can see how that happens, right? You have the financial stuff like, hey, where did the money come from and how much and what were they actually doing? Those were always supposed to be separate, but somehow the what are we doing? Part got put into the money box, and those files basically sat in a box in a building where they weren't supposed to be. So for the next year and a half, that's how it was. MK Ultra was, as far as the record was concerned, a thing that never happened. The people in charge burned all the files. The financial reports, sure, do whatever you want with those. There's nothing in there. But then one reporter at the New York Times brought the entire thing crashing down. And this guy's name is Seymour Hirsch. He was a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and made his name really by breaking the Mylai massacre story. And on the morning of December 22nd, 1974 he published a front page article that technically wasn't even about MK Ultra. The headline reads, this huge CIA operation reported in U. S Against anti war forces other dissidents in Nixon years. Now the article was actually about a separate domestic surveillance program called Operation Chaos. In this program the CIA had built intelligence files on more than 10,000American citizens involved in the anti war movement. But buried in Hersh's reporting was a single devastating phrase. He wrote that a 1973 internal review at the CIA also turned up, quote, evidence of dozens of other illegal activities by members of the CIA inside the United States beginning in the 1950s, including break ins wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail. Dozens of other illegal activities beginning in the 1950s. And that sentence created a crack. Within weeks, Washington was in crisis. On January 4th, 1975 the President at the time, Gerald Ford created a presidential commission chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate the CIA's domestic activities. Three weeks later the Senate voted 824 to create its own investigative body chaired by Idaho senator Frank Church. The House followed shortly after with the Pike Committee. Historians now call this period the year of intelligence. Basically the first time in American history that the entire dark machinery of post war intelligence operations and really what the intelligence community was doing. And all of this was hauled into the daylight for the first time. And with this move it exposed MK Ultra. In October of 1975 the committee hauled Sidney Gottlieb himself into closed door hearings. Gottlieb under a pseudonym Joseph Schneider. And when asked about the program he had personally run for two decades, he claimed he could basically remember nothing about it. He goes yeah, I did this thing. Oh, I think that happened maybe, I can't really remember. But here's the thing about the Church committee. They were investigating a 20 year plus covert program whose files had been shredded by the very people that ran the program just years earlier. But still they had enough evidence to leverage for change. And in 1976 President Ford issued Executive Order 11 905, the first formal presidential order banning U. S sanctioned assassinations of foreign Leaders and prohibiting drug experimentation on human subjects without informed written consent. I mean, pretty crazy, right? Like, they're like, all right, guys, come on. No more doing drugs on people without telling them, you know, you can't just put drugs on people without telling them. You got to tell them first. Also, while we're at it, can we stop killing everybody? It's crazy that they put those two things together. Well, I mean, both of those things are basically injections without knowing it, you know? Okay, right. It's like, hey, stop injecting drugs into people. Also, stop injecting bullets into people. Can we just do those things? Less injections. How about that? At least tell them first. If you want to go assassinate the president of another country, that's fine. Just tell them and get their written informed consent and then you can do it. That I think it's a. It's a pretty reasonable thing. It's crazy that it took until 1976, but. Find this slip right here. And. Yes, exactly. And note here, initials here. Okay, thanks. On conditions. Exactly. Scrolled. I mean, I skipped those every time, so they probably get me anyway. Congress created the permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The era basically, of unaccountable CIA black programs, in theory, was done. And then in the spring of 1977, the story gets another explosion. A CIA employee named John K. Vance was conducting a routine survey of the Agency's Technical Services division when he found something that, according to everyone, wasn't supposed to exist. And what he found was 20,000 random pages of MK Ultra documents sitting in a box in the budget and fiscal records. These are the same records that I mentioned earlier. And they're just sitting there, there at the Agency's Retired Record Center. And then everyone realized what happened. Gottlieb and Helms missed them back in 1973 when they were shredding everything. The Church committee missed them again in 1975, and they had been sitting in the wrong building, filed in the wrong box for seven years, while the CIA confidently told Congress and the public that no records exist. I mean, Sidney Gottlieb's literally in a closed door hearing being like, yeah, no, I don't. I don't really remember any of the stuff. And then, bang, all the files are right there sitting in a different place in the wrong box. Now, Senator Ted Kennedy convened a new round of Senate hearings In August of 1977, this time with actual primary documents in hand. And what came out gave the public for the first time, a real look at the architecture of the program. All the stuff that we're talking about right now. 149 sub projects, 185 private researchers, 80 institutions, 44 universities and colleges. Names that had been redacted in 1975 were now fully available. Sub projects that have been listed as, like, generic placeholders could now be matched to actual addresses and labs and colleges where these things had actually been going on. And for the first time, the public could see what MK ULTRA had actually been. And again, that should be where the story ends, right? With the Church committee, the Senate hearings. 20, 000 pages. Reforms, presidential policy to the, you know, presidential apology to the Olson family. Just. Okay, we messed up up. Let's just settle this once and for all. Sorry to everyone. We're done. We're not going to do it. Except that wasn't the end. It still was not done. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because there is a brand that we're working with that I am so stoked on. Truly one of my favorite products, and it's called Ultra. All right? And Ultra just dropped something that is going to change the game. It's already changed my life. So the way that I would think about this is whenever I'm tired and I'm sleepy and I'm not sleeping well, I am a worse person. Like, I'll literally, I'll sleep bad three days in a row and everything starts to break down. I make worse decisions. I'm less good on stage. I feel like I'm less good on the pod. Like, I eat poorly, I don't work out as much. And as I get older, I'm realizing more and more sleep is like, the only thing that really matters. If I sleep well, I'm in a better mood. I'm a better husband, I'm a better dad. I work out better, I feel better. I mean, everything stems from sleep. Here's the thing, you take like melatonin gummies or something. They're dosed with so much melatonin, it actually will make your sleep worse. Sometimes you'll be too sleepy to wake up. You get like an over the counter sleep med. Like, yeah, that's gonna completely nuke your sleep. And you don't want to just be, like, dependent on a heavy duty, you know, like medication, just to be able to sleep like a normal adult. And that is why I want to talk to you guys about Ultra's new sleep pouches. This is actually genius. I mean, you probably, I don't know if you saw Joe Rogan just recently shouted them out on his Podcast just organically. And the idea with Ultra is fascinating. Now everyone knows, you know, Ultra has pouches for energy. You know, they are basically have the same active ingredient you'll find in like caffeine. And it's a nicotine free boost that just makes you feel good now. It's awesome. And I've been taking the Ultra pouches for a while. This is the new blue raspberry flavor that I love. And I just take it throughout the day. It helps me cut back on my nicotine and I just feel good. It gives you like a little boost. But this is where they flipped it. They made a pouch for winding down. This is one that I put in right before I go to sleep. Like, I'm sitting on the couch, my wife watching a show, and I want to pop something in. I'll pop in the Ultra sleep pouch. This is the honey lemon flavor. It tastes amazing and it's just, you know, it's nice to do something right now. Here's the thing. I don't wake up. Like, I'm exhausted. I'm not popping like nicotine or caffeine right before I go to sleep. This actually has an ingredient stack that makes sense. It has 1 milligram of melatonin, which, which is a much more reasonable dose. You don't have to like all of a sudden hit like 10 milligrams or something. It also has L theanine, which helps calm the racing thoughts. It's like, basically it just relaxes your central nervous system and it gives you that thing of like, instead of late night rumination, you're like, I'm just gonna go to sleep. It also has magnesium, which you should already be taking to help go to sleep. It also has chamomile, passion flower, and lemon balm extracts to actually help you sleep better and sleep longer and feel more recovered. And it's not just one ingredient trying to do everything. It's a full nighttime stack rate in one can. They're super easy. I literally just pop it in my lip before bed, like 10, 20 minutes, and I am ready to go to sleep immediately. And for me, the big thing is that I want to sleep better without feeling wrecked the next day. And that is what is so great about Ultra. So with these sleep pouches, I'm getting deeper sleep. Literally, my whoop is showing me that I'm getting better sleep. I'm not groggy when I wake up. And honestly, track it with your own whoop or like your aura ring or whatever, because this is the exact kind of thing you want to test. Ultra Sleep pouches deliver better deeper sleep with properly dosed natural ingredients. And the new customers can use the code Camp C A M p to take 15% off when they go to takeultra.com that's takeultra.com for 15% off with the code. I'm telling you, everyone is going to be using these Ultra Sleep pouches as well as all the other Ultra products. And I'm telling you, I'm putting you guys on game before anyone else. And after your purchase, tell them that you heard about them from the good folks over here at Camp. Now let's get back to the show. Since those follow up hearings in 1977, since the moment that the country supposedly got the whole story, not a single decade has gone without something new coming out. And every single time, it gets even worse. So the 1980s brought the lawsuits from Velma Ortlico that we talked about earlier and eight other Canadian victims of Ewan Cameron. The same decade brought the Supreme Court case CIA versus Sims. And in that case, the agency successfully argued that even seemingly innocuous details about MK Ultra, I mean researcher names, institution names, could be permanently withheld from Freedom of Information act requests because when aggregated, they said that it might contain compromising intelligence sources. Now, the ruling essentially gave the CIA like total immunity from public disclosure on MK ULTRA and its successor programs. And to this day, large portions of these surviving documentations still remain redacted. And then came the 1990s. This is when in 1994, Frank Olson's son Eric had his father's body exhumed. And then in 95, this is one of the strangest single pieces of testimony in the entire MK ULTRA record. President Bill Clinton's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments held a hearing in which two women came forward and described being sexually abused as children in the 1960s by researchers affiliated with MK Ultra. One of the men was a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania who had received CIA funding through the program's front foundations. Once again, no one was prosecuted. In 2001, more redactions came off. And in 2018, internal CIA documents about Frank Olson, including a never before released account of the destruction of the MK ULTRA files themselves, were quietly added to the online Freedom of Information act reading room. Now, in 2024, the publisher ProQuest, working with the National Security Archive, released more than 1200 essential CIA records on this program, the most comprehensive archive of MK ULTRA documentation ever assembled in the public domain. And In October of 2025, the National Security Archive published Sidney Gottlieb's top secret 1975 testimony that he gave before the church committee 50 years after he gave it. Exactly. And the transcripts reveal, among other things, that Gottlieb had explicitly acknowledged the agency's use of unwitting and total lack of awareness as a feature of certain experiments. Not like a mistake, but a feature. And then came January of 2026. In January, a seven page CIA memo from 1955 resurfaced on social media. The memo, written by the technical services staff's chemical division, laid out research objectives for substances that could be, quote, concealed in common items such as food, water, coca cola, beer, liquor, cigarettes, et cetera. That's it. But it was this single phrase that made the document go viral right here. The memo specifically discussed delivering behavior altering substances through standard medical treatments such as the V word and shots, etc. Now, let's just be clear here. This is a 1955 research proposal asking what would be possible. There is no evidence in the surviving records that this specific proposal was ever implemented as a real public health campaign. Okay, But I don't think it needs to be implemented to feel unsettling. Right? The mere existence of a CIA memo on government letterhead discussing the use of very routine and safe medical procedures as a delivery vehicle for psychoactive chemicals. That, I mean, that's the exact kind of thing that the agency spent 70 years insisting that it had never done and that it would never do that. We don't, we don't want to inject the American people with mind controlling chemical drugs to get people to do what we want. I mean, that's crazy. And using shots and inoculations to do it, that's crazy. That's wild. But here it is at that. At the very least, a suggestion was made in the 50s. Now, by February of 2026, this document was everywhere. I mean, I saw it, it was all over Twitter. X whatever. But what's wild is that that wasn't even the biggest reveal. More MK Ultra files surfaced. We're talking 40 boxes worth of files. Now your reaction to this should be like, what? Where are these files coming from? When? Why are they being protected? Why are they not just being released? Well, let me back up a little bit. In late 2024, the incoming administration made declassification of long buried federal secrets a stated priority. Right? I mean, Trump basically came out and was like, I'm going to release the JFK files and the Amelia Earhart files and the UFO files and the Epstein files and the R. We're Releasing everything. And in the same basket was MK Ultra. Now, the executive order was signed in early 2025, and the work fell to the office of the Director of National Intelligence under the new director. And that new director is Tulsi Gabbard. Now, inside her office, a small team was set up to handle this project. And they were called the Directors Initiative Group, or quite cute Dig is what they call themselves. Kind of fun Directors Initiative Group. Anyway, their job was to take physical custody of sensitive intelligence archives, review them, and then prepare them for public release. Now, right off the bat, that single fact should make you just double take a little bit, because the CIA's official position since 1977 has been most of the files were destroyed in 1973. The surviving 20,000 pages that were put in the financial records were recovered later. And aside from a small number of redacted holdings, there's nothing left. So when the DNI's office in 2025 is taking custody of multiple boxes of MK Ultra files, that by itself is pretty stunning. I mean, what's in those boxes is that. Is that the same stuff that was in the other boxes, the 20,000 documents? Or are there now more documents that the public has never been told existed? And that is why, in response, Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna announced a formal congressional hearing on MK Ultra for May 13. Now, this is a first of its kind hearing, like something that happens once in a generation. And a man who testified under oath that day revealed another piece of the puzzle. His name is James Erdman III, 20 years inside the CIA. He was a senior operations officer and a pretty credible guy. And he testified that after the dig was shut down, the CIA had walked in and took back 40 boxes of documents being prepared for declassification. That's his testimony. He says, look, people were going through these files in, you know, Tulsi Gabbard's office. They were all being prepped for public release. And before they could be released, the CIA walked in and took all the files. And in those boxes included mk ultra files, 40 boxes. Now, here's where I want to be very precise. There are multiple directions that people have taken this. And I want to go with, you know, the verified version of the story. Okay? The viral version was that the CIA raided Tulsi Gabbard's office. And, you know, this word raid got repeated across cable news and on X and Instagram. Now, the DNI's, like, official statement publicly denied that any raid took place. Erdman's actual sworn testimony is more carefully worded. He doesn't allege that there was a break. And he alleges that after, you know, this whole operation to go through these files was dissolved. The CIA repossessed 40 boxes of declassification material that had been transferred to the dni. But the deeper allegation, the one that matters here, is this. A CIA operations officer testified under oath that material identified as MK ULTRA documents was still being fought over between federal agencies as of right now. And that by itself is pretty crazy because for half a century, the CIA's public position had rested on a very specific line of thinking, right? First they were like, this program never happened. And then they were like, okay, the program ended in 1973. And then they were like, all the files were destroyed. And then the 1977 Senate hearing represented, you know, 20,000 files that were extra. And then basically since then, everything has just kind of, you know, filled in the margins, right? It's just been like, yeah, okay, we got everything out. This is what it is. It's done. Done. But if Erdman's testimony is accurate, if 40 boxes of MK Ultra material, or even 20 boxes, 10 boxes, were physically being prepared for declassification in 2026, that entire line of thinking kind of falls apart. Once again. Within hours of the testimony, Luna went public with an ultimatum. She basically said The CIA had 24 hours to return the documents or she would move the issue to a subpoena. The next day, two senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, sent a formal letter to CIA Director John Ratcliffe enclosing Erdman's sworn testimony on the official Congressional Record. Basically, the, you know, the simple version of this is two senators officially said that they had taken these allegations seriously enough to demand a federal response. And here's the part that is wild. Luna has been working on MK ULTRA for months. In an interview she gave last year, she said that she had personally located archived documents tying the initial phases of the MK ULTRA program to Operation Paperclip, which if you remember, is the post war program that brought former Nazi scientists into American military research. And that connection isn't even really a conspiracy theory. Like, I guess it kind of is. But I mean, she's saying it, it's basically documented. And the fact that a sitting member of Congress is publicly saying that she found new archival evidence of it while simultaneously fighting the CIA over 40 boxes of MK ULTRA material tells you that the story isn't done. It's actually winding back up and in a way that I don't think we've ever seen. So the most Honest framing of this that I can give you is, I guess we don't have proof of a massive new MK Ultra archive, but we do have proof that, you know, 53 years technically after the program supposedly ended up, the fight over its records is still active enough to trigger sworn congressional testimony, a 24 hour ultimatum, a letter from two different senators, and a public dispute over 40 boxes of documents that, you know, we've been told for decades never existed. Which brings us finally to the question that this whole story has been pointing out from the beginning. What are they still hiding? Like what could possibly. If these boxes contain actual MKUltra documents that have never been declassified, what could be in there? And the most unsettling answer is that it could be material related to the post MK search continuity. See what I'm saying? Programs that picked up where MKULTRA officially left off when it was dissolved in 1973. Programs that under different names and different funding streams, never actually stopped. Now, to be clear, there is no public proof that any such program exists today. The CIA's official position is that MK Ultra ended in 1973 and nothing of its kind has operated since. But here's the thing. The CIA has said that exact line before. So there's another question that hangs in the balance here. A question that people have been asking for a long time, right? Is this still going on? Is MK ULTRA still operating under just a different name? Or is it change shape a little bit? Well, if by that you mean the original 1953-1973 program, the one that's run by Sidney Gottlieb under a specific code name with those specific sub projects, then I'll say with pretty confident certainty, no, I don't think MK Ultra run by Sidney Gottlieb is still running. But there's a theory that the techniques didn't stay covert and they just pivoted and kind of actually went more mainstream. Remember, MK ULTRA was initially about one thing. Finding ways to influence what people think about how they feel and what they do. So you take away the LSD and the safe houses with the prostitutes and the electroshock, electro convulsion stuff, or the, you know, drug induced sleeping that then re patterns your brain. You take all that out and you look at the modern world, you'll notice there are algorithms all around us that optimize behavior and test how you respond emotionally at scale. I mean, political campaigns that micro target insecurity and attention and outrage and what you hold most dear to you. Now, none of that is MK Ultra. In A literal sense. But if the old goal was behavioral influence, modern digital systems may have kind of accomplished part of that and maybe even done it more effectively than Sidney Gottlieb ever could have. I mean, that's one reason why this story is like, it feels so alive right now. Is that the goal behind MK Ultra to shape perception and guide behavior and influence how you think and feel about the world. I mean, it's everywhere, right? Like, we're constantly getting psyoped every single day when we open our phone. Now, again, there's no proof that a hidden MK Ultra 2.0 is operating in secret and is actually encoded into the algorithms of Instagram and stuff. This is just conjecture. But. But history gives people a reason to be very suspicious. And 40 mysterious boxes that government agencies are still fighting over doesn't help anything. Now, the CIA never actually succeeded, according to their own records, at what MK Ultra was supposed to do. They never actually built this Manchurian Candidate, this puppet that could be completely controlled by a guy with a computer. They never found a truth serum to get someone to say stuff. You know, they never figured out how to make a man forget something on command, you know, by their own admission. And after 20 years, millions of dollars, and dozens of ruined lives, by every internal measure, the program is a massive failure. I mean, that's their official position. Like, hey, this actually did nothing. And all these people suffered and died for no reason. But look at what they did learn. They learned that a man could go out a 10 story window in his underwear and that the country would accept that this was just, you know, a depressed guy that, you know, had one last straw and ended it all. And they believed that for like 20 years. They also learned that a hospital full of moms could be turned into strangers to their own kids and basically ruin their lives and make them go crazy and most of the world would never really care about it. They learned that a program could be exposed, apologize for, settled, declassified, re exposed, over and over and over. And the public would kind of just be over it by the third round, you know, I mean, like, how many people would you bring up MK Ultra to? And they would just be like, what's that? Or they might just be like, oh, yeah, that old thing. Yeah, that's done. You know, they learned largely that they could just completely escape accountability. And in 1953, they started the program. In 1973, they destroyed the files. 75. The public learned that the program existed. 77, 20,000 pages that they thought that they shredded turned up in the wrong building. 88. The first victim wins in court. 94. The first official death was reclassified as a homicide. In 2001, more redactions come off. In 2018, more files go online. In 2024, 1200 more records are assembled. And in 2025, Gottlieb secret testimony comes out. And as of today, this, you know, injection memo goes viral. And then 40 more boxes of files are found on top of that. Now, at this point, MK ULTRA stopped being a fight over what happened and started being a fight over what are we allowed to know and what is being done to us that we might not even know about. And the CIA doesn't feel like they need to answer anyone. Essentially, the people that they view as their test subjects. Right? I mean, if you get a prostitute and go to a safe house, you might become a test subject. I mean, at least in, you know, the 50s or 60s, to them, it might feel like, you know, just answering to, like, why would I tell you guys this is completely irrelevant? And I guess that's why in a building most of us couldn't find On a map, 40 boxes of evidence are still sitting in a closet covered in dust. And no one actually really cares that much. I mean, maybe except for you guys watching and me. But ladies and gentlemen, that is a brief timeline of the entirety of what we know about the MK Ultra program. I mean, it. It is crazy, right? Like, that they can do all this and most people still don't really care. Like, that's the part to me that's like the most, like, I would love to know, like, before you and I became best of friends, Christos, how familiar were you with MK Ultra? 00. Yeah. You're born in this country. It's true. You're a red blooded American. Absolutely. You love lying, stealing, cheating, pillaging, a couple of those. Okay. I mean, it's like, it's kind of wild that like this thing was done, multiple people's lives were ruined. Like, you know, I'm sure you kind of read it on like a Wikipedia page. You're like, oh yeah, you know, this mom goes in and now her, you know, never talks to her kids again. Oh yeah. You know, this researcher gets thrown out a window and dies. And it's like, sure, to us it's just like a line. But that's a person's entire life. And all the people connected to him, his, you know, his dad, his wife, his kids, his grandkids, never get to experience this person ever again because of this stuff that was done by the US government to its own citizens, and no one really cares. That that's the part, to me, that's the craziest. It's kind of like the scientist thing also going on. Well, the scientist thing, yes. Like, it is weird, and I do think that there is a little bit of, like, public curiosity about it, but it's still a little bit inconclusive. It's like, okay, well, this researcher, you know, Reza Monica. Reza goes on a hike, and she vanishes. And this other researcher who's connected to the Pentagon and has all these accesses, like, he goes for a walk in the, you know, forest outside of his house, and he's never found. It's not conclusive as to what happened. And we know more or less, Frank Olsen was in a hotel room with another dude with Lashbrook, and then he gets hit in the back of the head by someone and falls out the window or is pushed out the window somehow and dies. And no one. Like, everyone's like, oh, all right. Like, no one goes to prison for that. What I will say is female power. Both Senator Paulina Luna and Tulsi Gabbard are both fighting the good fight as far as this goes. Yeah, true. I. I really do like Tulsi. She's great. Like, she's. That one gray strand in her hair is just iconic. Tulsi's one of her. I met her once. Really? Yeah. And she was remarkably kind and. And sweet and smart, and I really enjoyed chatting with her and. Oh, I would love to ask her. That's great. What's in the box? What is in those 40 boxes? What are the MK files? The MK Ultra files that were confiscated. What is it? Like, I bet they're going to come out and be like, those were the old files that were already released. These are the hard copies. We are. They. They got inspected. Everything's above board. The ndi, you know, National Director of Intelligence went through it, and we're just taking them back so they can be filed in our place. Is that the actual truth? I don't know if we'll ever know. I think they're going to kind of sweep it under the rug and be like, yeah, no, we're just. This is normal procedure. We're just getting this out of here. That guy's testimony. He doesn't know anything. He worked at the CIA for 10 years. He was a janitor. What does he know? Forget about Frank Olsen's son exhuming his body. Not a big deal. Or acknowledge it, sure. But all this stuff has already been taken care of. It's done. I mean, look, I think of MK Ultra in two minds. Where like the one mind of me is like, again, I've heard people describe this with like remote viewing and like different government projects and stuff on remote viewing, like Ingo Swan, right? Where people basically are like, I think Yuri Geller was also part of one of the CIA programs. But basically the way someone explained it to me that I think is somewhat accurate is that it's low cost, high impact. Now you're thinking, how is it low cost? They spent $10 million or whatever the settlements, maybe 20, 50 million. If you look at the US government defense budget, 50 million is nothing. That's like a rounding error. So for them it's like invest 50 million and then potentially get a brain control drug. Like, yeah, let's do that all day. That's like if someone asks you like, hey, do you want to invest 100 in a company? And it's like 99 chance it does nothing. But there's a 1% chance you make a billion dollars. I think most people will be like, all right, well, a hundred dollars is a lot to me. But it's kind of like putting five bucks on the lottery for the to win a bill. Yeah. You're like, yeah, why not? And I think that's kind of what the government's doing. It's like, yeah, let's put five bucks in, see if we get a bill. Speaking of lotteries, I'm convinced that only CIA people win them. Well, you know who won the lottery twice in his lifetime? Who? Jeffrey Epstein. Get out. You can look that up. Fact check me on that. I mean, for real, I'm almost certain Epstein won the lottery twice. Like he won it or he won it like one, he definitely won it once. Like right before he went to prison or something like that. What does it say on your, on your little Googles there? This says, no, Jeffrey Epstein did not win the lottery. This rumor stems from a coincidence involving a legal entity called the Zorro Trust. In 2008, winning 85 million dollar Powerball ticket was claimed by an anonymous. An anonymous trust by someone using the same name. Hold on. The Zorro Trust? Yeah. You know what the name of Epstein's ranch is, right? No. Zorro Ranch. Get out. And then it was claimed by a guy that happened to also be named Jeffrey Epstein. Did we just stumble s backwards into something? No, this is the theory that I heard that apparently is not true. My bad. But I'm like, what do you mean? It was by the Zorro Trust. And then also A guy named Jeffrey Epstein of the Zorro Trust is the one that claimed it. The actual winner was a grocery store worker who lived across the street from a convenience store where the ticket was sold in Oklahoma. She simply happened to use Zorro Trust for her winning innings, which was completely unrelated to Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch Trust in New Mexico. I'll allow it. Yeah. Well, we all learned something on this show. Hey, and I'm glad you guys are more informed. Yep. So let me take it back. You know who didn't win the lottery? Who's that? Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, that's great. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. But there is a woman that was a grocery store clerk in Oklahoma. That one. It's true. Pretty wild, all that to say. It's just crazy to me that people are just kind of like, in a malaise. This is what Aldous Huxley talked about. Right. In Brave New World. I always bring this comparison up, so I'm sorry if you've heard this before, but people always, like, would read George Orwell's 1984, and they'd be like, that's the future. That's the government. They're going to oppress us. They're going to control us. They're going to decide what we can and can't see. Aldous Huxley writes a very similar sort of dystopian novel called A Brave New World. And in A Brave New World, he says, no, no, no, they don't need to burn any of the books. They're just going to give you soma. You're just going to be drinking the soma all day. That's just going to put you into, like, this opiate state where you're just completely just unaffected by anything. I argue that the people in those book are having a much better time than we are now, though. Maybe they're having sex parties all the time. Yeah, our soma needs to get upped a little bit. Yeah, we're having less sex per person. It's that soma, dude. Maybe our soma is so good, we don't even care. I doubt it. And what is the soma that we're using? I would argue it's your phone. Yeah. Stop. Get off your phone, dude. Go outside. And you know what? Stop listen to this podcast. No. Go out. Like, no, actually. Go listen to the Ingua Swan episode. Go listen to the Frank Olson episode. You can listen if you want to, but honestly, I care about your health. Go outside. Go hang with people you really know. Go hang with your friends. Love your family, go touch grass, be in nature. Look around. Life is awesome. Memorial Day weekend. I know there's some sad stuff going on. I get it. But truly, all we have is each other. And all we. All I have really is, like, my close friends, my family. And at the end of the day, that's all I'm going to focus on. I gotta love my people. And I don't think you should stop, you know, advocating for justice for all these terrible things that have gone on in the world. But don't lose yourself fighting windmills, Don Quixote, you know. Anyway, that has been a brief timeline of MK Ultra. God bless you all. I appreciate you tuning in. I also have some great news. We have a few things that I want to tell you about. One, I'm on the road. Mark Yagon Live. Come check me out. I'm coming to a bunch of cities at the end of the year. I'm also on tour with my good pal Andrew Schultz. So if you want to see me open for him, try to get tickets that probably sold out. Also on top of that, we have a secret society. It's called patreon.com Camp Gagnon. There you're going to get ad free episodes, bonus episodes, and monthly zooms where we all just chop it up up. On top of that, if you like history, history content, we have history camp where we talk about everything that's ever happened, ever. If you like to know what people believe to be a better human on this planet, we got religion camp. You can check that out. And for all your other needs of the mysterious, the mystical, deep dives, rabbit holes and conspiracies. Well, we do that here at Camp Gagnon and we do episodes here twice a week, every single week. So make sure you subscribe, comment like, and help us grow this show to heights never before seen in the world. Anyway, God bless you all. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode and I will see you next week. Have a blessed Memorial Day. Peace.