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Foreign this is crime house. On August 3, 1977, the US Senate held a hearing on a mysterious government program known only as Project MKUltra. This is what Senator Ted Kennedy had to say in his opening statement. Quote, the Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge. At least one death resulted from these activities. The intelligence community of this nation, which requires a shroud of secrecy in order to operate, has a very sacred trust from the American people. The CIA's program of human experimentation of the 50s and 60s violated that trust. End quote. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't theories. These are the real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. Hi, I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a Crime House original Powered by Pave Studios. Every Wednesday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And to continue building this community, I'll be asking for your input so we can decode each story together. If you want your voice heard, make sure to respond on Spotify or or leave a review on Apple. Or if you just want to support the show, rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts and for early ad free access to every episode plus exclusive bonus content. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Today I'm discussing Project MKUltra, a series of COVID and extremely controversial experiments in carried out by the CIA during the Cold War. In 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles recruited a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb to the agency. For the next 20 years, Sidney used psychoactive drugs, hypnosis, torture, and more on U.S. and Canadian citizens, all in the name of science. Because most documents relating to MKUltra were destroyed between 1972 and 1973, we still don't know exactly how many participants lost their lives. But we do know the experiments were deadly to some and psychologically destructive to countless others. So While some believe MKUltra is one big conspiracy theory, the truth is it's a cautionary tale of spycraft, government overreach, and science without ethics. And decades later, we're still left wondering, did the CIA really figure out much mind control? All that and more coming up. Like any classic spy story, this one begins in the heart of the Cold War. After Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, the United States emerged as one of two world superpowers alongside the Soviet Union, also known as the ussr. Almost immediately, the two nations were at odds. The USSR wanted to preserve communism around the world, while the US wanted to promote democracy. The two ideologies couldn't have been more different, and it quickly became clear that cooperation simply wasn't possible. The rivalry kicked into high gear in 1947, which marked the official start of the Cold Cold War. That same year, the US Government founded the Central Intelligence Agency. Its goal was to establish a worldwide spy network to protect the country's national security. By then, the USSR already had its own intelligence service, the KGB. And starting in 1947, the two agencies went toe to toe. Each believed that annihilating the other was the only path forward, and they were willing to use any means necessary to win. In the US few cold warriors were as committed to the cause as Allen dulles. Born in 1893, Allen was the youngest son of a wealthy Presbyterian minister in Watertown, New York. His grandfather, John W. Foster, was a former Secretary of State. Allen dreamed of becoming as successful as his grandfather one day, and he was determined to make it happen. Even from a young age, Allen was a smart kid, and it helped that he and his brother John had the best private tutors money could buy. Allen was an eager student and just as passionate about his faith. In his free time, he kept himself busy by memorizing and reciting the Gospel of John. And whenever his parents had guests over, he liked to eavesdrop on their dinner parties. Afterward, he'd go back to his room and imagine the glamorous adult conversations he'd have one day. This environment shaped Alan into a confident, charming young man. He knew how to listen, flatter, and make a good impression. That kind of charisma took him far. In 1914, 21 year old Alan graduated from Princeton University and took some time to travel the world before entering the job market. Thanks to his family's connections, Alan met all sorts of politicians from around the globe during his trip. It got him thinking about his own career. And just two years later, at 23 years old, he joined the State Department as a diplomat. His first job was at the American Embassy in Vienna, Austria. World War I was at its height, and the conflict thrust Alan into a world of intrigue, espionage, and political controversy. It turned out he excelled in high stakes situations. If anything, Allen got a rush from meeting with spies in seedy hotels, hunting disloyal bureaucrats, and directing covert missions all across Europe. Okay, listeners, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Would you ever want to work as a spy? Leave your thoughts in the comments, wherever you listen and respond to the poll on Spotify. These early successes helped Allen's star rise fast. By the time he was just 27 years old in 1920, he had a successful career, a bunch of influential friends and all the money he could ever need. The only thing missing was a family of his own. So when he met 26 year old Clover Todd at a Washington D.C. dinner party in August of that year, he threw caution to the wind. Just a week after locking eyes, the two were engaged. It was a hasty decision. Clover was sensitive, which didn't exactly mesh well with Allen's hair trigger temper. Despite his many successes, Allen wasn't always easy to get along with. He could be argumentative and judgmental, especially toward those who didn't share his beliefs. And when it came to his own wife, he often screamed at her until she broke down crying, then turned around and cheated on her too. Thanks to Alan's behavior, life at home was unbearable for both of them. But Alan didn't seem all that interested in fixing his marriage. Instead, he threw all of his energy into work. For the next two decades, Alan continued to grow his career, earning a law degree and working as an attorney at his brother's law firm and. But he still wasn't satisfied. When World War II broke out in 1941, 48 year old Allen got a call from the Office of Strategic Services, or oss. It was the precursor to the CIA and they needed Allen's help. It felt like the opportunity Allen had been waiting for. He jumped on board and quickly reacquainted himself with the world of COVID intelligence. Before long, the anti Nazi underground told Alan about Operation Valkyrie, a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. In the midst of all that, he also became heavily involved in the Republican party. When the war ended in 1945, he became one of the nation's leading anti communist voices. By all accounts, Alan hated the USSR and even called it an evil empire. Alan's conviction, combined with his experience made him the perfect candidate for Deputy Director of the recently formed CIA. Two years later, in 1953, 60 year old Allen became the first civilian director of Central Intelligence. This was his crowning achievement. After years of tireless work, Alan had done it. He'd become one of the most powerful men in the the world. But he still had a lot to prove. This was an era when the possibility of nuclear war was on everyone's mind. Allen Dulles couldn't bear the thought of the Soviet Union outpacing the US in anything, be it science, military technology or international influence. If they did, he believed the entire planet would be at risk. So when he received reports from his spies that the USSR was turning men into zombies, he acted fast. At highly publicized show trials, Soviet officials forced their political enemies to admit to crimes they clearly hadn't committed. Allen and other intelligence officers marveled at the glazed look in the victim's eyes. They couldn't believe these men and women had been convinced to lie like this in front of thousands of people. In reality, these phony confessions were obtained through prolonged torture. But Allen and others feared the USSR had access to some kind of advanced brainwashing techniques. They imagined electrodes being attached directly to the brain to control someone's mind. Or a drug that turned men into puppets. Allen was spooked. In the past, the CIA had used new technology like the polygraph to try and obtain intelligence from its targets.
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But.
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But these techniques blew lie detector tests out of the water. Whatever the Soviet Union was doing, Allen wanted in. He wasn't satisfied with just catching up, though. He was determined to outrun the ussr, no matter the cost. Oh, could I go to the.
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After a long and successful political career, Allen Dulles became the director of the CIA in 1953. As the head of the world's top intelligence agency, his primary goal was to help the US defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. So when Allen learned the USSR was supposedly using mind control on their enemies, he became determined to develop those same capabilities in America. In 1953, 60 year old Allen created a program within the CIA to investigate different drugs and chemicals. He assumed that was how the USSR was achieving such an intense level of control over their subjects. To lead the project, arbitrarily dubbed MK Ultra, he appointed master chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Similar to Allen Dulles, 35 year old Sidney was a workaholic. But unlike his boss, he came from humble beginnings, overcoming a speech impediment and a physical disability to become a star in the field of chemistry. Now he led a simple life, committed to his small farm, passionate research and his favorite hobby, folk dancing. But Sidney Was ready for more. So when Allen Dulles suggested he lead something as important as MK Ultra, Sidney was ecstatic. He'd been pushing the agency to investigate a new synthetic chemical called lsd, otherwise known as acid, for years, ever since it was isolated 10 years earlier. Scientists knew that LSD created intense psychoactive effects, but there weren't many rigorous studies that tested its actual capabilities. Sydney believed it had the potential to be used in CIA interrogations and Allen wanted him to explore the possibility. But the chemist also had a million questions he needed to answer before getting to that point. Point? He wanted to know if there were antidotes to the effects, how the chemical reacted in conjunction with other drugs and the long term impacts of heavy use. And here was Sidney Gottlieb's chance to answer all his burning questions with hardly any pushback. For starters, Alan gave the project an initial budget of $300,000. It was a lot of money. Over 15 times the cost of a single family home back then. Not only that, but Sidney was exempt from the usual CIA protocols for launching research projects. Agency bookkeepers were ordered to blindly pay whatever he asked for without the usual paperwork. Essentially, Sidney had a blank check to fulfill his mission. But even then, the project was a long shot. Alan, who was not a chemist for fully expected a magic pill to solve his espionage problems. His end goal was to manufacture a drug that could brainwash Russians into betraying their country. He wanted untethered mind control and all the sci fi implications that went along with it. Sidney wasn't sure he could make that happen, but he was determined to give it a shot. For the first year or so, Sidney devoted himself to gathering data on lsd. He set up grants to fund institutions that secretly studied the drug's effects all over the country. Hospitals and universities suddenly got access to new funding. Sydney also set up some projects across the border. Since Canada was one of America's closest allies, the CIA felt comfortable sharing its plans with them. Plus, this meant they could conduct some of their most sensitive research studies outside of the us. In Alan's mind, the less everyday Americans knew about MK Ultra, the better. And he and Sydney were ready to get started. Some of Sidney's earliest experiments followed legitimate scientific protocol. For example, Boston Psychopathic, a mental health hospital, administered LSD to volunteer subjects and informed them about the experiments they were conducting. Of course, they didn't fill them in on the CIA's involvement or the ultimate goal of the tests. The even so, the recruits gave their consent to participate and knew what they were consuming. Other experiments were a Lot less ethical. In Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. Harris Isbell ran experiments on inmates at his addiction research center, sometimes commuting their sentences in exchange for their participation. During these trials, he took advantage of current and former drug addicts without even informing them what substances they were taking. And the experiments themselves were devastating. In One infamous test, Dr. Isbell kept his recruits on LSD for 77 days straight. The prospect of tripping on acid for more than two months was terrifying and created a lot of bad blood between Dr. Isbell and his test subjects. His solution was, was to buy off some of the most difficult patients by giving them a steady supply of their drug of choice. For example, heroin users were given opiates in exchange for their participation. It was morally questionable at best. But none of this mattered to the heads of MK Ultra. Remember, Allen believed the KGB was way ahead of the CIA in the mind control game. Time was of the essence. Allen didn't care how the research was done as long as they got results. And he was impatient for Sydney to move on from controlled studies to the next phase of his search fieldwork. Since the project's goal was to test acid as a potential interrogation tool, Sydney figured CIA employees would make the perfect guinea pigs. So later on, in 1953, the same year MK Ultra launched, Sydney and his team started dosing their peers with LSD laced drinks. There was just one problem. The test subjects had no idea they were being drugged. Unsurprisingly, this led to chaos. While many people were able to endure their unexpected trips without panicking, the effects varied depending on the subject's personality. And for people who were predisposed to paranoia, the results could be catastrophic. One unsuspecting agent experienced a full on psychotic break after drinking coffee dosed with acid. In a fit of paranoia, he left the building and ran through traffic, hallucinating that the cars around him were actually monsters. His co workers finally found him curled up in a fountain, shaking like a leaf. The bad trip lasted until the end of the day. Despite close calls like that one, Sidney was fully on board with drugging people in his department. Before long, he decided to start drugging victims in other departments. Some of whom didn't even know MK ultra existed. On November 18, 1953, 35 year old Sydney joined the Army's Special Operations Division, or sod at a three day retreat in Western Maryland. Like the people on Sydney's team, the chemists in SOD had some of the highest security clearances in the CIA. But while Sydney was focused on developing interrogation techniques, the SOD agents dealt with more deadly tactics. Things like plotting to assassinate political leaders such as Fidel Castro using poison and biological warfare. Even so, they welcomed Sydney into their ranks. To them, it looked like he just wanted to talk about work and get a better understanding of the other projects happening in the department. They had no idea he had something more sinister in mind. Because deep in the Appalachian mountains that ran through western Maryland, Sydney prepared to carry out his latest experiment, a mass drugging. Late one night, he slipped LSD into the retreat's supply of lead liquor, then proposed a toast. Twenty minutes later, serious conversations devolved into fits of laughter and panic as the entire group started hallucinating. As Sydney expected, their reactions varied. Many subjects were able to roll with the punches and embrace the experience. But a few became agitated, totally unable to sleep and process what was happening. 43 year old Frank Olson was one of those people. A specialist in airborne diseases, Frank was an outgoing, talented scientist. The type of guy who was always surrounded by friends. But after being unwittingly forced to drop acid, he became unrecognizable. Overnight. He withdrew into himself and left the retreat early. When he got back home, he would barely speak to his wife. Wife. She asked what happened and Frank said he'd made a mistake. In line with his oath of secrecy. He couldn't tell her what the mistake was, but according to Frank, his co workers had humiliated him. When he returned to work a couple days later, Frank was distraught. He told his boss he wanted to be fired. He said he didn't feel right and questioned his mental state. Frank's boss tried to reassure him, but the next day he showed up even more off kilter. At that point, Frank's boss called Sidney Gottlieb. Of course, Sidney probably knew exactly what was wrong. After all, he'd been the one to lace the drinks at the retreat. But instead of coming clean, he referred Frank to a doctor friend of his in New York for counseling. Someone named Harold Abramson. The only problem? Dr. Abramson was an allergist, not a psychiatrist. For the rest of the day, Frank cycled between fish fits of paranoia and depression. That night he checked into a hotel where Dr. Abramson gave him a sedative and some bourbon. A couple of hours later, Frank slipped out and wandered the streets of New York in a haze. The next morning, Sydney found him nearly catatonic in the hotel lobby. And things only got worse from there. Two days later, Sydney and Dr. Abramson finally arranged to transfer Frank to a mental hospital in Maryland. Frank spent the night on the 13th floor of the hotel with another CIA official. Just after sunrise, the official woke to the sound of smashing glass. In a state of total delusion, Frank Olsen had jumped out of the window and died by suicide. The incident was quickly and quietly covered up. The CIA blamed Frank's death on pre existing medical medical conditions. They made sure no one, not even his wife, knew Frank was an unwitting victim of MK Ultra. But behind closed doors, the CIA officially recognized that LSD had triggered the psychotic episode. And according to one of the agency's attorneys, Sidney seemed weirdly calm about the whole thing. It's possible he believed Frank's death was an unfortunate consequence of making scientific progress progress. And Allen Dulles seemed to agree. After Frank died, little changed for MK Ultra. Allen even gave Sydney the green light to continue testing drugs on unsuspecting victims. The only difference was they switched their targets from CIA agents to suspected criminals. This way, if one of their experiments went south, it couldn't come back to haunt them. It was a devious idea, but easier said than done. Eventually, Sydney enlisted a narcotics agent to go undercover and recruit new test subjects for him. Usually small time drug dealers. On the CIA's dime, Officer George White rented a ratty apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, outfitting it with two way mirrors and an extensive camera setup. Then, while posing as an artist, George steadily made underworld contacts, drugged them and recorded the results. Sometimes he warned them, other times he didn't. Even more concerning. By this point, Sydney's team wasn't just experimenting with lsd. The CIA tested a variety of experimental chemicals designed to knock subjects out or put them in a more suggestive state. In at least one case, a victim was hospitalized or while many more ended up sick for days on end. Once the New York safe house was up and running, Sidney's team expanded their operations on the West Coast. At a second safe house in San Francisco, White embraced a different Persona, becoming a dirty cop. After gaining intel on local sex workers, he would arrest them, then offer a get out of jail free card if they agreed to pursue participate in his mind bending experiments. It was another example of MK Ultra preying on vulnerable people to carry out their work. And despite all their efforts, they didn't have much to show Alan Dulles. The dream of a truth serum or a magic pill was still out of reach because Sidney Gottlieb kept so few records of his experiments and periodically destroyed evidence. We don't know exactly how many substances they they tested or to what extent, but by all accounts, he and Allen spent years chasing a ghost, searching in vain for A chemical that could unlock the human mind. By 1959, six years after the launch of MK Ultra, they'd all but given up on LSD. Still, Alan wasn't ready to shut down the project entirely. Instead he turned to different, darker methods of control. He wanted to turn torture into a science. By 1959, 66 year old Allen Dulles was at his wit's end as director of the CIA. The Cold War was all he could think about. And despite all his efforts, Sidney Gottlieb's reaction research wasn't producing the results Allen craved. Meanwhile, the USSR seemed to grow more powerful with each passing day. The public stunts were the most upsetting for Allen. In the Soviet Union, high profile American prisoners were paraded in front of TV cameras, forced to publicly denounce their home country. Allen feared the Russians had perfected their brainwashing machine and were using it to create traitors. And he wanted to do the same to them. But by 1959, it seemed unlikely that a drug like LSD would give Alan the magic mind control pill he wanted. After that the research continued, but the major focus of MK ULTRA shifted. Allen ordered Sidney and his team to look into other options, namely traditional methods of torture. Allen wanted things like solitary confusion, refinement, sleep deprivation and psychological and physical abuse to be tried, tested and turned into a recipe. A systematic way to break a person's will and turn them into a puppet. Like the original mind control idea, Allen planned to use these methods on Soviet prisoners of war to create informants and loyal assassins. Allen knew it was controversial, but in his opinion it was for the greater good. As it happened, there were other scientists already looking into those very prospects. One of them was a well known Canadian psychiatrist named Donald Ewan Cameron. He worked as the director of the Allen Memorial Institute located outside of Montreal. Dr. Cameron's experiments made Sidney Gottlieb seem like a Saint by comparison. Dr. Cameron was obsessed with finding a cure for schizophrenia. He tried to modify his patients behavior by subjecting them to a grueling month long regimen of electroshock therapy and psychological manipulation. He referred to this process as depatterning. If this sounds like something out of a horror movie, it was actually much worse. De patterning typically began with two to four weeks of what Cameron called sleep therapy. During this period, patients were kept asleep under heavy sedation using a combination of drugs. The only time doctors woke them up was to administer two or three daily rounds of electroshocks. This kind of therapy was common at the time, but Dr. Cameron used shocks that were between 20 and 40 times more intense than recommended. There's no other word for it. This was torture. And Dr. Cameron found it led to three distinct phases of amnesia. First, the patient lost their memories of the therapy, but retained their identity and understood why they were at the treatment center. In the second stage, the patient forgot who they were but still wanted to remember. This, unsurprisingly, caused them intense anxiety and distress. Finally, in the third stage, they regret progressed to a childlike state, only able to describe what was happening to them in the moment and seemingly uninterested in questions about who they were or what they were doing. This third stage is what Dr. Cameron termed a success. Because these patients were nearly catatonic, their outward schizophrenic symptoms disappeared. But in traditional exams like the Inkblot test, they continue continued to show clear signs of schizophrenia. Still, Dr. Cameron dismissed these results as anomalies, claiming the patients he tormented into amnesia were, quote, cured. Although the CIA wasn't interested in schizophrenia, they were encouraged by Dr. Cameron's research under Project MK Ultra. They funded his institute, explicitly instructing him to continue continue his experiments and take patients beyond the third stage. In other words, they wanted Cameron to take a patient with complete amnesia and somehow force a new identity onto them. They wanted a real life Manchurian Candidate. It's a reference to the plot of a 1959 novel where a man is brainwashed into becoming an unwitting assassin. So to accomplish this, Cameron intensified and extended his his methods. After taking a patient to stage three, he strapped them down and played a recorded tape. The messages contained emotionally triggering experiences the subject had revealed in interviews. For example, it might be a recording of the patient talking about the sexual abuse they suffered as a child. Cameron would play these tapes on a loop for days at a time. After weeks of this treatment, the negative tape was then swapped with a positive one. These contained encouraging messages reflecting a patient's deepest aspirations. According to Cameron, this kind of psychic driving resulted in controlled personality changes. However, these claims have since been debunked. Besides being completely unethical, Cameron's experiments weren't very successful either. Given time and time therapy, many patients were eventually able to recover many of their memories. Even so, the emotional scars the treatment left behind were deep. All for a supposed remedy to schizophrenia, which he never actually cured. Dr. Cameron's work might represent one of the lowest points of MKUltra, but it was just one of many avenues the CIA explored. There are too many to cover here, but we know researchers delved into techniques like hypnosis. Sensory deprivation and solitary confinement. They reportedly succeeded in hypnotizing a patient into attempting murder. When the subject came out of her trance, she had no memory of the encounter. These kinds of experiments continued unchecked for nearly a decade, at least until 1961 when when 68 year old Allen Dulles time as CIA Director came to an end. That year, Allen turned his sights on Cuba, which was newly under the control of the revolutionary Fidel Castro. Allen was the one responsible for launching the failed Bay of Pigs invasion that became an international incident and severely humiliated President John F. Kennedy. In retaliation, JFK fired Allen from the CIA and and vowed to splinter the agency into a thousand pieces. Kennedy never succeeded in dismantling the CIA. But he did replace Alan Dulles with a man named John McCone. Two years later. In 1963, McCone reorganized Sidney Gottlieb's department. MK Ultra's budget was put under new scrutiny and while the project wasn't totally shut down, he it was stripped bare. Sidney, now 44, was forced to work on less contentious research. To this day, we don't know exactly what that research entailed. It seems like he shut down studies related to paranormal topics like ESP and telekinesis. From there, he focused on the chemical and psychological methods that had already moved beyond the research phase and into practical testing. After that, MK Ultra's scope dwindled further with each passing year. By 1970, the program was a shadow of its former self and operated on a fraction of its previous budget. Finally, in 1973, while Richard Nixon was in office, Sydney officially shuttered the program. His final report was pessimistic. Sidney noted that while MK ULTRA kept the CIA on the COVID cutting edge of pharmaceutical research, it didn't lead to many practical results. According to him, the drugs they tested were ultimately too unpredictable to be effective in real covert operations. Since everyone reacted differently, substances like LSD simply weren't reliable in a high stakes situation. On top of that, many agents had ethical objections to using them in the field. After closing the project, Sidney destroyed all the records he could find. Many of the experiments were never well documented in the first place. Still, he hunted down every scrap of paper that referenced the program and fed them to the shredder. He later claimed he did this because the research might be, quote, misunderstood and damage the reputations of the scientists who participated. But other people pointed to the oddly convenient. Convenient timing. Around this time, the Watergate break in trial began and rumors of the CIA's illegal activities leaked to the public. These were bombshell revelations to most Americans, the idea that their government was lying to them, experimenting on them and trying to control their every move shook society to its core. Before long, public trust in institutions plummeted to the lower, lowest levels ever recorded. The outcry led President Gerald Ford to create the Rockefeller Commission in 1974 to investigate the CIA's potential crimes. That's how we know about the death of Frank Olsen, a discovery that sparked a new round of scandals. Since then, we haven't learned much else about Project MK Ultra. The government's only conclusion was that in 20 years of extensive research, the CIA failed to produce any tangible results. So, listeners, what do you think of this? Do you believe the official conclusions of the Rockefeller Commission? Do you think they left anything out? Tell us in the comments. Decades later, the existence of MKUltra is still hard to believe. That might be why, even after the Rockefeller Feller Commission, conspiracy theories about the program have exploded. It's understandable. We know the CIA was trying to perfect methods of mind control and that all their findings have been destroyed or hidden from the public. We know they carried out unethical experiments on human subjects for decades, and yet we only have a vague idea of what really went on. So while there's no hard evidence, it's easy to believe. Believe there's more to the story. What else is the CIA hiding? Is it possible their mind control experiments were more successful than they let on? If they were, it's safe to say the public wouldn't be informed. With all the secrecy around MKUltra, it's created a conspiracy theory chain reaction of sorts because some people think the program never ended. It's possible that MK Ultra played a role in the 1969 Manson Family murders and the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, both of which we'll be covering in future episodes. It's a terrifying thought, and while we'll probably never know the full extent of MK Ultra, the bits we do know are horrific. It makes you wonder if the government was willing to sacrifice its own citizens in the name of progress. Who knows what other secrets they're keeping and at what cost? Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next week. We'll decode this episode together and hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your favorite feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free, plus exciting bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Paves 2 Studios, this episode was brought to life by the cult's crimes and conspiracies team Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Terrell Wells, and Leah Roesch. Thank you for listening.