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It's 1959 in Montreal, Canada. Along a slope of Mount Royal, an imposing mansion, already nearly a century old, looms over the city. Its dark gray stone facade envelops over 50,000 square feet and reaches to the top of a 75 foot tower. Formerly a private home called Raven's Craig, it's now the site of the Allen Memorial Institute, a beautiful but ominous psychiatric hospital. One of its grand doors creaks open and a woman stumbles out. Normally, she's well dressed. Everybody tells her she looks like a movie star. Elizabeth Taylor, to be exact. Only right now, the woman is disoriented and severely underdressed in an oversized hospital gown. Even as she trips over the hem, the slight woman manages to slip away from the isolated mansion. She's making a run for it. Unable to follow a straight line, the woman claws her way farther up the mountain, doing whatever she can to just keep moving forward. Whatever she can to escape this hospital and the debilitating treatments she's been subjected to. But her body is too weak. Soon she hears the nurses gaining on her. The next thing she knows, she's back inside the Allen Memorial Institute, back under the care of its director, Dr. Ewan Cameron. his direction, the woman is sedated and given electroshock therapy again and again until she can no longer remember why she was even there in the first place. And she's just one of the many patients unwittingly subjected to Dr. Cameron's twisted brainwashing experiments. Funded in part by the CIA. This is the story of Dr. Cameron and the Montreal experiments, also known as sub project 68 of MK Ultra. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday. We'd love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Or check us out on instagram @the conspiracypod. This episode includes discussions of drug use and torture. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us.
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Now streaming on Acorn tv. There's a killer on the loose. Brooke Shields leads an all star cast in the hit original mystery series. You're killing me. I solve mysteries for a living. I think I'm good to go.
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Maybe in one of your books, not in real life.
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Catch every killer episode.
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You're someone who can vouch for your whereabouts at the time of the incident. What are you?
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The alibi? That's literally who I am.
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Exactly who I am.
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When the doors of the Allen Memorial Institute open in Montreal in 1943, its founders envision it as a bastion of state of the art psychiatric care. No longer will asylums be synonymous with prisons. No longer will patients live in squalor while doctors practice barbaric Stone Age treatments. Their facility will not be seen as some kind of dumping ground for family members who don't fall in line. At the Allen, patients will come and go as they please. Treatments will be in accordance with the latest scientific breakthroughs. This institute will lead with care and compassion. That's the hope at least. And in many ways the Allen achieves the goals of its founders, who which includes the Rockefeller family. Less than a decade after the hospital is established, it is considered a world leader in mental health care. But that's because the world doesn't really know what's going on there. They don't know that in the 1950s and early 60s, disturbing experiments are being carried out at the Allen. Often in secret. These treatments will ruin patients lives for months, years, sometimes forever. So where does everything go wrong? Well, let me introduce you to the very first director of the Allen Memorial Institute who will oversee its operations for more than 20 years. His name is Dr. Ewan Cameron. Born in Scotland, Cameron eventually settles in Montreal. That's where he's hired as a professor of psychiatry at McGill University. When the Rockefellers team up with McGill to open the Allen Memorial Institute, Cameron is selected as the man in charge. They must think, well, who better to run the place than the university's own pioneering expert in mental health? Cameron has already studied all manner of mood and brain disorders, but his research focuses primarily on schizophrenia. At a time when the condition is greatly misunderstood and demonized. Cameron wants to find a cure at face value. His ambitions do seem genuinely altruistic early in his career, but his methods are highly questionable. In one experiment, Dr. Cameron subjects patients to extreme temperatures as high as 107 degrees Fahrenheit for a whole hour. His conclusion? People with schizophrenia respond to high heat the same as people who do not have schizophrenia. Not exactly groundbreaking. In a different trial, Cameron tests how dehydration affects epilepsy. His patients are given just 20 ounces of water to last an entire day. And Cameron finds that water intake does not reduce the number of seizures a person experiences. But it does cause a whole host of unrelated health problems. Acidosis, which messes with ph levels in the blood. Severe weight loss. Once again, the results are pretty much what you'd expect. The ends don't justify the means, especially when you take into account that one of his epileptic patients dies during this experiment. Oh, and by the way, this all happens before he's hired to run the Allen Memorial Institute and before The United States CIA decides to give Dr. Cameron a bunch of money. There are different stories about how Cameron comes up with the experiments he'll carry out at the Allen in the 1950s and 60s. And they're probably all true to some degree. Here's one. In 1951, he reads a theory about brainwashing. According to influential British psychiatrist Dr. William Sargent, the communists have supposedly unlocked the secret to manipulating the mind. The key, says Sargent, is to put the patients through intense stress. That's how you make someone more susceptible to persuasion. Which leads Dr. Cameron to an epiphany. He asks himself when traditional therapy isn't enough, could the mind simply be wiped clean? He thinks maybe he could put his own patients through extreme stress and create a blank slate of sorts of. And then he can rebuild the person from the ground up without the symptoms of mental illness. Uh, what? Okay, I'm sorry. Timeout. How exactly does Dr. Cameron propose to wipe his patients minds clean? What kind of extreme stress is he talking about? Well, that brings us to his next influence. Only this one isn't found in a peer reviewed journal. It's more likely that Cameron heard about this invention from a friend or even saw an ad for it imploring him to fork over part of his paycheck. It's called the cerebraphone, and later the dormophone. And it's meant to help its users learn new languages while they sleep. The idea is pretty simple. A tiny record player tucked under your pillow at night. Repeats phrases over and over until they stick. While you're unconscious, all you have to do is drift off to dreamland and. And if the cerebraphone works, you wake up and voila. Suddenly you know how to ask for directions to the nearest bathroom. In French. Jou vous dre un. I guess I didn't sleep long enough to learn that part. The story goes that Cameron takes these two separate ideas. Wiping the mind clean and playing tapes on a continuous loop. And he merges them into one unholy union. He calls his new technique psychic driving. Here's how it's supposed to work. For each of his patients, Cameron starts with traditional therapy sessions. That's when he assesses what he believes to be the root of their problems. Side note, even though he specializes in researching schizophrenia, the majority of Cameron's patients at the Allen have more common diagnoses. Most of them are women with anxiety or depression. Next, Cameron writes a script. It's a message directed at his patient that is intentionally negative. He calls out all of their fears, weaknesses, asocial behaviors, you name it. And then he records this message onto a tape. In fact, he usually makes the patient dictate the message. Or sometimes he asks one of their family members to drop by the Allen and lend their voice. And then he takes the audio tape he's made and plays it for his patients on repeat. Here is an actual example of one of those. Gertrude. You don't get along with people. You have never gotten along with your mother. She made you do what she wanted, and you could never win out against her. You have always felt inadequate and. And have been jealous of other people who felt that they had it better than you. You are always trying to make other people do what you want. But even when you succeed, you don't feel good. You are forever trying to make your husband do what you want him to do because you think that he is not strong. And you try to turn the children against him. It's ruthless. Hard enough to listen to one time through. And Cameron isn't just playing these messages a dozen times. He doesn't stop at 100 or even 1,000. Dr. Cameron subjects his patients to these recordings on repeat for 10, 12, sometimes 20 hours per day, for days on end. In one study, Cameron writes that participants spent 10 to 15 days listening to these tapes. That means his patients are hearing the same message played tens of thousands of times, back to back to back. And while he starts off by making the patients listen to their own voices, Cameron modifies the recordings, too. The tapes are Sped up, slowed down, distorted, given an echo. So patient has to hear increasingly unsettling versions of the message, too. It goes something like this, Gertrude, you don't get along with people. You have never gotten along with your mother. She made you do what she wanted, and you could never win out against her. You have always felt inadequate. I just. I can't even. That is crazy. In response to these tapes, the patients get angry, agitated. Some feel like screaming. Others say it's like hearing voices in your head. So how does he get them to stay in one place and keep listening? Usually he drugs them or uses hypnosis. In one instance, a patient rips headphones off her head to make the messages stop. So Cameron has his assistant secure the headphones underneath a helmet so she can't remove them again. Many patients beg Cameron to stop. Like Val Orliko. She came to the Allen to treat her postpartum depression because she believed Cameron knew what he was doing. In fact, when she begins the unorthodox treatments, she idolizes him. And Cameron, in turn, doses her with LSD before subjecting her to his psychic driving tapes. She has no idea what LSD is. And he leaves this woman, this new mother, alone to navigate an acid trip while playing messages that insinuate she's done something wrong. You can't script a worse trip. Val likens her experience to the story of Alice in Wonderland. She takes some unknown substance, and then she feels like she shrinks down in size and falls into an impossibly deep hole. Only Val doesn't wind up in a fantasy world. She says it's more like descending into hell. Reportedly, Cameron does feel bad about what he's doing. At first, he realizes this all looks very, very wrong. He'll later say, quote, one simply didn't do this sort of thing to people. But his reservations don't stop him from pressing onward. See, Cameron's theory about all this psychic driving stuff goes back to what he read about brainwashing. He believes his treatments will induce so much stress that it will tear a person down. Or, as he puts it, the existing personality set could be temporarily broken up. During the treatments, Cameron looks for signals so he knows when this breaking up has supposedly been accomplished. When a patient grows distraught when they begin to fight against hearing the tapes, he takes that as a positive sign, like he's moving in the right direction. Cameron believes this physical struggle is proof that a more desirable trait is pushing its way to the surface. He calls these contra traits positive characteristics that are lying dormant, waiting to replace the negative traits. It's an idea that doesn't seem to have any scientific basis. When Cameron thinks those contra traits are bubbling up, he stops playing the negative tapes and he switches over to a new tape with a new message. A positive message. Here's another can get along with people by now. You are not afraid of others and you are very pleased to be with them. People like you and your relationship with people is good. And who does Cameron tap to record the nice messages? Not his patients. For these, he lends his own voice. Cameron's experiments with psychic driving are already underway in the mid-1950s when he catches the attention of an academic group. They call themselves the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and they want to offer Cameron funding to advance his studies. Now, if you're a longtime listener of this show or or you happen to know your CIA history already, that group's name might be setting off some alarms because the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology is a front. Through them, the CIA covertly channels money to fund subprojects for MKUltra, and Dr. Cameron's experiments are about to get a lot of more twisted.
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before the name of Dr. Ewan Cameron crosses the lips of anybody at the CIA, the agency grows interested in one of his colleagues at McGill University. It's the early 1950s when Dr. Donald Hebb performs his experiments with sensory deprivation. First, Dr. Hebb recruits student volunteers. He offers them $20 a day, serious money for a college kid at this time. But the cash is hard earned. Volunteers have to enter a plywood box where they lie down on a stiff hospital bed. Their eyes are covered with goggles to obscure their vision, and once the box is shut around them, the only noise they can hear is a muted buzz. It's basically a cubicle from hell, which is somewhat intentional. Dr. Hebb is studying the effects of cutting out sensory inputs. No sight, sound or touch all day, except for food and bathroom breaks. What he learns is that about three days in, participants start to report hallucinations. Thankfully, his experiment is completely voluntary, and the college students can tap out at any time, which they usually do as soon as the hallucinations begin. Nobody lasts more than six days. Actually, that's incredible to me. I can't believe somebody stayed in there six days. Initially, the agency is interested in funding Dr. Hebb as part of MK Ultra. But looking into his work leads them to someone else, Dr. Cameron, who is clearly more open to pushing the envelope. Cameron has also been keeping tabs on what his colleague has been up to, and apparently he thinks it's a good start. But it could be taken even further. Cameron starts moving some of his patients into darkened rooms at the Allen. He uses earplugs and blindfolds to impair their senses and keeps them confined for much longer than six days. Cameron's sensory deprivation treatments can last over a month. Sometimes he combines his treatments. He pairs sensory deprivation with his psychic driving messages on loop. That way, his patients have almost no sensory input other than their own distorted voices. At this time, John Gittinger is the head psychologist over at the CIA. When they launch MKUltra, their illegal program to research mind control techniques, Gittinger oversees some of the subprojects. He sends an undercover agent to speak with Cameron to convince him to apply for funds through the Society for the Investigation of human ecology, the CIA's front for funding external MKULTRA experiments. And what researcher is going to say no to funding? Especially to someone with a genuine interest in your work and who won't be interfering. Cameron sends in his application right away. And that's how his experiments at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal in Canada become known as MK Ultra's Subproject 68, one of the largest in the entire program. Now, it's very possible that Cameron doesn't know who's really behind the money. Many researchers who run these sub projects never find out they've played a role in MK Ultra. Or they only learn the truth years later, along with the rest of the world. And by the time it's widely known, Dr. Cameron will be dead. Nevertheless, in 1957, Cameron signs a contract with the Society. In exchange for funding, he proposes to continue his work on psychic driving, along with yet another unconventional treatment. Something that makes Dr. Hebb's sensory deprivation studies look like child's play. Something that Cameron refers to as de patterning. There's a place in the Allen Memorial Institute that strikes fear in the heart of every patient. If you must walk by this particular spot, it's common practice to slide past with your back against the opposite wall. That's the best way to keep as much distance as possible between you and those doors. Beyond them is the sleep room. This is where the de patterning takes place and the sleep room got its name. Because here patients are kept drugged and unconscious, basically they're in an induced coma and they're forced to stay this way for extended periods of time. We're talking 21 to 22 hours per day, waking briefly every few hours so the patient can eat, use the bathroom, take more drugs, and so they can receive another type of treatment, electroshock therapy, now known as electroconvulsive therapy or ect. Modern day ECT is performed using anesthesia. Electrodes affixed to the skin transmit a low dosage of electricity to a patient's brain. But as with Dr. Cameron's other treatments, he practices a more severe form of ect. He uses a special technique called Page Russell. Instead of administering one shock at a time, Cameron shocks his patients multiple times, back to back, using a higher voltage. Even the doctors who pioneered this method would only use it once per day. Cameron's patients receive Paige Russell ECT twice or even three times daily. Then they're put back to sleep. Often, Cameron combines de patterning with psychic driving. While a person is asleep, he plays those negative messages for them on repeat. And sometimes this particular treatment can last up to two months straight. Cameron's goal with depatterning is to essentially give his patients amnesia. He wants them to forget their past, who they are, why they're even at the Allen. In fact, he writes that he wants his patients to lose all recollection of the fact that he formerly possessed a space time image. In many cases, Cameron is successful. Too successful. Yes. His patients appear to lose their unwanted symptoms, but only because now they can barely think at all. They can't dress themselves, feed themselves. According to one of his patients, people in the sleep room act like babies. After someone comes out of the sleep room, it can take months or even years to regain normal functions and memories. Families report that their loved ones come out of the Allen forever changed. Dr. Harvey M. Weinstein, who, yes, happens to have an unfortunate name, no relation, is now a psychiatrist and a human rights scholar. But before all of his impressive work, Harvey is just a kid whose father is sent to the Allen as a patient of Dr. Cameron's. When his father finally comes home, he spends most of his time on the couch, sleeping. He can barely talk anymore. Harvey's dad, as he knew him, is gone. Looking back as an adult and a mental health professional, Harvey concedes that there may have been a part of Dr. Cameron that truly wanted to cure people. But the fact is, Cameron is carrying out experimental treatments without his patient's consent. I mean, he kind of sounds like a quintessential mad scientist, but get this. There's something about Dr. Cameron's credentials that I haven't mentioned yet. You already know that he's got this lofty position at one of the most prestigious psychiatric hospitals in the world. Well, from 1952 to 1953, while working at the Allen, he also serves as president of the American Psychiatric Association. That's not all. He also becomes president of the Quebec Psychiatric association, the Canadian Psychiatric association, and the World Psychiatric Association. This guy isn't exactly flying under the radar. Now, that's not to say that the people giving him these titles know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors at the Allen. But Cameron does publish papers on some of his work there. There's one from April 1958, titled Effect of Repeated Verbal Stimulation upon a Flexor Extensor Relationship. When he writes verbal stimulation, he's referring to psychic driving, playing those tapes on repeat. Well, in this paper, Cameron studies four women who are already patients of his, who are already receiving a combination of ECT and psychic driving treatments. And he decides, well, let's spend half the day on their normal tapes and half the day on new tapes. These new tapes play the following message. Your right arm is straightening out. Your right arm feels as if you are reaching out for something. Your right arm feels stiff at the elbow, as it does when you are stretching for six hours a day. His patients listen to this tape while electrodes measure the movement in their biceps and triceps. He's testing whether the repeated message can induce a physical response, whether he can make his patients move their arms almost like puppets. He concludes that three out of the four patients did show slight movement in both the biceps and triceps after listening to the tapes in another setting. Under the right circumstances, this kind of experiment wouldn't seem so malevolent. But Cameron is being funded indirectly by MK Ultra, a program attempting to harness the powers of brainwashing and mind control. Now, why would they be interested in creating human puppets? We can only guess. But it probably isn't for benevolent reasons. Not to mention, MKUltra notoriously did not always get its subject's consent before going through with experiments. Anecdotally, Dr. Cameron didn't either. His patients wanted to be cured, but they had no idea what type of treatments they'd be forced to endure. Informed consent has been codified since 1947 as a result of the Nuremberg Trials. That's when an international court tried Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of World War II. A panel of judges then worked together to create the Nuremberg Code, A set of 10 guiding principles meant to ensure we wouldn't repeat the illegal and unethical medical studies carried out by the Nazis. That code would be broken time and again, and as any listener of this show is aware. But that fact is especially surprising coming from Dr. Ewen Cameron. After all, he was called upon as an expert psychiatrist at the Nuremberg Trials. Yeah, he was one of 10 doctors from around the world asked to evaluate Rudolf Hess. Hess had been one of Hitler's aides and served as the deputy leader of the Nazi Party. But when he got to Nuremberg, he claimed he had amnesia. Dr. Cameron examined Hess and found him mentally fit to stand trial. So you might think Cameron, of all people, should be deeply familiar with the Nuremberg Code that he would understand. Ethical experimentation requires a patient's full consent. And if they're not capable of giving that consent, their families should be consulted. But it doesn't sound like that's what happens here. In 1964, Cameron abruptly leaves his post at the Allen Memorial Institute. Nobody knows why now. That same year, MKUltra comes to an end. By then, the CIA has paid Cameron over US$60,000 to run his experimental procedures on unwitting patience. And then, just three years later, at the age of 65, Cameron is on a mountain climbing trip when he has a heart attack. He doesn't make it, so he's no longer around to see what happens next. In December 1974, reporter Seymour Hersh releases an article in the New York Times unveiling some of the CIA's illegal domestic operations. That leads to congressional hearings and to the public unmasking of MKUltra. But it would take a little longer for Dr. Cameron's work in Montreal to be connected to all of this. In the summer of 1977, a Canadian man named David Orliko is reading the paper. That's how he learns. The United States CIA was funding mind control research in Montreal at the Allen, where his wife Val went for postpartum treatment and was never the same. And now David and Val realize it's because she was used as a human guinea pig without her knowledge. Val isn't Cameron's only former patient who has suffered. Remember the woman I mentioned at the beginning of the episode? The one who tried to escape the Allen? She speaks about her experiences with reporter John Marks under the condition of anonymity. We know her only as Lauren G. Over the years, more and more patients come out of the woodwork. But as for Val Orliko, she has something the others don't. A spouse who's a member of the Canadian Parliament. So when the Orlikos learn the truth, Val turns to David and tells him she wants to sue the CIA.
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Her favorite hobbies just aren't in the cards anymore. She and her entire family can see she is no longer the same. What happened to her under Dr. Cameron's care changed her. All this time, Val has clung to the belief that at least Dr. Cameron was wanted her to get better. Maybe it didn't work out perfectly, but he had tried. So when she realizes all of those experiments had been funded as part of MKUltra, the tapes, the electroshock, the sleep room she feels as though Cameron saw her as nothing more than a fly. Now she's mad as hell and she wants her parliamentarian husband David to sue the CIA's pants off. David is game, but at first he can't help but think it's futile. How are they going to sue another government's agency and win? But then they get in touch with Joseph Rao, a famed civil rights attorney in the us. He's willing to go up against the CIA and thinks he knows how they can pull this off. First, though, he and his team reach out to some of Cameron's other former patients. Eventually they gather eight more plaintiffs, including Dr. Harvey Weinstein, who we mentioned earlier, and they file suit. At the end of 1980, Rao hopes to establish negligence. He believes they might have a shot if they can prove the CIA knew those MK Ultra experiments were dangerous and funded them anyway without any real oversight. As part of the lawsuit, Rao and his junior attorney Jim Turner deposed several key figures from MK Ultra. That includes Sidney Gottlieb, the so called poisoner in Chief, John Gittinger, the original program officer for Subproject 68, Dr. Cameron's work and Robert Lashbrook who okayed the funding. At one point, Rao presses them on the death of Frank Olson. We've covered the man who Knew Too Much on this show. Before. Olson was a biochemist doing top secret military research when he was dosed with LSD during a CIA meeting. He later fell to his death from a hotel window. Officially he jumped, but his family and many others have never bought that story. However, Olson died, Joseph Rao wants to prove that the CIA should have learned their lesson. They should know by now that LSD can be harmful if misused. And yet they funded Dr. Cameron's work anyway, even though he force fed his patients LSD in order to induce stress. Not only that, but Gottlieb and Lashbrook had personally been tangled up in the Frank Olson affair. And they still involve themselves in funding. Subproject 68. Rao's team, already off to a good start, finds two more smoking guns, or what they hope will be smoking guns. One is a speech delivered by Dr. Cameron wherein he calls his own experiments brainwashing. The second occurs when Rao catches them in a lie. The CIA has been trying to claim that it was Cameron who sought this them out, not the other way around. But Gittinger reveals, nope, they went to Cameron and suggested he apply for funding. The case seems to be going well, but this is the CIA we're talking about. They seemingly use every motion in the book to try to delay the lawsuit. So Rao decides he needs to lay on the pressure. He goes to the Canadian government, who so far have been open and helpful. He's hoping they can assert their diplomatic powers to move things along. That's when the case hits a snag. Around this time, another journalist reveals that Dr. Cameron had another benefactor. Rao and his clients didn't know about. This other source of funding actually paid out even more than the CIA did. It was the Canadian government. The news is a devastating blow to the families involved. It's almost like they expected it of the CIA, but their own government. To make matters worse, Canada is no longer helping Rao with the lawsuit. The CIA threatens to bring up their involvement in court. Canada doesn't want to be sued too. It's a huge mess. In the end, the lawsuit takes eight long years. It may have dragged out even longer had a new CIA director not stepped in and forced a settlement. The agency agrees to a payout of about US$70,000 per person. Later, the Canadian government also pays a settlement to 77 people, though they do not admit fault. After Cameron left the Allen Memorial Institute, things changed. His successor actually ordered an impartial review to be carried out on Cameron's experiments. That team concluded that Cameron's methods were no more effective than any other treatments. And because some of his patients had ongoing problems with memory, even a decade later, Cameron's methods, they say, should never be used again. It turns out Dr. Cameron himself might have even agreed were he still around. He eventually admitted that his treatments never worked. During a keynote speech in 1963, he said that none of the shock treatments or psychic driving or induced comas, none of it, rid his patients of of their unwanted symptoms for good. I should also point out that his work did not prove successful at brainwashing or mind control either. I mean, other than making three women's arm muscles a little twitchy. Officially, MKULTRA never finds any effective way to control people's minds. But that doesn't mean Dr. Cameron's work isn't useful to the CIA. People will tell you there's some disturbing overlap in the techniques Cameron used on his patients and the techniques used by various governments in torture. In 1963, six years after Cameron signed his contract to accept federal funding, the CIA and the US army distribute a training manual. It's titled Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. Kubark being a CIA codename for itself, the document is a top secret guide to extracting information from resistant sources. The introduction calls it an aid for interrogators and others immediately concerned, and claims it is based largely upon published results of extensive research, including scientific inquiries conducted by specialists in closely related subjects. And it suggests using methods such as sensory deprivation. It even mentions experiments performed at McGill University, ostensibly by Dr. Cameron. I do want to point out that the Kubark manual says the conditions of his experiments were so different that they may not apply to interrogations. But not everyone is so sure about that. Over the next few years, techniques similar to Cameron's are allegedly used to torture people in Argentina, in Chile, and in Northern Ireland. In 1971, during the Troubles, the British army carries out Operation Demetrius to target those suspected of being in the Irish Republican army, the IRA. Over 340 people are pulled from their homes, rounded up and interred. 14 men are then transferred to a secret location where they are tortured. Their torment includes forms of sensory deprivation, like being forced to wear hoods. Hence they are now known as the hooded men. All 14 of them are eventually released without ever being convicted of a crime, and and many of them suffer for years afterward when their story comes out. People can't help but notice, these sensory deprivation methods. Sound familiar? They're like a sickening echo of Dr. Cameron's work in Montreal. Whether he'd anticipated it or not, some say Cameron laid the blueprint for torture. So why did Ewan Cameron do this in the first place? If he got to the point where he was willing to admit to his peers that his treatments didn't work, why keep doing them? Why inflict unnecessary pain, both immediate and lasting, on the very people he was supposed to be helping? Well, there is one theory to explain his motive. The doctor may have been highly decorated. He may have headed up every major psychiatric organization at one point or another. But there was one more honor he wanted. A Nobel Prize. It turns out that not all of Cameron's colleagues thought so highly of him. Dr. Donald Hebb, whose work in sensory deprivation unintentionally inspired Cameron, said Cameron only got all of his credentials due to office politics. Hebb goes so far as to say Cameron wasn't even a good researcher. I mean, honestly, the paper he published where he tried to mind control four women into moving their arm muscles is suspect, and not just because of what he's doing or who's funding him. Four participants is an incredibly small sample size. Even if he had gotten amazing results, that study would have been scrutinized. Its conclusions wouldn't stand on their own merit without a much larger follow up study. So why even put his patients through the agony? Some say the torment he inflicted still reverberates through the halls of the old Allen Memorial Institute. Though the building was repurposed, it is still in use by McGill University, and it's reportedly one of the most haunted places in Quebec. There are even claims of unmarked graves on site, and the university outright denies those claims. Officially, there are no more skeletons, real or metaphorical, to be found. The truth of what Dr. Cameron did, subsidized by MKUltra, is out in the open now. And that truth is more terrifying than the thought of any poor lost soul who might still be wandering the halls of the Alan. In the end, Cameron never got his Nobel Prize. But he did achieve the fame he was after. At the cost of human dignity and destroying dozens of lives. Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on instagram @the conspiracypod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Our sources for today's episode include Project Mind Control By John Lyle, CBC's podcast series Brainwashed and Eminent Monsters for the BBC. Until next time. Remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written and researched by Miki Taylor, edited by Justin Sayles, fact checked by Sophie Kemp, and engineered Video edited and sound designed by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, set up, required compatibility and availability varies.
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