The CIA

Summary

Project Mind Control

Episode: The CIA

Host: Dr. Julia Shaw (Always True Crime)
Date: April 7, 2026

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Overview

This chilling episode of Project Mind Control, hosted by Dr. Julia Shaw, delves into the secretive world of CIA-funded mind control experiments, with a focus on the notorious Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal and the infamous psychiatrist Dr. Ewan Cameron. The narrative traces the personal story of survivor Lana Ponting, explores the motivations and methods behind the CIA’s MKUltra project, and investigates the widespread, often devastating consequences of these covert experiments on individuals and families.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Origins of CIA Interest in Mind Control (02:48 – 06:54)

• In 1951, a high-level secret meeting in Montreal (Ritz Carlton Hotel) outlined the plan to create a brainwashing and mind control research center in Canada, attended by officials from Canada, the UK, and two representatives from the CIA.
• The official aim: research into "confession, menticide, intervention in the individual mind... psychological coercion, change of opinions and attitude."
• Dr. Ewan Cameron, although central later, was absent from this initial meeting, suggesting he might not have initially known about CIA involvement in his research.
• Quote:
  "The minutes of this meeting show that Canada was about to establish a major brainwashing and mind control research center for the CIA." — Dr. Julia Shaw (03:43)

Enter Dr. Ewan Cameron and MKUltra (05:03 – 14:37)

• MKUltra (1953-1964): The CIA’s umbrella project for mind control research, involving 149 sub-projects, many on hypnosis, drugs, sleep research, and behavioral change.
• Dr. Cameron was heavily funded by the CIA via a front group (Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology), often without his knowledge of their involvement.
• His "heteropsychic driving" experiments involved breaking down and attempting to reconstruct subjects’ minds, often through electroshocks, intense drug regimens (notably LSD), and sleep deprivation.
• They targeted vulnerable populations, including children and psychiatric patients, often without consent.
• Quote:
  "He was able to operate with absolutely no controls, no worry about patient consent or even family consent, to what he was up to. Very much an authority figure." — Professor Andrew Scull (09:54)

Experimental Methods and CIA Secrecy (09:42 – 14:17)

• Front organizations masked CIA funding; most researchers, including Cameron, likely unaware of ultimate funding sources.
• MKUltra prioritized tests on unwitting subjects—often patients unable to give informed consent—using drugs like LSD, leading to unpredictable and sometimes tragic outcomes.
• The scope of research included not just drugs but techniques like hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and “depatterning” therapy.
• Quote:
  "Still, can you imagine finding out that the research you've been doing was funded so it could one day be weaponized by the CIA?" — Dr. Julia Shaw (11:12)

Notorious LSD Experimentation and Tragedy (14:37 – 19:47)

• The case of Frank Olson—a scientist dosed with LSD by CIA colleagues and later dying after apparently jumping from a hotel window—became emblematic of MKUltra’s dangers and secrecy.
• The CIA acknowledged their own experiments were often chaotic, unscientific, and ethically indefensible.
• Further experiments dosed not only agency staff but also unsuspecting members of the public, including heroin addicts and psychiatric patients, with little scientific oversight.
• Notable Moment:
  The retelling of Olson’s story underscores both the reckless culture within parts of the CIA and the utter disregard for subjects’ welfare.

Global Reach and Influence (21:38 – 24:26)

• The MKUltra program had international tendrils, supporting similar research across 86 universities and institutions—with projects paralleling or inspired by Dr. Cameron’s methods.
• British psychiatrist William Sargent, a contemporary and friend of Cameron, led similar experiments in the UK, notably using insulin coma therapy and drug-induced “sleep rooms” on patients.
• The 1977 MKUltra committee report cited Sargent’s techniques as valuable for interrogation, not because they compelled truth, but because of the confusion and false confessions induced.
• Quote:
  "William Sargent, arguably the leading British psychiatrist after WWII… used insulin coma therapy… the Sleep room… the same kind of thing that Dr. Cameron was doing." — Professor Andrew Scull (22:49)

The Human Cost and Survivors’ Testimonies (24:52 – 32:02)

• The Bedard Commission (Quebec, 1960) found the Allan Institute used more electroshocks than any other facility, 12,000 ECTs in one year for just 1,000 patients (25:02).

• Patient experiences: Survivors like Lana Ponting and Val Orlico describe enduring shame, secrecy, family consequences, and lifelong trauma.

• Dr. Cameron himself, later in his career, began expressing regret and discomfort with his work, yet could not let go of his theories.

  • Quote (as Dr. Cameron, voice actor):
    "I felt that I was being unkind, insensitive, imperceptive, that in a word one simply didn't do this sort of thing to people." (26:05)

• Successors and medical officials often failed to acknowledge the harm, instead citing strains on staff as the main difficulty.

  • Quote:
    "I wouldn't call it harsh. I would say it was harder on the staff than it was on the patients..." — Dr. Cameron's successor, Robert Cleghorn (28:45)

• Lana Ponting on living with the secret:

  • "I never told anyone I was in the Allan all my life. I never told anyone because I thought if I tell people that happened to me, they're going to look at me and say, well, you're a crazy person." (31:07)

• The intergenerational impact is highlighted by relatives of survivors (like Alyssa), who grapple with suspicions about what was done to family members.

The Ongoing Struggle for Truth (27:14 – End)

• Vital records and experimental data were systematically destroyed or redacted by the CIA, often only coming to public light through patient lawsuits and freedom of information efforts in the 1970s and 80s.
• Survivors and advocates continue to shine light on these crimes, despite persistent skepticism and disbelief from the public.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Professor Andrew Scull:
  "What they did ruined lives, killed people, damaged people beyond repair and there was enough accumulating evidence that somebody should have stepped in and said stop, stop." (04:31)

• Dr. Julia Shaw:
  "The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions. So they created MK Ultra in order to secretly fund research on mind control." (08:38)

• Lana Ponting:
  "Except Dr. Cameron once gave me a shot of LSD. It's in my records. LSD does not kill people, but the effects from it are bad, really bad." (14:17)

• Alyssa:
  "Most people, as soon as you say the word CIA, you know, the fingers go in the ear and you go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not. This is ridiculous. Certainly this is a conspiracy theory, right? Like, this can't be real." (32:02)

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Critical Timestamps

• 02:48 – The secret 1951 Montreal meeting and CIA involvement
• 05:03 – MKUltra’s creation and scope outlined
• 09:42 – How the CIA covertly funded Dr. Cameron’s work
• 12:33-13:11 – LSD’s effects illustrated via British military experiment
• 14:43-19:47 – The Frank Olson case and the consequences of secret dosing
• 22:39-23:05 – Similarities between Dr. Cameron’s and Dr. Sargent’s UK work
• 25:02 – Quebec’s Bedard Commission and staggering ECT statistics
• 26:05-26:24 – Excerpts from Dr. Cameron’s later expressions of regret
• 28:45 – Dr. Cameron’s successor minimizes harm to patients
• 31:07-31:34 – Lana Ponting on the secrecy and stigma
• 32:02 – Family perspectives and suspicions about CIA-funded treatment legacies

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Episode Tone & Closing Reflections

The episode maintains a somber, investigative tone, amplified by both survivor testimonies and the clinical detachment of official sources. Dr. Julia Shaw’s narration is compassionate yet rigorous, never sensationalizing but allowing the horrific facts and personal impacts to stand on their own. The voices of survivors like Lana Ponting echo as a demand for truth, recognition, and historical accountability for these still-unfolding crimes.

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Next Episode Preview

• The next episode promises to investigate Dr. Heinz Lehmann, a contemporary of Cameron, and the rise of so-called “chemical lobotomy”—foreshadowing further exploration of medical abuses justified as scientific progress.

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For listeners: Project Mind Control courageously illuminates a hidden history of power, secrecy, and suffering—a must-listen for those interested in the dark intersections of psychology, crime, and government secrecy.

Transcript

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[Dr. Julia Shaw]

warning this series includes discussion of inhumane medical experimentation, including on children, violence, sexual assault, abuse of children and cultural genocide. On June 1, 1951, a secret, high level meeting took place at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal. In attendance were eight people. They included the Chairman of Canada's Defence Research Board which funded experiments at the Allen, a psychiatrist working at the Allen, and the Chairman of psychology at McGill. There was also a representative from Defence Research in the UK and two CIA officials. The official purpose of the meeting was research into the general phenomena indicated by such terms as confession, menticide, intervention in the individual mind, together with methods concerned in psychological coercion, change of opinions and attitude, etc. Menticide. In other words, the killing or breaking down of the mind. The minutes of this meeting show that Canada was about to establish a major brainwashing and mind control research center for the CIA. Dr. Ewan Cameron was not at this meeting. In fact, while he was pulling the strings at the Allen, he may not have been aware of who was pulling

[Professor Andrew Scull]

his what they did ruined lives, killed people, damaged people beyond repair and there was enough accumulating evidence that somebody should have stepped in and said stop, stop.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

We explore just how far the obsession with mind control went and I'm wondering

[Lana Ponting]

why did they get involved? What was their purpose of getting involved with Dr. Cameron? What was Dr. Cameron up to with

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

the CIA and whether the researchers involved had any idea who they were really working with? I'm Dr. Julia Shaw and this is Project Mind Control. MKUltra was the umbrella term for a series of experiments and other research run by the CIA between 1953 and 1964. After mounting concerns regarding the nature of this research, there was an investigation in 1975 followed by a select committee hearing in 1977 where senior members of the CIA were interviewed. The whole thing was framed as a fact finding review so that new legally binding guidelines could be developed that would prevent the same kinds of abuses from happening in the future. They wrote a report which summarized what they found. According to the report, MK Ultra had sub projects, 149 of them. Some of them were rather unorthodox on hypnosis and lie detection and aspects of magician's art, useful in covert operations. Others were pretty standard, including subprojects listed as library searches. There was also one category which sounded awfully familiar. Nine sub projects on in quotes, studies of human behavior, sleep research, and behavior changes during psychotherapy. One of them involved Dr. Cameron's work. Sub project 68.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

Cameron was an interesting figure.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

That's sociological historian Professor Andrew Scull.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

He practiced in Montreal and we now know as a result of lawsuits that he was heavily funded by the CIA.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Records show that the CIA funded Dr. Ewan Cameron's work at McGill University from 1957 until at least 1960.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

One of the things that, particularly after the Korean War, much exercised the intelligence services here in Britain, and especially the CIA in America, was the phenomenon of brainwashing, the idea that you could completely transform somebody's mental state via various kinds of interventions.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

In the 1950s, there was a widespread fear that the Communists had discovered and deployed mind control. If the enemy knew something the US didn't, it was crucial for the US to catch up. As the chief of the medical staff of the CIA wrote in 1952, There is ample evidence in the reports of innumerable interrogations that the Communists were utilizing drugs, physical duress, electric shock, and possibly hypnosis against their enemies. We are forced by this mounting evidence to assume a more aggressive role in the development of these techniques. There was also the sentiment that rather than torturing people for information, wouldn't it be better if you could just drug them? Or rather than shooting down the enemy, wouldn't it be amazing if you could just control their minds and so they walked off the battlefield freely? Still, it was decided that studying how to crawl into people's minds and control them like marionettes would be unpalatable. As the CIA's inspector general wrote in 1957, Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces, but but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions. So they created MK Ultra in order to secretly fund research on mind control. And when it came to it, who better to fund than Dr. Cameron? A grant was assigned to him for research on his heteropsychic driving experiments.

[Lana Ponting]

You're a good girl. You're a good girl. You're a good girl. You're a good girl.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The godlike power that came from his international renown was also an obvious plus.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

And the thing about Cameron was that because he was able to operate with absolutely no controls, no worry about patient consent or even family consent, to what he was up to. Very much an authority figure.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Still, the CIA is a clandestine organization. How exactly does someone, anyone, get funded by the CIA? When the CIA decided they wanted to get into studying mind control, one of the things they did was set up a public facing front for an organization that dispersed grants called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Then it seems they invited McGill to apply and they got the grant. This also happens to be after the Ritz Carlton meeting in 1951, which for those in the know, as written in what looks like to be an internal CIA memorandum, there was guidance that Dr. Cameron and his staff must remain unaware of the government's interest in his work. In fact, CIA staff were expressly told not to visit or contact Dr. Cameron except under extreme circumstances. So it looks like, at the very least, Dr. Cameron wasn't told that he was being funded by the CIA. This helps explain why he continued to publish his research as usual in academic outlets. These weren't secret experiments as much as secretly funded experiments. Still, can you imagine finding out that the research you've been doing was funded so it could one day be weaponized by the CIA? The grant also stipulated that Dr. Cameron had to search for chemical agents, in other words, drugs that would change people's behavior. One of the drugs they specifically required him to test is one that we've heard mentioned before, lsd. Today, LSD is sometimes used as a recreational drug. When it was discovered after World War II, it quickly caught the interest of the military. And from the beginning the experiments always had unexpected results. Like this study conducted in the uk where Royal Marines were given LSD before being asked to complete a training exercise somewhere in a forest.

[Documentary Narrator]

The movements for the rocket launching team have become slow and uncoordinated and it is apparent that they are now incapable of taking proper aim.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This video was posted on the Imperial War Museum website entitled A Trial of an Incapacitating Drug. It shows a Marine grinning and swaying with a rocket launcher.

[Documentary Narrator]

Men with no specific task to perform have relapsed into laughter and inconsequential behavior, though they are still capable of sustained physical effort.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Now one man is shown lying down in the forest against the base of a tree trunk, laughing hysterically.

[Documentary Narrator]

Seventy minutes after the administration of the drug, with one man climbing a tree, the troop commander gives up, saying, I cannot do anything about this. I cannot control the men and I can take no action myself. I am wiped out as an attacking force.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

But people have very different reactions to lsd.

[Lana Ponting]

And the next thing I knew, I was put into A room. And the next thing I knew I was given drugs in the arm. It was probably lsd.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

That's Lana Ponting. We don't know whether she was part of Dr. Cameron's MKUltra funded work or if she was just a patient of his receiving his personal cocktail of treatments. But we do know that MK Ultra was predominantly focused on research related to behavioral drugs, specifically on lsd. And that research using these drugs involved tests on unwitting subjects.

[Lana Ponting]

Except Dr. Cameron once gave me a shot of LSD. It's in my records. LSD does not kill people, but the effects from it are bad, really bad.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Here's a clip from a 1979 ABC News documentary, Mission Mind Control.

[Mission Mind Control Documentary Host]

The best known case is that of this man, Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the Army Chemical Corps.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

On screen we see black and white portraits of him. He looks to be about 40.

[Mission Mind Control Documentary Host]

He ended his life at this New York hotel by diving through a shaded closed window in his 10th floor room. Frank Olson was the first known fatality in the CIA's LSD program.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

In the public imagination, his story became emblematic of the kinds of wild things the CIA was getting up to. Here is the CIA's version of events. On 19 November 1953, a group of tens of scientists attended a conference at a cabin located at Deep Creek Lake in Maryland. These weren't your typical scientists. All of them were affiliated either with the CIA or the Army. On the second day of the conference, after dinner Cointreau, a liquor was served to the attendees. About 20 minutes after they finished their control, one of the men, Dr. Gottlieb, informed the others that they had just been given lsd. It was, he would later say, a very small amount and that they were all now part of an experiment. Dr. Gottlieb was one of the people in charge of MKUltra and he said that the drug had a definite effect on the group to the point that they were boisterous and laughing and they could not continue the meeting or engage in sensible conversation. The men were giggling and a bit chaotic. Some of them struggled to sleep that night, but there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about their demeanor. But a few days later Dr. Olson's friends and family began to worry because he appeared to fall into serious depression. Then he became paranoid. It was relayed to the CIA that he was in serious trouble and needed immediate professional attention. Where do you take a man who knows a lot of classified information and is having a mental breakdown? Two of Dr. Olson's colleagues from the CIA took him from Washington to a doctor in New York, someone familiar with LSD and importantly, a doctor with CIA clearance. His two CIA colleagues stayed with him while he was unwell. A couple of days later, on the 26th of November 1953, they all flew back to Washington with Olson so that he could spend Thanksgiving with his family. But as soon as they landed, Dr. Olson changed his mind. He was suddenly afraid to face his family. One of his colleagues agreed to do a U turn and flew back with him to New York to go back to the doctor, who then said that he should be placed in regular psychiatric care. Closer to home in Washington, they couldn't get plane tickets for the same evening, so they had to check into a hotel that night. In the middle of the night, the police were called out to the Statler Hotel because, according to the colleague who was there, Dr. Olson crashed through the closed window of his room and fell to his death from the 10th floor. His death would be called in official documentation, the most tragic result of the testing of LLSD by the CIA.

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[Dr. Julia Shaw]

When MK Ultra first became publicly known because the government released the information in 1975, this LSD related death of Dr. Frank Olson stunned the public. There were more of these kinds of mini experiments conducted by the CIA itself that felt more like dark pranks by frat boys than a genuine desire to develop mind control. Sometimes these experiments were on members of the CIA like Dr. Olson. Other times they were on unsuspecting members of the public, like one where heroin addicts were enticed into taking LSD to get a reward. Heroin. Did all this shady and unethical testing at least lead to some useful insights? Unfortunately, not really. Even the CIA acknowledged that the tests made little scientific sense, that the agents doing the monitoring were not qualified scientific observers, and in some instances, the test subjects became so ill that follow up was impossible. Still, it seems that comparatively few people were tested like this by the CIA directly. Almost all of the research done in the context of the MKUltra program was via the funding of 185 non governmental researchers at 86 universities and institutions around the world. And when it all came out in the 1970s, the CIA had to call up the universities and inform them that they had been part of MK ultra.

[Alyssa]

So I guess that leads the question of, you know, like, were these all influenced by Dr. Cameron?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

That's Alyssa, whose mother underwent similar treatments under one of Dr. Cameron's contemporaries.

[Alyssa]

If they were copycat things, well does that make the CIA responsible for all of the copycats that happened?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

In other words, did the CIA's funding of research by Dr. Cameron mean that other researchers started to test the same priority problematic ideas? It actually seems to be the other way around. The CIA mostly funded existing research on ideas that were already widespread and might well have continued being researched even if MK ULTRA had never existed. So while researchers within the CIA were spiking each other's drinks with tragic consequences, mind control experiments were happening around the world.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

I worked on Sargent's paper as Sargent being the English equivalent of Cameron and a great friend of Cameron's.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

That's historian Dr. Andrew Scull.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

William Sargent, who was arguably the leading, certainly the most famous British psychiatrist after World War II and a good friend of Ewan Cameron. In Canada, Sargent used insulin coma therapy.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

William Sargent worked at the Royal Waterloo Hospital in the UK where he was in charge of the Psychiatric Unit Ward 5. As part of the unit there was something called the Sleep room where women were put into drug induced comas for long periods of time. It was the same kind of thing that Dr. Cameron was doing. Like Cameron, he also published articles, including one published in 1951 where he wrote about how he wanted to bring about rapid changes in an individual's beliefs and actions. Dr. Sargent's work is directly cited and described in the MK Ultra Committee report. It states that his techniques had direct potential use for interrogations. Not because his techniques made people tell the truth, rather because people felt like they talked a lot while they were drugged and believed that they had already confessed and told all their secrets. So when they came to, it could be easier for the army to actually, for the first time extract their genuine confessions. Dr. Andrew Scull has recently spent a lot of time going through Dr. Sargent's files for a book called the Sleep Room.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

When I worked on them, I was warned by one of his former assistants that they'd been heavily redacted and it was clear that they had been. I think they were destroyed because the records would have been deeply damaging to the reputation of Sergeant or in this case to Cameron.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

In 1960 the Minister of Health for Quebec formed the Bedard Commission in order to investigate the state of Quebec's mental hospitals. It found that the Allen Memorial Institute used more electroshocks than any other facility in 1961. Over the course of one year, 12,000 ECTs were administered to just 1,000 patients. At a meeting of the American psychopathological association in 1963, even Dr. Cameron was more self critical.

[Dr. Ewan Cameron (voice actor)]

He said at this point, as so often happens in a long research, we took a wrong turning and continued to walk without a glint of success for a long, long time.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

In response to his hypothesis that he could de pattern and re pattern people's

[Dr. Ewan Cameron (voice actor)]

minds, there seemed no answer to the question. So I repeated this procedure with all the other patients I had in psychotherapy and got much the same thing. Discomfort, aversion, embarrassment and resentment.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The patients hated him and he started to be ashamed of his work.

[Dr. Ewan Cameron (voice actor)]

And indeed I even noticed in myself a reluctance to do this. I felt that I was being unkind, insensitive, imperceptive, that in a word one simply didn't do this sort of thing to people.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And yet he wouldn't let go of his pet theory.

[Dr. Ewan Cameron (voice actor)]

For these reasons, namely the patient's feelings and my own, I felt increasingly sure that there must be something of importance lying hidden.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

His failures, he counterintuitively saw as proof that he needed to keep going. For if he was wrong, all this suffering, all his work would have been in vain. But then, in 1964, Cameron abruptly resigned

[Professor Andrew Scull]

from his post at McGill and moved before the connections to the CIA were exposed. And he died not long after that.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

During the official investigations into MKUltra in 1975, the investigators were told that most of the files had either been destroyed or heavily redacted because of an internal CIA request in 1973. Other files the CIA claimed never existed or were destroyed closer to when they were written. But seven additional boxes of documents were then found in the Budget and Fiscal section of the Retired Records Archive. They revealed names of people and institutions. These new documents were included in the 1977 report and details continued to slowly make their way into public knowledge, often through considerable effort, repeated freedom of information requests and class action lawsuits.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

It took a lot of complaints from patients and patients, relatives, people whose relations lives had been completely destroyed by what Cameron had done to them before. Some of what had occurred spilled out into daylight.

[Mission Mind Control Documentary Host]

In retrospect, does Dr. Cameron's experimentation and his treatment appear harsh.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

This clip is from Mission Mind Control, and the host of the documentary is speaking to Dr. Cameron's successor, Robert Cleghorn.

[Mission Mind Control Documentary Host]

I wouldn't call it harsh. I would say it was harder on the staff than it was on the patients because these people had to be fed and they had to be cared for and they had to be given sufficient fluid and food and toileted and so on and so forth. It was a very difficult thing for the staff to, to follow these patients properly and see that they, they did well. Well, I'm glad he was concerned for the staff.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

That is Val Orlico, one of Dr. Cameron's former patients.

[Alyssa]

But damn it all, I, I wouldn't, I, I, I could have maybe had

[Mission Mind Control Documentary Host]

a different kind of life.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

And that makes me angry and sad

[Documentary Narrator]

and I don't know how to explain

[Mission Mind Control Documentary Host]

how I feel, really.

[Lana Ponting]

I heard about it and I thought, I can see the CIA being involved in something like this. Yes, I can. And I'm wondering, why did they get involved? What was their purpose of getting involved with Dr. Cameron? What was Dr. Cameron up to with the CIA? He learned brainwashing techniques from them. That's what he was doing.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The fact that Lana is still here to tell the story of what happened to her all those years ago as a witness of the past, is astonishing.

[Lana Ponting]

I met a, A nice man. He was in the Navy. We had two beautiful children, and I have four beautiful grandchildren. So I have a happy life now, as happy as it can be. My, my son and daughter do not know the full truth of what happened to me because I don't think they could handle it. You know, when people do something like that to their mother, who could handle that?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

For decades after leaving the Allen, she kept what happened to her a secret.

[Lana Ponting]

I never told anyone I was in the Allen all my life. I never told anyone because I thought if I tell people that happened to me, they're going to look at me and say, well, you're a crazy person. And how do you explain to people what happened to you? How do you explain that? How would I explain it to you?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Lana kept this secret from her parents and siblings, from her husband, and from her two children, and she lived a relatively normal life.

[Lana Ponting]

I tried to live my life as normal as I could.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Lana Ponting is one of the last remaining survivors of Dr. Cameron's interventions. And it's not just the patients themselves who were affected by the work of Dr. Cameron and his contemporaries.

[Alyssa]

Most people, as soon as you say the word CIA, you know, the fingers go in the ear and you go,

[Lana Ponting]

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Alyssa]

I'm not. This is ridiculous. Certainly this is a conspiracy theory, right? Like, this can't be real. But because I was doing research and it came up as part of it, all of a sudden I was like, faced with it and then it was like, oh, gee. And I did the math and I thought, hmm, that's interesting. It sounds a lot like what happened to my mother.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

Next time on Project Mind Control.

[Alyssa]

Then the story goes, my mother's marks went from straight A's to like, failing. Everything sort of fell to shit. Pardon me. And she threatened to jump out the dorm room window. At Victoria College, at McGill, we meet

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

a contemporary of Dr. Cameron, the man who developed something he proudly called a chemical lobotomy. Dr. Heinz Lehmann.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

He gets a supply of these drugs and he starts experimenting on his patients. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose. And when they don't respond, he doubles the dose again.

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

I'm Dr. Julia Shaw. Project Mind Control was presented by me and written by me and my producer Simone Arratta. The executive producers are Elsa Rochester and Louisa Adams. Sound design by Craig Edmondson. The words of Dr. Cameron were read by Paul Livingston. Project Mind Control is an always true crime. Production.

[Tim Spengler]

Leadership used to mean having all the answers. But today's best leaders embody a more human approach.

[Jack Myers]

I'm Jack Myers.

[Tim Spengler]

And I'm Tim Spengler.

[Jack Myers]

Tim and I have spent our careers inside media, marketing and culture and we

[Tim Spengler]

partnered with the Acast Creator Network to start Lead Human to answer one simple question. What does it really look like to lead in this AI dominated world?

[Dr. Julia Shaw]

The biggest tip for being a creator. It's a job. What I learned from Michael Jackson.

[Professor Andrew Scull]

Here's a man who understands precision.

[Jack Myers]

It's about answering the questions that are hard, not about answering a bunch of teed up questions that are fake.

[Tim Spengler]

What we're looking for are real stories and practical advice that you can use with your teams right away.

[Jack Myers]

Subscribe to Lead Human with Jack Myers and Tim Spengler wherever you get your podcasts.

[Acast Announcer]

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[Farnoosh Torabi]

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[Acast Announcer]

ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com

[Always True Crime Announcer]

want more true Crime this podcast and loads more are part of the Always True Crime network. It's packed with box sets to binge and twisted tales you won't find anywhere else. Find your next podcast obsession at Always True crime dot com.