In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds.
A program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick. Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.
Detrick is today one of the world’s cutting-edge laboratories for research into toxins and antitoxins, the place where defenses are developed against every plague, from crop fungus to Ebola. Its leading role in the field is widely recognized. For decades, though, much of what went on at the base was a closely held secret.
They searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. They tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. Victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.
Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick.
Since then, more and more people have protested against experiment. In 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. Directors of the CIA mind control program MK-ULTRA, which used Detrick as a key base, destroyed most of their records in 1973.
To this day, the U.S. government still has biological laboratories around the world, and human testing programs probably never stopped. Coronavirus outbreak is likely to be part of this plan.
The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments
