“We have had religious revolutions, we have had political, industrial, economic, and nationalistic revolutions. All of them, as our descendants will discover, were but ripples in an ocean of conservatism — trivial by comparison with the psychological revolution toward which we are so rapidly moving. That will really be a revolution. When it is over, the human race will give no further trouble.”
— Aldous Huxley
MKULTRA remains probably the most famous, and least understood element of conspiracy theory research: first of all muddied by a bewildering variety of codenames and project titles, and then submerged under expanding conspiritainment industry, four points of order are useful to clarify from the outset: 1) In what follows, “MKULTRA” will be used as an umbrella term covering the various mind control projects (MKULTRA, MKOFTEN, MKSEARCH, MKNAOMI, MKDELTA, Project BLUEBIRD, Project ARTICHOKE, etc.) associated with the CIA between 1950-1975. 2) The CIA did not discover hypnotic and/or pharmacological mind control but built on a longer history of tactical ensorcellment. 3) Almost everything we know about MKULTRA is derived from ten boxes of leftover financial documents: the vast bulk of direct evidence was deliberately destroyed by the CIA, leaving the true scope of the operation unknown and impossible to determine. 4) Nearly all of the early researchers who exposed or contributed to the narrative around MKULTRA-type programs themselves had deep ties to the intelligence community.
In short, although the reality of MKULTRA has been “disclosed”, our real knowledge of it remains both limited and limiting. As CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner put it before the 1977 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the evidence does “not tell the story; they tell pieces of it.” What is nonetheless clear beyond doubt is that MKULTRA was not a minor subprogram launched by rogue CIA agents and a few eccentric scientists, but took place in the context of major human experimentation and psycho-chemical research project involving every branch of the US military and intelligence community as well as at least 44 universities, 15 private research facilities, 12 hospitals or clinics, and 3 penal institutions. Every department of the US military-scientific complex participated in the MKULTRA “mind control” project, and there are reasons to think that involvement continues unabated today. Read more…
