Article · Geopolitics · Conspiracies
The CIA director told the Senate himself: 149 covert projects, 80 institutions, people who never knew
Yes, it happened. On 3 August 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified under oath before the US Senate about MKUltra, a twenty-year program in which people were given LSD, electroshock, hypnosis and sensory deprivation without their knowledge or consent. This is confirmed not by speculation but by the CIA director's own sworn testimony and seven boxes of documents that accidentally survived a 1973 records purge.
Until 1977, MKUltra was what we would now call a conspiracy theory: rumors of CIA experiments with mind-altering substances, with no official confirmation. In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most of the program's files destroyed. The program would have stayed unconfirmed, if not for a filing error.