Samiul Bashar Samin
The human psyche has always been of immeasurable interest to us since forever. And ofcourse, some crazy scientist would come up and try to start a mind control program. But in this case, the problem was that the scientist, or rather scientists were funded and aided by the government of one of the biggest superpowers in the world.
In 1953, the CIA commenced the MK Ultra project spearheaded by Sidney Gottlieb. The objective behind this entire project was to develop a method that could be used to control people’s mind. The idea was conceived as a weapon to use against The Soviet Union and North Korea as a response to the allegations that they were using mind control on prisoners from the US.
The CIA was interested in using these techniques in order to go as far as to even controlling world leaders. A glaring example would be when they tried to drug Fidel Castro who was the leader of then-communist Cuba. The people they experimented on would almost never have any say or consent in these experiments, which is a direct breach of their human rights.
One of the key elements in these experiments was the use of LSD. The synthetic drug was used with in succession on the test subjects who were usually prisoners or people who were committed to mental institutions. The basic idea was to target people who wouldn’t be able to expose these experiments. This then expanded to the general public as well.
These experiments would end up having long-term psychological effects on the test subjects and some would be driven insane by the constant use of drugs to brainwash and control their minds. Some would even commit suicide. There was also the case of the death of a scientist who was leading the program. According to conspiracy theories, he might have been experimented on and the killed by pushing him off the tenth floor of a building.
In 1973, the Director of the CIA Richard Helms destroyed all the files connecting the CIA to the MK Ultra, which was later admitted by the CIA. The number of people that were experimented on is still unknown and there are still victims who are trying to hold on their sanity and sometimes there lives in the aftermath of this program.
The cause for concern lies in the fact that it is still widely believed that the CIA is still conducting these experiments on the general public even now. I don’t even have to explain how scary the entire notion is. All we can do is hope that more information about how the MK Ultra translates to recent times is brought into light.