Rumor & Record
MEMORANDUM / FILE 100
MK
Ultra
In November 1953, ten government scientists sat down after dinner at a cabin on a Maryland lake. One of their hosts had spiked the liqueur with . Nine days later one of those scientists was dead, and his family would wait twenty-two years to learn he had been drugged.2
Declassify the hearing
0 of 8 declassifiedThese lines come from the 1977 Senate hearing where the CIA's own surviving records were read into the public record. The words are exact. We blacked out the key details. Tap each bar to declassify it.
SENATOR KENNEDY. The records of all these activities were , at the instruction of then CIA Director .
SENATOR KENNEDY. universities or institutions were involved.
SENATOR KENNEDY. Several of these tests involved the administration of to "."
ADMIRAL TURNER. I reported our recent discovery of related to Project MKULTRA…
ADMIRAL TURNER. The retired records of the of the Branch responsible for such work were not searched, however.
ADMIRAL TURNER. I did mention the operation in my statement, sir, and that is how these were carried out.
Source: Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, U.S. Senate, 1977. A U.S. government document in the public domain.1
A program to change minds
On April 13, 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved a new research program. Its code name was MKUltra, and its job was to find drugs and techniques that could change how a person thinks and behaves: truth serums, ways to break down resistance, perhaps ways to control a mind.3
The program was run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Over the next decade it funded work at more than 80 institutions, many of which never knew the money came from the CIA. The agency later counted 149 separate subprojects.13
Some of the research happened in labs with volunteers. Some did not. The program also gave drugs to people who had no idea they were part of an experiment.1
The man in the hotel window
Frank Olson was a 43-year-old army scientist and a father of three. In November 1953 he joined colleagues at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland. A CIA officer served an after-dinner liqueur he had spiked with LSD, without telling anyone.2
Olson fell into a deep depression. Nine days later, early on November 28, he went through a window high in New York's Hotel Statler and died on the street below.2
The truth came out in 1975, when a presidential commission investigating the CIA mentioned the case. President Ford met the Olson family at the White House and apologized, and Congress approved a $750,000 settlement.23
The family never accepted the official story that he jumped. They had his body exhumed in 1994 and argued he was killed. A wrongful-death suit they filed in 2012 was dismissed the next year.3
Burn the files
In January 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the MKUltra records destroyed.13 That should have been the end of the paper trail.
It wasn't. In 1977, a Freedom of Information request turned up about 20,000 pages that had survived because they were filed with the agency's financial records.3
That August, the Senate held a hearing on what the boxes showed. The CIA's own director read the numbers into the record.1
Montreal
One subproject ran in Canada. Starting in 1957, the CIA funded psychiatrist Ewen Cameron at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute through a front group called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.3
Cameron's patients had come for help with problems like anxiety and depression. His methods included long drug-induced sleeps, massive electroshock and repeated taped messages, an approach he called "psychic driving."3
The fight over it isn't over. In July 2025, a Quebec court authorized a class action by former patients and their families against the Canadian government, the Royal Victoria Hospital and McGill University.5
The paper trail
- Apr 13, 1953ApprovalCIA Director Allen Dulles approves MKUltra.3
- Nov 1953Deep Creek LakeFrank Olson is secretly dosed with LSD. He dies nine days later.2
- Jan 1957Subproject 68CIA-funded work begins at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal.3
- 1964MKSEARCHThe program continues under a new name into the early 1970s.3
- Jan 1973Destruction orderRichard Helms orders the MKUltra files destroyed.1
- 1975Commission reportsThe Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee make MKUltra public.3
- Jul 21, 1975White HousePresident Ford apologizes to the Olson family.2
- 1977FOIA releaseAbout 20,000 surviving pages turn up among financial records.3
- Aug 3, 1977Senate hearingThe CIA's director testifies: 149 subprojects, more than 80 institutions.1
- Jul 2025Quebec courtA class action by former Montreal patients is authorized.5
Host"They called it paranoia too"
For twenty years, anyone who said the CIA was drugging Americans was a crank. Then the receipts turned up. That's the lesson of MKUltra: the conspiracy theory was right, and the only reason we know is that someone forgot to shred the accounting files.1
And think about what's missing. Helms destroyed the reports on purpose.1 What we have is invoices. So when Whitey Bulger said he was given LSD in prison, or when people point to Ted Kaczynski's time in a Harvard study, nobody can prove them wrong.3 When a government burns the evidence, it doesn't get to say there's no evidence.
Host"The system caught it"
MKUltra isn't proof that every theory is true. It's proof that the record works. A presidential commission, a Senate committee, a reporter's records request and the CIA's own director put it on the public record, with names, numbers and an apology from a president.123
And it failed at its own goal. There's no evidence anyone was ever controlled, and the claims built on top of it, from secret assassin programs to the Bulger and Kaczynski links, have never been confirmed.3 The honest version is bad enough: real people were drugged and harmed. You don't need to add anything to it.
Rex and June are characters written for this site and appear in every file. They are not real people. Their arguments come from the sources listed below.
The receipts outlived the reports
The CIA destroyed MKUltra's research files on purpose. What survived were the boring ones: invoices, payment records and budget papers, stored in a different building under a different filing system.13
Almost everything the public knows about the program comes from accountants' paperwork. The reports describing what the experiments found are still gone.
What was MKUltra, really?
On film
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The file
Common questions
Was MKUltra real?
Yes. The CIA's own surviving records, released in the 1970s, and a 1977 Senate hearing confirmed it. It ran from 1953 into the early 1970s.
What was MKUltra trying to do?
Find drugs and techniques that could change how people think and behave, including truth serums and ways to break down resistance under interrogation.
Did MKUltra work?
There is no evidence it achieved mind control. The program's leader later described the effort as useless. It did harm real people, some of whom were drugged without their knowledge.
Who was Frank Olson?
An army scientist who was secretly given LSD by a CIA officer in November 1953 and died after a fall from a New York hotel window nine days later. In 1975 President Ford apologized to his family.
Is MKUltra still going?
There are no documents showing MKUltra continued after the early 1970s. Claims that it continues under other names have not been confirmed.
Other open files
Sources
- Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification (U.S. Senate joint hearing, August 3, 1977)
- Nov. 28, 1953: LSD and the death of a CIA scientist (ABA Journal)
- MKUltra (Wikipedia)
- Ottawa, McGill hospital argue MK-Ultra brainwashing lawsuit should be dismissed (Global News, 2024)
- A class action for victims of the MKULTRA program (Éducaloi, 2025)
Ancient Aliens
Stand in the Peruvian desert and you can't see them. Fly over it and you can: a hummingbird, a monkey, a condor longer than a football field. Drawn for whom?
Open file 005Photo credits: MKUltra document page, Central Intelligence Agency (public domain); Richard Helms, Yoichi Okamoto (public domain); Allan Memorial Institute, Thomas1313 (CC BY-SA 3.0). Full list on the credits page.