On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we put on our tinfoil hats and explore the conspiracy theory of MK Ultra. It turns out it wasn’t a conspiracy theory, so much as a conspiracy fact. MK Ultra was the CIA’s illegal attempt at behavior modification and mind control which officially ran from 1953 until 1973. Some say it is still running under a different name, but the official party line is that it was disbanded in the paranoid wake of the Watergate tapes.

The fact that MK Ultra existed is incontrovertible and involved three senate hearings, a freedom of information act release that included 20,000 pages of documents about the CIA’s secret funding, and multiple reports filed by senate subcommittees and even the office of veteran’s affairs.

So what did MK Ultra involve? The CIA funded experiments on various ways to control minds, alter perceptions, and get inside of people’s heads. They did this at 87 American universities, often without the knowledge of the subjects or the scientists (who didn’t know their funding was coming from the CIA). MK Ultra used LSD as a way to break people down, often dosing American citizens with the drug without their consent or knowledge through projects such as the accurately named Project Midnight Climax which used prostitutes to deliver the drugs in San Francisco.

MK Ultra used a doctor named Donald Cameron who was president of the World Psychiatric Health Organization to work on a technique called Psychic Driving. What did it involve? Induced paralysis and then an audio loop that played thousands of times to try and break a patient’s personality down and replace it. Oh, and the patients were coming to him for things like post mortem depression and anxiety and had no idea this was being done to them!

Find out about Subproject 54, which was a Naval Research project involving amnesia, and the case of Frank Olson. Olson (a biochemist employed by the CIA) was thought to have committed suicide in 1953, but an autopsy in 1994 that he was murdered with a blow to the head after being dosed with LSD. All of this is true, provable with congressional documents, and completely nuts.

Of course, it gets crazier when the tin foil does come out, and a woman named Cathleen Ann O'Brien reveals details about an alleged MK Ultra subproject called Project Monarch. It involves George Bush, holograms, and lizard people. Oh, and it also involves Shia LaBeouf, Roseanne Barr, and Michael Jackson. No. I’m not kidding...