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"When it’s easier to blame a conspiracy about mind control than it is to face our political differences then something is very wrong"

Thomas HobbsCultureMay 9, 2019 1:00 AMThe conspiracy theorists convinced celebrities are under mind control"When it’s easier to blame a conspiracy about mind control than it is to face our political differences then something is very wrong"CommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyChristopher Polk / Getty Images / WIREDWhen rapper Cardi B unexpectedly stared into space during a red carpet interview at the 2018 Grammys, the internet didn’t blame it on exhaustion or nerves. No: according to some sections of the web, this lapse in concentration was a clear sign that she was the victim of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control program; the bizarre blank expression on her face was evidence of a “glitch” in her programming.MK-Ultra is a wild conspiracy theory that has infiltrated certain corners of the internet. Its believers are convinced that whenever a celebrity or politician acts strangely on camera, they aren’t just nervous or butchering their lines, but are victims of a top secret mind control division of the US government.The conspiracy theory extends to more sinister acts as well, and is often referenced in combination with other conspiracy theories: there are dozens of Reddit threads suggesting the gunmen behind attacks including Sandy Hook and Columbine were not terrorists or fanatics but rather “MK-Ultra puppets” conducted by sinister forces to carry out these atrocities.Perhaps one of the reasons the MK-Ultra conspiracy theory is so compelling to its believers is that its roots are surprisingly grounded in reality. If I were to tell you the CIA carried out brain surgery on six dogs, putting electric chips in their craniums so they could be controlled by remote controls that made them run, turn and stop, or that it experimented on American citizens with high doses of LSD in a bid to see if they could “de-pattern” their thoughts and turn them into “robot agents” triggered by key words – an experiment which was disproportionately carried out on mental health patients, prisoners, drug addicts and sex workers as they were "people who could not fight back," according to one government agent – you’d probably assume I’d been reading too much science fiction. But declassified CIA documents show these things really did happen under a program that was in fact called MK-Ultra, right up until the early 1970s when it was officially halted.Founded in 1953, MK-Ultra was seen by CIA director Allen W. Dulles as a way to study mind control, which he wanted to weaponise against the Soviet Union to gain a critical edge in the Cold War. With communism at its height, the CIA was disturbed by reports that American prisoners had been turned into communist allies, and believed this was evidence they had been manipulated or even hypnotised under questioning. The agency poured millions of dollars into studies examining ways to influence and control the mind and to enhance its ability to extract information from resistant subjects during interrogation. As part of this research, testing with psychedelic drugs such as LSD was common.According to government scientist Dr Russell Monroe, who spoke to ABC news in 1979, the CIA was looking for “an incapacitating agent; an agent that would not harm permanently but incapacitate temporarily. [Mind control] was a humanistic way to wage a war.” But even if the CIA was convinced it was operating in the national interest, its methods were brutal. In one case, a mental health patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. In total, the agency conducted 149 separate mind control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects, according to the New York Times, which says documents show at least one participant died. Others suffered long-term health issues, including amnesia, as a result of these tests.The government paid compensation to the family of Jean Steel, one of many MK-Ultra human guinea pigs that the infamous Dr. Ewen Cameron experimented on at the Allen Memorial Institute building at McGill University in Montreal, with a settlement of $100,000 in 2017. Her daughter, Alison, told the media: “My mother was never again able to really function as a healthy human being because of what they did to her.”“MK-Ultra sounds so cartoonish, almost like the dastardly scheme of a Bond villain,” Michael Wood, a lecturer at the University of Winchester’s Department of Psychology, says, “but its origins are based on verifiable facts and that gives it an uncomfortable edge.”Wood credits the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, which is about a soldier manipulated by mind control into killing a politician, for bringing MK-Ultra out of the shadows and into pop culture folklore. This, he says, has been further propagated by the internet and modern-day references in TV series such as Stranger Things (where it’s referenced by the scientists responsible for creating Eleven, a character with telekinetic abilities) and films such as the Jesse Eisenberg-starr...