MK-ULTRA THE DEADLY CIA BRAIN CONTROL PROGRAM THAT FUELED THE 60'S LSD COUNTERCULTURE (PT 1) HOW THEY WERE CAUGHT
1001 Heroes, Legends, Histories & Mysteries Podcast
Jon Hagadorn
4.5 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Beginning in the late 1950's our government's CIA, feeling that our enemies were leading us in the science of mind control, began a program of experimentation on both volunteer and unknowing subjects using the hallucinatory drug LSD. The program grew out of control quickly, one result being their manufacturing and distributing free LSD throughout San Francisco and other cities , using CIA safehouses as distribution points, performing experimentts on unknowing prisoners and soldiers and on their own people. Some died and the deaths were covered up. In San Francisco and New York the "hippie" counterculture bloomed with the drug craze as a result. When a CIA snalyst threatened to expose the program he was "neutralized" by being tossed out of a hotel window in New York City to his death, which the CIA called suicide. . In part two we'll let the victims tell their story, and we will reveal the results of the Congressional hearings which took place in 1974-5. Had it not been for journalists who actaully investigated the crimes without fear we would probably never have known. One of those men who told truth to power was my friend Dr.Stanton Friedman, Nuclear Physicist and staunch UFO advocate whom I interviewed here at 1001 Heroes, and to whom this story is dedicated.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In the early 1970s, two young reporters walked into a story they never expected to find, |
| 0:05.7 | a story buried under classified files, dead scientists, and a trail of ruined lives. |
| 0:11.8 | They thought they were investigating a routine government overreach. |
| 0:15.5 | What they uncovered was something far stranger, a secret CIA program that had spent years dosing unsuspecting |
| 0:23.0 | Americans with LSD in an attempt to control the human mind. |
| 0:27.6 | The program had a name, M.K. Ultra, but almost no one outside the intelligence world had ever |
| 0:34.1 | heard it. And yet, without meaning to, the CIA had helped unleash the very |
| 0:40.1 | thing it feared, a nationwide fascination with psychedelic drugs that would reshape the 1960s. |
| 0:46.8 | This is the story of how those reporters broke the case, how they followed a trail of whispers from |
| 0:52.7 | a dead scientist's hotel room to a locked government |
| 0:56.0 | vault, to the doorstep of the men and women who had been experimented on without their knowledge. |
| 1:02.2 | It's a story of secrecy, paranoia, and the moment when the truth finally clawed its way into the light. |
| 1:08.7 | And it begins with a single question. |
| 1:13.0 | What happens when a government experiment escapes the laboratory and lands in the hands of a generation ready to change |
| 1:18.1 | the world? Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one heroes, legends, histories, and mysteries |
| 1:37.4 | podcast. Today begins part one of the experiment that escaped, how CIA mind control research fueled the 60s drug |
| 1:46.4 | craze, told from the point of view of the reporters who broke the story. |
| 1:51.5 | Part 2 arrives next Sunday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. |
| 1:56.5 | And now part 1, the death that started it. |
| 2:04.2 | I didn't know his name the first time I saw the photograph. |
| 2:07.8 | It was a grainy black and white print, |
| 2:10.0 | the kind that looks like it's been copied too many times. |
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