10 Creepiest Government Secrets

1. The CIA's LSD Experiments On Unsuspecting Citizens

If this doesn't peeve you and creep you out, you may not be human. Under Project MKULTRA, the CIA began experimenting on the behavioral engineering of human beings, using a variety of catalysts, including illicit drugs like LSD. This program was the follow-up to Project Artichoke, which involved experiments with mind control.

In this case, the CIA doped unsuspecting Canadian citizens (the Canadian government had allowed the agency to operate within its borders) in secret in the late 50s and early 60s, leading to lawsuits in the 1980s involving a CIA funded doctor on the project, Donald Cameron. Not one to want to leave out its own populous, the CIA also began administering LSD to U.S. mental patients in secret, with the hopes of uncovering mind control techniques and truth serums. In a related project, MKDELTA, they doped citizens of foreign nations.

The doping became even more devious and illegal as the project went on. In one related operation, agents set up brothels in San Francisco with one-way mirrors, doped unsuspecting clients, and filmed the results for later study (you know guys, these days folks do drugs and have sex willingly, so you know, search the net a little). Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who headed MKULTRA, decided LSD might be used in covert ops, and also began feeding it to citizens in "normal" situations.

Eventually, the government decided LSD wasn't as beneficial as hoped - but not before they'd cooked a up large number of more powerful hallucinogens of their own. Other drugs (including heroin and MDMA) were tried as well, as well as hypnosis, all against unsuspecting citizens. After the Watergate scandal, however, CIA director Robert Helms ordered all the MKULTRA files destroyed. What wasn't destroyed was heavily censored, though some was eventually released; investigations into the illegal activities relied on the testimony of those involved.

A 1984 report by the General Accounting Office estimated thousands of citizens were experimented on with dangerous substances without their knowledge. At least one death was connected to the experiments, that of Frank Olson, a biological weapons researcher, in 1953. Olson had recently quit his position as acting chief of the Special Operations Division at Detrick, Maryland, and was seen as a risk to divulge state secrets. He was dosed with LSD without his knowledge or consent and later fell to his death from thirteen stories up.

A CIA doctor who was supposed to monitor Olson claimed to have been asleep when Olson went out the window. The agency was reprimanded, and the Olson family granted $750,000 in compensation from the government and an apology from President Ford in 1975. However, they maintain the death was a murder to keep Olson quiet rather a suicide stemming from the LSD, as was officially claimed. They filed a wrongful death suit against the government in 2012.