10 Outlandish Conspiracies That Were Actually True

5. The CIA Tried To Invent Mind Control (With LSD)

Project MKUltra is one of the strangest real-life conspiracies to ever take place, and considering we've already covered one where modern art brought down the USSR (sort of), that's saying something.

Not that it'll take much to convince you, since the secret project is better known as the CIA's clandestine attempt to invent mind control. By injecting LSD into people's brains. We hasten to remind you that this is a list of conspiracies that were actually true.

Between the fifties and the seventies, multiple people signed off on this plan like it was a good idea. Not only that, but nobody flinched at highly illegal activity like experimenting on unconsenting American and Canadian citizens by dosing them with hallucinogenics, subjecting them to verbal and sexual abuse, isolation, and various forms of torture. Fun!

MKUltra was a truly huge conspiracy, taking in eighty constitutions including hospitals, colleges and prisons, all of whom had to keep schtum about the stuff they were up to. Partly, that was helped by them not actually knowing what they were doing. The CIA set up the majority of these institutions as fronts and, whilst some cottoned on, for the most part the experimenter and their subjects had no idea what was going on or why.

It took until 1975 for the experiments to become public knowledge, and what few documents relating to it that hadn't been destroyed by the CIA were declassified and released in 2001. As if that wasn't all bad enough, the project was partly come up with by German scientists who had been hired by the US government after the end of World War II. So for twenty years the CIA were secretly trying to control the minds of its citizens with LSD, under the auspices of Nazis. Yep, that happened.