During the peak of the cold war in the 1950s and 60s the CIA conducted many mind control experiments. The most infamous of these was project MK-Ultra. These projects, and MK-Ultra in particular were insidious because they involved the use of LSD and other mind-altering drugs, often given to private American citizens without their knowledge or consent.

The fiendish experiments into so-called psychological warfare – which went on well into the 1970s – were of course Top-Secret, and probably would have remained hidden and relegated to the annals of “conspiracy theories” if they were not made public in 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.

Now, more recently, an obituary, published in the Washington Post, sheds more light on what many think of as the barbarous and unconstitutional project.

The Obituary of John K. Vance and Revelations About MK-ULTRA

The obituary is of John K. Vance, 89, a member of the CIA’s inspector general’s staff, who uncovered the program during an investigation.

The following is an excerpt from the Washington Post obit of Mr. Vance.

John K. Vance, 89, a member of the Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s staff in the early 1960s who discovered that the agency was running a research project that included administering LSD and other drugs to unwitting human subjects, died May 27 of respiratory arrest.

He died at the Wilson Health Care Center of Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg.

Code-named MK-Ultra (and pronounced m-k-ultra), the project Mr. Vance uncovered was the brainchild of CIA Director Allen Dulles, who was intrigued by reports of mind-control techniques allegedly conducted by Soviet, Chinese and North Korean agents on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. The CIA wanted to use similar techniques on its own POWs and perhaps use LSD or other mind-bending substances on foreign leaders, including Cuba’s Fidel Castro a few years after the project got underway in 1953.

Heading MK-Ultra was a CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. In congressional testimony, Gottlieb, who died in 1999, acknowledged that the agency had administered LSD to as many as 40 unwitting subjects, including prison inmates and patrons of brothels set up and run by the agency. At least one participant died when he jumped out of a 10th-floor window in a hotel; others claimed to have suffered serious psychological damage.

Mr. Vance learned about MK-Ultra in the spring of 1963 during a wide-ranging inspector general survey of the agency’s technical services division. The inspector general’s report said: “The concepts involved in manipulating human behavior are found by many people both within and outside the agency to be distasteful and unethical.”

As a result of Mr. Vance’s discovery and the inspector general’s report, the CIA halted the testing and began scaling back the project. It was terminated in the late 1960s.

Mr. Vance gave several long phone interviews to Congressional committee staff during the aforementioned investigation in which MK-Ultra was made public during the 1970s, but was never called to testify publically before the committee.

The full-text of the obituary, which was published on June 16^th 2005, can be read on the Washington Post’s website.

While MK-Ultra has been exposed, and allegedly curtailed, many believe the results of the experiments live on, and the CIA continues to not only conduct similar atrocities, but has used the techniques learned to create “Manchurian Candidate” style assassins. These include, Stephen Paddock, the perpetrator of the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in United States history, with 58 fatalities and 851 injuries, when he opened fire during a concert in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, and Aaron Alexis, who fatally shot 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard shooting which occurred on September 16, 2013.

Those that believe this to be the case, say that both men, and many others recently involved in mass shootings, showed the typical signs of having been victims of MK-Ultra style brainwashing techniques.