Cursed Bread

Hey, true weirdos, thank you so much for all your support. Because of your support, we were able to win some awards with this podcast in the past year. And be sure to stick around for the conversation we have after the episode. On August 15th, 1951, an entire town in France fell ill. The first wave of patients had nausea, were agitated, and complained of severe stomach pain.

Some had vomiting and diarrhea, hot flashes followed by chills. Many were drooling and their limbs were cold to the touch. The patients were pale with lowered heart rates and at risk of fainting. Doctors were puzzled by how many had dilated pupils, by their diminished response to light. And then came the insomnia that lasted for days, the digestive disturbances, from upset stomachs to burning rectums.

From the September 15th, 1951 edition of the British Medical Journal. A state of giddiness persisted, accompanied by abundant sweating and a disagreeable odor. The special odor struck both the patient and his attendants. Mice. The afflicted people, they said, smelled musty and, well, like mice, like dead mice. These pale and limp patients showed inconspicuous trembling of the extremities.

They complained of disorders of visual accommodation and especially of being unable to read. Disorders of visual accommodation? Like words seeming to melt and run off the page. Towards evening, visual hallucinations appeared, recalling those of alcoholism. The particular themes were visions of animals and of flames. All these visions were fleeting and variable.

In many of the patients, they were followed by dreamy delirium. The delirium seemed to be systematized with animal hallucinations and self-accusation. And it was sometimes mystical or macabre. In some cases, terrifying visions were followed by fugues. And two patients even threw themselves out of windows. What happened in that sleepy little French village in August 1951?

And why do so many people suspect that the American CIA had a hand in it? And they got a small beam of light against me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. True, weird, stuff. Jumper! We've got a jumper! We've got a jumper! We've got a jumper! We've got a jumper! When scientist Frank Olson plunged to his death from a tenth-floor window at the Statler Hotel in New York City on November 28, 1953, it was an awful shock.

Suicide, they said. He was depressed, struggling at work, how terribly sad for his widow and their children. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot more to that incident, though it took over two decades for some of the truth to emerge. When it did, it was a crazy story and a hard one to believe, especially for those who'd swallowed the supersized patriotic Kool-Aid and just couldn't accept that their government might play dirty.

Dirty in ways that were hard to dress up in any kind of red, white, and blue nobility. I mean, what percentage of the American people were really ready to hear that their government had secretly dosed a group of its own employees with LSD? Frank Olson was one of those employees, a scientist working in the secret biological and chemical weapons lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

He'd gone to a meeting nine days before his death where he and other CIA personnel in attendance were given drinks laced with LSD. None of those employees consented to being dosed. None knew the drinks were spiked until about 20 minutes after the fact. In the days following that meeting, Olson's behavior changed. He became paranoid, convinced that someone was trying to poison his food.

He was depressed, agitated, and restless, weeping and ranting. He told his wife he was afraid that he would hurt her. And then in the company of a co-worker, who actually seemed more like a handler, Frank packed a bag and left his family home for what would turn out to be the very last time. Eight days later, he sailed through a closed hotel room window in the middle of the night, leaving nothing but questions and an enduring mystery behind.

You might think that a dead biochemist who'd been working for the CIA and the weird poisoning of an entire village in France two years earlier couldn't possibly be related. It's good that you think that. It's what you're supposed to think. Anything else just wouldn't be reasonable. And no one wants to be labeled a tinfoil hat wearing looney tune, right?

It's just one heck of a coincidence that CIA biochemist Frank Olson did some work in that part of France. And I'll tell you what else is a little weird. The experts that were sent into that village to investigate this baffling event? Chemists from Sandoz Laboratories in nearby Switzerland. And Sandoz, for all of you sweet summer children who think your government is fundamentally honest and decent?

Sandoz is the company that first synthesized and distributed lysergic acid diethylamide, Sandoz sold massive amounts of LSD to the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. And the CIA threw themselves in a legal human experimentation party that they called Program MK Ultra. Was the poisoning of an entire village in France just one more CIA experiment?

Paul San Esprit is located in the south of France. Something to know about the place back in 1951, when all of this happened, is that the people there were very much trying to recover from the extreme deprivations of World War II. We hear 1951 and we think, I don't know, Chubby Checker, Cars with Fins, the middle aged cast of Grease hand jiving at the school dance.

But in the village of Paul San Esprit, life was less about the funds and more about having enough to eat. The war years had brought real hardship. France, under German occupation, the Vichy regime had a strict mandatory rationing program. Bread is a critical part of the French diet and flour was a precious and tightly controlled commodity.

So it became a powerful tool for the Vichy regime to control the people because starving people make a piss poor adversary. The hungry are always easier to control until they aren't. I don't know if tyrants never learn this part of history or if they forget it or if they think they can outrun it. Truly, that is one of history's most perplexing mysteries.

So even after the World War II and the French government kept a handful of Vichy era systems in place, the way the Vichy regime had standardized the transport and distribution of flour seemed fair and efficient enough. Why not keep that going? Under this system, bakers didn't choose who grew or milled the grain they purchased, which meant they had no say at all in the quality of the flour they received.

It was sometimes mixed with other things to bulk it out and not all of those things were optimal. A baker couldn't reject a shipment, but they could petition the French government regarding its quality. A government representative would eventually get around to investigating their complaint. In the meantime, though, their bakery was shut down.

That was so bad for business that few bakers bothered to do it. They simply worked with what they had and the people grew accustomed to bread that ranged from inferior to peculiar. But that's life in wartime and in the long, slow days after of rebuilding and recovery. It just so happened that the summer of 1951 was a wet one in the Avignon region of France.

So much rain. Too much rain. It was predicted that the crop of rye grain would inevitably fail, which would mean even more potential shortages in a place where people were already struggling. There was another risk, even if the crop didn't completely fail, a risk farmers understood very well. A fungal disease called ergot.

Ergot thrives in the rain and damp and dew. The rain splashes it around and helps it spread from diseased plant to healthy plant. The same rain extends the plant's flowering period, giving the ergot fungus even more time to lock in. Insects help spread the ergot fungus too. It makes for a double metaphor. Ergot as life, relentless and resilient.

Ergot as cancer, relentless and invasive. And there isn't much a farmer can do about it. There are strategies designed to help prevent it. Seed cleaning, crop rotation, careful mowing and field management. But once the symptoms of ergot appear, it's too late. Ergot makes people and animals sick. There's historical evidence of ergot causing problems in ancient Assyria in the year 500 BCE.

The ancient Romans were plagued by it. Used to be back in the Middle Ages, they had whole ergotism epidemics. Communities all over Europe were beset by it. They called the resulting disease St. Anthony's fire. It got that name thanks to the medieval Benedictine monks who dedicated their lives to St. Anthony and to the care of people afflicted with the painful rash that ergot caused, searing, burning pain in the extremities.

The monks even incorporated the dead saint's relics in their attempts at cures. Of course, St. Anthony, who appears to now be spending eternity finding lost car keys and jewelry, first found himself associated with a bizarre fungal infection. Fun fact. The monks who found that the order of hospitaliers of St. Anthony and Grenoble, France, even painted the walls of their hospital bright red to reflect that burning agony experienced by those suffering from ergotism.

Millions of people across France were sickened in these ergotism epidemics. Tens of thousands of people died. It wasn't until the late 16th century that a German doctor figured out the connection between rye grain and this terrible affliction. Oh, so that's why we're getting sick. It was one of those public health light bulb moments that helped the human race lurch forward in our fight for survival.

Interestingly, while the ergot rye connection wasn't made until the year 1596, ergot as a pharmaceutical was already known by the ancient Mesopotamians and the ancient Greeks. The Chinese were using it in obstetrics and gynecology as far back as 1100 BCE. And in 1582, just a few years before the ergot rye connection was made, another German physician advised a low dosage of ergot be used with pregnant women to increase the strength of contractions during labor.

Ergot, like so many things in nature, can be both therapeutic and toxic. Ergot can be a poison or a medicine or a weapon or a party drug. Ergot, that humble spore of the fungus Claviceps purpurea, is a real shapeshifter. The organic compounds in ergot that cause all that mayhem are called alkaloids. Guess what is a component of those ergot alkaloids?

Guess. In 1938, the chemist Albert Hofmann figured it all out and synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide from the ergot fungus. And that's LSD to you and me. From a declassified 1954 CIA memorandum titled, Potential New Agent for Unconventional Warfare. Our studies of unconventional warfare have included for some time the potential agent lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, which appears to be better adapted than known drugs to both interrogation of prisoners and use against troops or civilians.

Civilians? Hmm. The Soviet bloc has the necessary supplies of ergot from which to synthesize this drug. And there it is, that Cold War obsession with the Soviet Union. In effective doses, LSD is not lethal, nor does it have color, odor, or taste. Since the effect of this drug is temporary, in contrast to the fatal nerve agents, there are important strategic advantages for its use in certain operations.

It is capable of rendering whole groups of people, including military forces, indifferent to their surroundings and situations. Interfering with planning and judgment and even creating uncontrollable confusion and terror. That memo goes on to detail the difficulties of synthesizing LSD, something that only the Swiss company Sandoz had achieved by the date of publication.

Sandoz had made samples available for clinical testing in both Europe and the U.S., something that irritated the CIA because it meant the Soviets had access as well. The memo went on to detail the effects of LSD on the human brain and body. A feeling of intoxication, some incoherence of ideas. The faculty of expression is decreased.

Euphoria, manic behavior, unmotivated attacks of laughter. Isn't an unmotivated attack of laughter the best kind though? Colors seem brighter and shadows more intense. Hallucinations which generally consist of flashes of light, patches of color, or complex geometrical figures. A feeling of strangeness and distortion of certain parts of the body.

There's a feeling of depersonalization and there's a feeling of looking at oneself from a distance, of having lost control of one's real self, more or less unreal and cut off from the rest of the world. CIA funded researchers experimented with LSD on rabbits and frogs and cats. Not to learn if the varmints could see music and taste colors, more to figure out just how LSD played with neurons, synapses, muscle tissue, the central nervous system.

My favorite finding? LSD is capable of diminishing the epinephrine effect on isolated rabbit uterus. I think we're all going to sleep better tonight knowing that. Anywho. LSD, because of its potency, could possibly be used in the contamination of food and water for the purpose of rendering whole groups of people, including troops, mentally indifferent to their surroundings and situation.

And the memo described the findings from multiple experiments on human subjects. In general, LSD tends to reinforce preexisting tendencies, producing a caricature of the subject. The patient who experiences mood swings from elevated mania to depression often becomes euphoric. The schizoid becomes a true schizophrenic.

Its effects may be considered, to a certain degree, a true personality test. And this is where we pause to remember that the MKUltra program was running unlawful LSD experiments on unwitting soldiers, inmates, college students, psychiatric patients, children, and government employees, including biochemist and CIA contractor Frank Olson, who happened to be in France during the summer of 1951.

Olson paid a visit to that small town in the Avignon region, that place called Ponce-en-Espree. August 1951. A baker in Ponce-en-Espree receives his usual allotment of flour from the French government. The flour was off-color, oddly gray, but the baker knew that if he complained, he would not only lose business, there was no guarantee that the government would find in his favor anyway.

So what else could he do but begin baking the baguettes and the loaves that his customers required? A weird melody struck the tiny Rhone river port of Ponce-en-Espree. Some 200 persons called urgently for medical help, some of them screaming that they were surrounded by fire and monsters, and some trying to commit suicide.

Within 48 hours of that bread being sold, hundreds of villagers became sick, violently sick. At first it looked like, you know, garden variety food poisoning, stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting. But severe insomnia wasn't a part of food poisoning, was it? Yet the afflicted couldn't sleep for days. Many screamed with pain in their arms and legs, screamed that their limbs were swollen and on fire.

Doctors watched in horror as people convulsed and babbled, terrified by things only they could see. The bread that kills and makes men mad claimed a fifth victim when 79-year-old Joseph Portal died in a psychiatric hospital. Portal was one of many Ponce-en-Espree residents who became mentally upset, as well as gravely ill earlier this month after eating contaminated bread.

When left untreated, ergotism is bad news. It causes restriction of blood flow to the extremities. That's the burning sensation victims describe. As ergotism progresses, gangrene can set in, causing fingers and toes, hands and feet to just drop off the body. That's a horrifying thing all by itself. Throwing cramps and sores and the nausea and insomnia, and you have something pretty awful.

And that's before you get to the part where victims are hallucinating, unable to discern what is real and what isn't. A villager named Gabriel Valadaire tried to fling himself into the river. I am dead, and my head is made of copper, and I have snakes in my stomach, and they are burning me. A mother ran screaming in the streets.

Translation? My children! Help me! My children have become sausages! My children are made of sausage! Which is funny and all, until you stop and consider what it would mean to have reality dissolving around you like a dream. Only you're wide awake, and somehow lost in the funhouse your own mind is making of the world.

And all around you, others are experiencing the same tumble into madness. Towards evening, visual hallucinations appeared, recalling those of alcoholism. The particular themes were visions of animals and of flames. All these visions were fleeting and variable. In many of the patients, they were followed by dreamy delirium.

The delirium seemed to be systematized, with animal hallucinations, and self-accusation. And it was sometimes mystical or macabre. In some cases, terrifying visions were followed by fugues. And two patients even threw themselves out of windows. Children were affected. The elderly were affected. Seemingly, no one was immune.

And there were other puzzling aspects to this strange, mass-poisoning event. The delirium was the first serious sign to be noticed. Yet it appeared very late, between 10 to 12 days after the first onset of poisoning. Doctors treating the afflicted said they could foresee the physical symptoms disappearing completely. But...

We cannot say what the effect will be on the minds of some patients. Particularly on the minds of alcoholics who fell victims to the poisoning. Which is interesting. Because according to that classified CIA memo, the agency's researchers knew from their own experiments that some test subjects who were diagnosed with alcoholism had already experienced hallucination while in the grip of alcoholic delirium.

And so, well, they were certainly less shocked by the phenomenon. That's a glass half full of poison attitude, if there ever was one. CIA researchers also noted that test subjects with diagnosed psychopathy tended to have fewer and far less varied hallucinations under the influence of LSD. Sidebar. Think about that. Does the brain of a psychopath have less creative material to work with?

Or is reality already so distorted in the brain of a psychopath that LSD can't really move the needle all that much without a significantly higher dose than typically required? Hmm... Back in the village of Pont Saint-Esprit, where hundreds of people were tripping balls and had no comprehension of what in the world was happening to their minds and bodies?

Among the stricken, delirium rose. Patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies. Some of the effected became violent. From investigative journalist Hank Albarelli's 2010 book, A Terrible Mistake. One young man had to be subdued by three ambulance attendants. Even they could not restrain the man, who viciously fought them and two more came to their assistance.

The five men were able to put the crazy young victim into a straitjacket, but as they tried to fasten it, the young man pushed the attendants away, tore the jacket from his body, and tore the thick canvas down the middle into two pieces. The five men piled on and managed to restrain him, tying him down to a cot at the local jail using thick leather straps.

Within minutes he had loosened one strap and chewed the others to pieces with such a frenzy and intensity that some of his teeth fell out of his bloody mouth. A reporter with a newspaper in Paris wrote this. All around Pont Saint-Esprit, terrifying scenes of hallucination are taking place. Scenes full of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows.

The doctors are besides themselves with work. The rumors are wild and contradictory. Fear hangs over the town everywhere. No one knows when it will end. What were those rumors? Some believed that the local police had poisoned the town's water supply. Others pointed to a recently defrocked priest who might have cursed the town.

Wasn't this so obviously the work of Satan? There were those who insisted that the morning it all began, an airplane flying strangely low had sprayed the town with an invisible dust. Wait, said others. What about those three well-dressed, polite strangers that came here the day before? What business did they have in Pont Saint-Esprit?

By August 18th, 1951, 250 people were sick. 32 had been admitted into an asylum for the insane in the city of Marseille. Four were dead, three elderly and one man aged 25. The French authorities launched an investigation and it didn't take long for experts to arrive at the conclusion that maybe ergot poisoning actually couldn't account for what was happening in Pont Saint-Esprit.

From John Fuller's book, The Day of St. Anthony's Fire. Nothing could be pinned down. Police probed, only to see evidence dissolve in front of their eyes. The doctors fought against symptoms that responded to nothing. The toxicologists found ergot in some cases, but in extremely small quantities. They encountered mysterious and unidentified alkaloids with it, but nowhere, even when the ergot was present, did there seem to be enough quantity to cause the lethal massive concentrations that could flatten hundreds of people.

All of the investigators agreed that surely this entire bizarre situation was an accident. No criminal intent. Even the most insane criminal will be totally unlikely to find a poison that could elude modern medicine and which could be administered so clumsily and haphazardly. It was a drama without a villain, except for the phantom that continued to hover over the village.

The official report submitted to the French Academy of Medicine was 25,000 words that basically came to this. We've looked at every single aspect of this case in the greatest possible detail and we have no idea. It was agreed that ergot, per se, could not be so devastating. A detail that might seem small, but could be the most significant of all in shooting the ergotism theory out of the sky?

The taste and smell of the bread. Ordinarily, ergot would most certainly cause the consumer to be revolted by it, to spit it out, and to take the bread back to the baker for a new loaf. Okay then, so what about mercury? Mercury poisoning was considered as a possible cause, but there was no evidence to back that up. None of the signs that mercury was the culprit.

Where, ask the doctors, is the damage and destruction to the kidneys that is a classic indication of mercury poisoning? Plus, ingesting a single dose of mercury wouldn't lead to hallucination or insomnia lasting for days. And gangrene? That wasn't a symptom of mercury poisoning either, not even from a massive dose. Autopsies on the dead didn't reveal mercury.

An autopsy on an affected dog didn't reveal mercury. Tests of flour samples failed to turn up evidence of mercury. The poison in the cursed bread, doctors agreed, would have to be not only powerful, tasteless, and odorless, it would have to be concentrated to such a degree that only a single bite of the bread would be enough to cause severe illness and even death.

Hello there, true weirdos, time travelers from the future who already know that there was a substance that fit that description. And it came from ergot. It was the alkaloid synthesized by Dr. Albert Hofmann, lysergic acid diethylamide. One one-hundredth of an ounce could cause unbelievable and unpredictable reactions.

An eyedropper could contain enough for 5,000 doses. A single effective dose of 250 micrograms wouldn't even cover the head of a pin. Animal testing with LSD revealed that even an experimental dose could and did literally kill an elephant. From pigeons to salamanders, white mice to cats, researchers saw nervous agitation, catatonic rigidity, drooling.

The fur on the cats stood on end and carps spun wildly from just a single drop in their water. Human trials proved that only the tiniest amount was needed to trigger hallucinations and deep mental confusion and disturbance. The size of the dose required to summon these reactions? The equivalent of a single raindrop in a swimming pool.

So powerful that a single dose could be painted onto a postage stamp or a fingernail. And there was something else that Dr. Hofmann, his colleagues at Sandoz, and the CIA knew about the effect of LSD on human test subjects, and it was a bewildering side effect. The drug, for whatever reason, made a person want to jump out of the nearest window.

Jumper! We've got a jumper! Jumper! We've got a jumper! We know that CIA biochemist Frank Olson, that infamous window jumper, was in Pont Saint-Esprit in the days leading up to the outbreak. And someone else was there in the days immediately following, the scientist who'd first synthesized LSD, Sandoz Company researcher Dr. Albert Hofmann.

Hofmann and his boss at Sandoz, Dr. Arthur Stoll, called a meeting with many of the doctors treating the Pont Saint-Esprit victims. Ergot was the subject, how it forms and ferments on the rye grain. And they talked about one of the alkaloids produced in that fermentation process, LSD. Dr. Hofmann told the assembled physicians about how he'd discovered lysergic acid diethylamide.

The words he used to describe it were, appalling, frightful, shocking. He said he feared that used improperly, LSD might cause more destruction than the atom bomb. The evidence was looking pretty overwhelming for a mass LSD poisoning in Pont Saint-Esprit. And yet at the same time, the idea was ludicrous. To begin, who even knew about this alkaloid, this lysergic acid, diethylamide?

The Sandoz laboratories were the only place in the world where the substance could be found and studied. No police or toxicology lab at the time would be able to analyze it. Sandoz was still kind of mystified by it. And so was Dr. Albert Hofmann. Now the police weren't interested in any of this. They'd never even heard of LSD and they were skeptical.

As were the toxicologists who knew little about ergot and nothing about LSD and were like, can we please just go with mercury poisoning and be done with this? And so that's how the official story came to be that the afflicted of Pont Saint-Esprit had consumed grains treated with a mercury contaminated fungicide. The cops were happy. The government was happy.

Happy they didn't have to try to live with some weird mystery involving a drug no one had ever heard of. A drug so bizarre that it sounded like science fiction. In the final report prepared by the French toxicologists, there's no mention of either mercury or LSD. In certain samples of the bread, the experts discovered the presence of feeble quantities of ergot.

Quantities too feeble to be the origin of the toxic accidents. The ergot notably was found in quantities inferior to one per thousand. It is correct to abandon the hypothesis of poisoning by ergot. But while one per thousand might be a mild dose of ergot, that same amount would be a ginormous dose of LSD. Which brings us to the spontaneous mutation theory in which there was ergot in the flour distributed to the bakers of Pont Saint-Esprit.

Somehow that ergot spontaneously mutated into a form of lysergic acid close enough to Hofmann's LSD that victims consumed what science calls an effective dose. Supporting this was the fact that some of the bread that was tested did have an unidentified substance that sure acted like an alkaloid. That same bread was fed to a pair of white mice and they died within 48 hours of taking a bite.

And several humans who consumed that bread had to be hospitalized. This unidentified substance, these unknown alkaloids, why weren't the investigators more curious? Why wasn't this angle pursued? Almost 300 people had been impacted, not to mention the cats and dogs who'd also consumed the contaminated bread. People were injured. People were dead.

But maybe scientific or academic curiosity is a luxury you can't afford when a whole town is involved. People who couldn't work weren't getting paid. Crops were rotting in the fields. Businesses were failing. The pressure on the authorities to resolve and close the case was overwhelming. The government simply couldn't have a scenario where its people were frightened of bread.

They had to restore trust, and they had to get things back to business, and fast. And so, despite resistance from doctors who'd actually treated the afflicted and had far more unanswered questions than hard facts, the Office of the Public Prosecutor shut it down. In spite of all the research, they were not able to determine where or under what conditions and by whose fault or negligence the deadly event had been produced.

When the Pont Saint-Esprit outbreak happened, almost nothing was known about LSD, outside of the Sandoz team in Switzerland who worked with it, that is. As late as 1962, LSD wasn't even part of the pharmacology curriculum in med schools. But just a few years later, LSD would explode onto the recreational drug scene, thanks in large part to one-time Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary.

Leary became kind of the fairy godfather for psychedelics. Leary got fired from Harvard. That tends to happen when you're not only taking the drug you're supposed to be studying, but encouraging students to give it a try, too. And honestly, Harvard firing Timothy Leary and the resulting scandal is how a lot of people even learned of the existence of LSD.

So thanks, Harvard! Leary was a true believer. He coined the phrase, turn on, tune in, drop out. He believed that LSD could be a powerful therapeutic tool. He understood the drug about as well as anyone. He knew that it made a person believe they could fly, which might explain why some users felt compelled to fling themselves out a window.

Timothy Leary once famously said, Something else to know about LSD is this. Could a more perfect poison exist? Flavorless, odorless, undetectable in the body, incapable of driving people completely mad. If it didn't already exist, the CIA would have invented it, right? And speaking of the CIA, in January 1973, MKUltra chief wizard in charge Sidney Gottlieb hopped into his car and headed for the CIA's record center in Warrenton, Virginia.

His mission, on the orders of CIA head Richard Helms, was to destroy all MKUltra files to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. Helms did not want the CIA to be embarrassed. The head of the record center tried to stop Gottlieb, but failed. One box of destroyed files was material related to environmental sampling for chemical and biological warfare.

It was speculated that another of the boxes contained records of agency activity in Germany and France. In June 1973, Sidney Gottlieb instructed his assistant to go get all the MKUltra files stored in his office safe and burn them. In those files was information on Frank Olson and many of the projects he'd been involved with.

Then Gottlieb retired and moved with his wife to India. He knew he'd have to answer for why he destroyed the MKUltra files, so he released a statement in which he pointed out just how much paper was involved. Oh, the agency was forever trying to shrink that mountain of paper. And he added, these files had no constructive use.

They were the kinds of things that could be easily misunderstood. And there were some folks named in those files who'd been promised confidentiality. And eventually, despite the outrage and the ensuing investigation, the director of the FBI was informed that the CIA would not be making Dr. Gottlieb available for an interview.

And some other fancy legalese that amounted to, drop it, now. The CIA maintained its usual silence regarding the incident at Pont Saint-Esprit. The mercury poisoning theory has become the widely accepted version of events. So what if the CIA's own expert in chemical and biological warfare paid a visit to the place? People travel, not everything's a conspiracy.

So what if Dr. Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD, let's remember, showed up in the days immediately following the outbreak? He worked in Switzerland's Practically Next Door. Girl, not everything is a plot. And all the files being destroyed? So what? As Gottlieb said, that's an awful lot of paper to keep track of. Hey, wouldn't it be best if we just minded our business and let the grown-ups handle the serious business of running the world?

The CIA absolutely does not want you thinking that they ran a covert LSD experiment in a small French town in 1951. The CIA doesn't want you thinking they killed their own scientist, Frank Olson, because he knew too much, was unhappy with what was being asked of him, and was starting to talk. The CIA would also very much appreciate your acceptance of the story that they destroyed so many of the MKUltra files because the paper was just piling up.

To doubt any of this would be unhinged behavior, tinfoil hat behavior. Things happen, sometimes in ways that look sinister, but are actually just, you know, a whole lot of coincidences that somehow manage to collide all in one place. As for the people of Pont Saint-Esprit, the baffling strangeness that began in August 1951 never really ended.

Many of the affected suffered lifelong side effects and disability. Many of the children born to them were oddly pale, though it was tricky to measure other impacts. The mystery of what happened to these people, to their entire community, has never been solved, and probably won't be. Maybe it was a freak ergot mutation.

Maybe the CIA dosed the town and then sat back and watched and destroyed every scrap of evidence in their files. The bakers blamed the millers, the millers blamed the farmers, and the people who ate the bread? They tasted music and heard colors, and they believed they could fly. Next time on True Weird Stuff. Ever play with a Ouija board?

Some people think they're demonic. Some people won't even have one in their house. The Ouija board is a silly little game or a portal to the spirit world. And once that portal is opened, anything can come through. Like maybe a spirit who wants you to murder your daddy. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode.

Charly King, Don Morgan, Caramia, Kary "Doc" Bowser, Sam Moore, and Erin Cox. So, Sherry, the question I have about this is, why did they do it? First of all, second of all, if they had... However monstrous this is, alright, set that aside for a minute. It's bad science. How could you be able to tell anything if you were trying to mickey these people with the LSD?

Some would be taking more than others. What would any of that mean? I can't make any sense of what the CIA had in mind when they got involved with this. I think that's not only a good question and a fair question. It feels like the only question, as far as I'm concerned, that needs to be asked here. I think we can answer it if we operate on the theory that this is, in fact, what the CIA did.

So a couple of things to know is, MKUltra was a black box project. Meaning, dollars flowed into it, but with no accountability. Nobody had to report to Congress or anybody and let them know what they were up to. And MKUltra ran for a long time. And this was one of many, again on the assumption that this is what happened.

This was one of many profoundly unethical and frankly half-assed, unhinged experiments the CIA did on human subjects. You know, Frank Olson, who was recruited by the CIA on a contract basis at Fort Detrick in Maryland, which is where the Army and the Department of Defense and the CIA were conducting all of their chemical biological weapon research.

Frank Olson had a particular specialization and that was aerosol. So if you were going to take – and he had been working on biochemical weapons. He had been talking to his wife and neighbors about the use of biochemical weapons in the Korean War, something our government has never admitted, by the way. And you can see why Frank went through a window.

And is that the thing – remember you said a neighbor of his who also worked there reported him. So it must have been from him talking endlessly. So here's what you have to know about Frank Olson. His particular area of expertise was taking biochemical agents and aerosolizing them. And he worked on the episode called The Jumper, which is a companion episode to this.

That's Frank Olson's story. One of Frank's projects was a joint mission between the CIA, the Army, the DoD, and the U.S. Navy off the coast of San Francisco when they aerosolized a really powerful and dangerous bacteria along with anthrax and some other things and sprayed them over the city. And hundreds of people were sickened and some died.

And of course they didn't notify anybody. They didn't get consent. But the point there is it was Frank who had figured out how to turn these products into aerosols that could be widely dispersed. So when you – like everything is a coincidence. But then sometimes you dig a little deeper and you're like, OK, so like wait.

The CIA's expert in aerosol biochemical weaponry paid a visit to Pont Saint-Esprit shortly before this event. It may not be connected, but it doesn't look good, does it? No, it doesn't. So to answer your why, the CIA did it because they could, because they were very curious. It's in their own documents that are declassified and believe me, not much of it is.

So the fact that this is in the stuff that they didn't redact should tell you something. Their own documents said we wonder if this could be used as an aerosol to control a large population including civilians. So let's just say – let's say it wasn't in the bread. It might have been, but we don't know that for sure. So let's just say it wasn't in the bread and they did this as aerosol.

Once again, it brings in the question of it's not very scientific to just do some aerosol just kind of over a general area because you don't know who's getting what amount of whatever it is. So I haven't even gotten into how monstrous this is and perhaps how Frank Olson might have been going, I don't want to be a part of this.

I can't rely on patriotism for my country as a great rationalization for what's happening here. So when it comes to MKUltra and some of the projects inside MKUltra, the most important thing to remember is none of these stand up under the light of scrutiny and the scientific method and ethics. I'll remind you that the CIA funded that program at Ravenscroft Hospital in Montreal where they literally just tortured people with brainwashing, mind control, reprogramming, smoothing out their brains and trying to rebuild them from scratch.

When you look at that, there's no coherent science and there's certainly a staggering lack of ethics and morality. I think the answer is if the CIA did this, they did it because they could. They did it because they could just in the same way that they dosed unknowing Johns who were going into the brothels in that other MKUltra project we talked about in a previous episode.

They did it because they could dose Frank Olson with LSD which makes you wonder were they doing this as a way of controlling him and was Frank Olson paranoid after all that he thought people were trying to poison him because he had indeed been poisoned. Well, in the CIA's defense and there's a sentence I've never used but in the CIA's defense, they dosed a bunch of their employees.

Frank was one of many that they dosed at that meeting at Deep Creek and it was shitty. But what you have to remember, I think it's hard for decent human beings who have lived their whole lives on the assumption that there were some grownups somewhere running things. I think what you have to remember is the CIA especially in that period, especially under Sidney Gottlieb, they're cowboys.

They just did whatever. They were not accountable or answerable to anyone and they played fast and loose. It was kind of a lark dosing their coworkers and you can – I mean you work in radio. You can understand that mindset for sure I think. The problem is not that we can't understand the CIA behaving like this. We're so heartbroken and appalled and frightened and disappointed that some of our institutions are not at all what we were taught they were or hoped they would be.

Well, not forever as it seems. But the thing about LSD is – and I don't understand it as a hallucinogen. I sort of know what it is. There are certain things that I do know about it. I know that micro doses of this have been used to try to help people with depression or a number of real world kinds of issues where this could be something that could help.

I was staggered by your explanation of how little it took in order to get some kind of an effect with this and how these people were probably being dosed with many times that. Raindrop in a swimming pool when you think about it, right? The head of a pin with room to spare. It's incredibly potent. At the time that this happened, even Albert Hofmann who synthesized it, the great daddy of LSD, even Hofmann wasn't all the way on what all the capabilities and risks were because it was pretty – I mean he synthesized it in the 30s.

But the science – he was a scientist using the scientific method and it's slow and painstaking and there was still so much that he didn't know. You can't discount the Cold War paranoia, the conviction in the government and the military and in the minds of many citizens that at any moment, the Soviet Union was going to annihilate the world.

So against a backdrop of that sort of profound existential threat, people feel that this is no time to get hung up on the rules and the CIA during those years operated like, hey folks, we're trying to save the world and you got to break some eggs to make that omelet. So they themselves didn't feel – they felt bound to the salvation of the world not to – wow, maybe we shouldn't give unsuspecting psychiatric patients LSD or radium or thorium or polonium or any of the other things that they did under MKUltra.

So – and I'm not excusing them by the way, but that's an important context thing to know that they really saw themselves as cowboy heroes. And yes, they played fast and loose with every possible law and ethical principle, but they felt justified in that and some of them are sociopaths. Let's be so real. The kind of people that get recruited into these kind of jobs where you got to kill somebody with your thumb, come on.

That is the thing that is really upsetting about this is – first of all, why would you pick out this poor small French village? Why would you do that first of all? And second of all, was there no – at no point along the line did somebody go, oh my god, look at what's happened. Look at what we've done. I mean did nobody say we really shouldn't be doing this?

Somebody might have, but Gottlieb scrubbed the files. I mean I can't tell you how many thousands of pages of documentation were destroyed by him in Warrenton, Virginia. We mentioned at the end of the Jumper episode that Gottlieb destroyed the files. That was Warrenton, Virginia where they were stored. Pre-digital, you had boxes of paper.

And we don't – because those files were destroyed, we not only don't know everything about how these various projects were conceived and implemented. We don't know if there were whistleblowers. We don't know if there was dissent because it was all burned. But when we look at the timeline – and again, it's all circumstantial, right?

And here we are wearing our foil hats. But when you look at the timeline, August 1951, the CIA's expert in aerosolized biochemical weaponry is in Ponsonnesbury. Then the incident and then this man begins decompensating, falling apart. He's depressed. He's got an ulcer. He's starting to talk. He's begging. At one point, he says to his superiors, just let me go.

I'll never say a word to anyone. Just let me leave and disappear into private life. And then he went through a window two years later. So when you look at that, it's, again, coincidence. But it's certainly an interesting coincidence. When they convict somebody of a crime on insanity, what they have to prove is the person didn't know what they were doing was wrong.

So you can say that these people were sociopaths, psychopaths, whatever they were, like Gottlieb. But the fact that he went back to destroy those files lets you know there's no real justification for what they're doing. He knew what they were doing was wrong. There was no part of him that was kind of like, all of this is all OK, and I don't care who sees it in the light of day.

People, and again, this is all under the auspices of the government and the military. You are a patriot. You are defending truth, justice, and the American way. You are a warrior for freedom for the world doing these things. The people at the very top might be twisted and sociopathic and whatever else you want to say.

But the rank and file, a lot of those folks are a combination of true believers and people that are following orders. And how many times have we seen that dynamic play out in human history? I know that I've talked about this in a previous episode, but I will say this again. I was in a play called Judgment at Nuremberg, and I played the judge.

And one of the points that is made in this, in referring the trial for the play that I was in, was all these people that were involved in law. It wasn't Garing and Nat Crowd Hess. These are people that were like lawyers and judges and that sort of thing. And one of the points that it brought out was, look, if you all were monsters and psychopaths and all of these things, OK, fine.

You can understand how this would happen. But the fact was, these were rational, educated men with families and all of these things. And the point, the point the trial was bringing forward was, these are people who went ahead and just followed it anyhow and were not the monsters. The monsters were at the head, but these weren't.

And you can't, the monsters have no power if they have no followers. And, you know, that's the thing about this. And of course, Frank Olson is kind of your flashpoint for this is one of the guys that was following that was kind of like, I don't think so. Yeah. And never, never forget, like you can't lose sight of the fact that these like MK Ultra was it's a CIA program, but they were in the biochemical weaponry stuff that Frank Olson was doing.

And these aerosolized contaminants and bacteria and possibly LSD were happening at Fort Detrick in conjunction with the army. So when you have when you have military and Frank Olson was army, remember. People who join the military and take an oath on warriors, that's a world that you and I don't understand. We don't understand. We don't understand what it means to be broken down and built back up again and turned into a soldier or warrior, whether you're a private or a lieutenant or a general.

That process is the same. And your sense of mission and your unquestioning obedience to authority and to the orders that are given you, it is made clear to you that you don't have the whole picture private. This is your part of the picture and you are executing it on behalf of God and country, sir. And it is not for you to question the rest of it.

You can never you can never forget the context for all of this stuff and who the people were that were following these orders and how little the one hand didn't know what the other was doing. The pilot, let's say that the stories of a plane flying low over Ponsen a spree shortly before the outbreak, the pilot may not have known what was happening because he wasn't he didn't have that level of security clearance.

He wasn't read into the operation at that level. Right, sir. Yes, sir. And I'm going to get in the plane. I'm going to fly the mission. I think we we forget how complicated these organizations and structures are and how many how many layers of plausible deniability are built into this system so that the pilot can spray the town with this contaminant and not realize what he's doing.

Yeah. And Frank Olson wouldn't have that luxury because, again, he's the local expert in aerosolized weaponry and his he that you can track his basically his nervous breakdown. You can start tracking it right up until that moment he goes through that window. And not everybody has what it takes to be a super secret agent. And he didn't clearly.

No, no. Now, do I think that it's like almost insane to suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency dosed an entire French village with acid? I think that sounds crazy. And yet I don't think it's impossible. And I also don't think that regular people like us will ever know the truth. I wonder and I didn't notice anything in when we went through this with the French government thought about it because you would think that the French people would go, hey, aren't you here to protect us from this sort of thing?

Well, you I think you can assume that the CIA and the United States government, if they did, in fact, do this, didn't get permission and they didn't offer an apology afterward because the French government decided that the only way to close the books on this was to attribute it to mercury contamination, even though there was zero evidence of it.

And the French government, along with the medical establishment, could not agree that this was a simple case of ergotism because the outbreak was too large. The effects were too long lasting. There were there were things that didn't match up. But you've got we are we are just a couple of years out of World War Two. France is in desperate shape trying to rebuild. People are heartbroken from so much death. They're dispirited from the loss of everything. They don't even have they don't even have uncontaminated flour to make bread with. People are starving. We as Americans, like modern Americans, we we can't know what that feels like.

We have not yet had a war on home soil since the Civil War. You know, we don't know what it's like to have an enemy's tanks roll through your town and your people captured and rounded up and arrested and sent into hiding. We don't know what it's like to starve and watch our kids starve because of an enemy occupying force. That's the backdrop. That's the context for France, for Ponce de Spree at this time.

And the French government. Folks, we we can't dick around with this. We have got to put a bow on this and move on with reconstruction. And that's kind of what happened. It's kind of what happened. And it's also possible that they made some sort of a deal with the French government ahead of time. So this is what we're going to do. And you can't stop us. And we're doing you know, they may have had some sort of a deal.

We won't tell about this if you won't tell about that. We have a rogue nuclear submarine and we don't know where it is or what's happening. And you watch the blood drain out of the Secretary of State's face. I suspect a lot more of the business of the world is conducted like that. I suspect somebody rolled up on the French government, prime minister, what have you, and said, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, would you like us to continue to assist you in reconstructing your country? How about we put an end to this investigation in Ponce de Spree?

Yeah, I absolutely believe, would believe that that would be something that would happen. And in my fantasy world, they sent another foghorn leghorn over to France to get that done. So I think anything's possible. I think it's possible the CIA had nothing to do with this. It's just all these weird kind of coincidences.

Because here's another thing, here's another thing. Sandoz Chemical, Sandoz Pharmaceutical over there next door in Switzerland. Albert Hofmann, renowned scientist, very busy man, very busy man. Sandoz, very busy company. Some sleepy backwater in France has some weird thing going on. And Sandoz and Hofmann mobilized to their aid. Were they just like the goodness of their heart? Because why?

Now, Sandoz, and to be fair, they were in the ergot business. I mean, that is how Hofmann synthesized LSD was from ergot fungus. So, you know, maybe I think you could make an argument in every direction and have some pretty good points. Yeah. But it's like, what do you think? Like, what does your gut tell you? I think this was done purposely. And I suspect that some kind of a deal was made in order to allow this to happen with the French government. And then let's do this. Let's see what happens.

And we'll give you some sort of financial help or some kind of other help to help with your reconstruction. And so the government looks at it goes, well, you know, we'll sacrifice a few people for the good of everyone else. Okay, fine. That's a deal we can live with. All right, fine. You know, that's just the collateral damage of doing business.

And it was a small place. I mean, it wasn't like they launched this at Paris, right? They picked a sleepy little town, little rural farming community in Avignon. And they cropped us at the place with LSD. And I can't put in the CIA's defense again, let me say, they had no idea what was going to happen. None. That's why it's called an experiment. And because it was done on unwitting, non consenting human beings. It's what's called an unethical experiment. But the whole point of an experiment is, see what might happen. It's somebody they were curious. Because if this was a way to think about it, if the CIA found that they could cropped us to town, and immobilize it, do you think they wouldn't deploy this against like, there are trying to be the Soviets?

I'm sure. I'm sure that that's what they were thinking. And of course, you know, if the Soviets have it, then we need to have it. And I'm sure that that's what was going on with all of this. And, you know, the rationalization, the ends justify the means and this is the means. However, I don't know how and, and Frank Olson suffer with this. I mean, I don't know how you sleep at night and do stuff like that. I just don't know how you do.

I think there are there was a lot of talk about Olson, a lot of internal chatter about Olson when he began sort of having a come apart, as we like to say, over there, Fort Detrick in Maryland, his co workers in the year or so leading up to the incident where he went through the window in New York City, November 1953. In the years in the year and the months and weeks leading up to that, Olson's co workers at Fort Detrick were like, Frank, what? And there was a neighbor, because you know how it is with I mean, you grew up in the Washington DC area. You know, people like you'll have neighborhoods where a lot of folks work at the IRS or at the Pentagon, right?

Or the CIA, or the CIA, Frank lived in a little neighborhood in Maryland, with a lot of other people who worked at Fort Detrick as contractors, you know, they're not military living on base. And he carpooled with one of those folks. And that guy was like, Frank is Frank needs to be quiet. And what he was talking about were the terrible things that he had seen, and that he that had been done. And these were things that you're that you know, you aren't supposed to talk about you have security clearance.

And, and the American government has still not admitted to chemical or biological weapons in Korea. So you definitely didn't want to be talking about that in late 1952. Now, you know, hello, we were not talking about it today. So, you can see how, you know, if, if we're if our theory is correct, that Frank's conscience after the incident in Operation Harness, where they sprayed anthrax and Brucella at the island of Antigua and sickened people on the island without informing them, after the incident in San Francisco, where people died.

And they're cheerfully blasting biological aerosolized biological weapons at, you know, the city of San Francisco, the Korean conflict war. And then Paul Sanisprit. Here's a guy that's coming undone. Yeah. And in the last episode, they did try to use animals to do this, but it didn't work out very well. So I guess they figured, hey, animals are a bother. Let's just go after some living humans.

It's wild how half-assed. That's the other thing, you know, for folks that are really patriotic. True patriotism is I love my country. I see her flaws. I want to make her better. That's true patriotism. True patriotism is not my country, right or wrong, yourself. That's not true patriotism. That's jingoism and, and whatever.

True patriotism is I love this country. I want it to be the best it can be. And Frank was, you know, Frank was a patriot, but he was the wrong kind of patriot for what he was doing. So if you really believe, if you're a true believer, all of these things can be justified. You can make your peace. And that was one of the things that, that Frank's coworkers were able to do that he wasn't. They, they kept their eyes on the bigger picture of we're making the world safe for democracy and freedom. We are not going to allow the Soviet Union to drop the evils of communism across the globe. You know, the propaganda and you also understand the political, the geopolitical realities at the time, you know, the arms race and mutually assured destruction. It was a scary time.

It was. Yeah, I agree. But of course, he and his wife are now in India, and he is not available to be deposed. He is not available to give the FBI an interview. He's just not available. And, and the FBI is told you need to drop this and walk away. You need to pay no attention to this. We're living this, this is happening right now, where clearly there is criminal wrongdoing that needs to be addressed, investigated, there needs to be accountability. But we're not going to be doing that. I'm talking about the Epstein files. We're just not going to do that.

We're at war with Iran, and it would be not in the country's interest. So these people who are in, who are clearly needing to be looked at, we're just not going to do it. We're going to silence it, which is how Sidney Gottlieb skated on all of this. I mean, you think about everything we talked about. The CIA doesn't want you believing that any of this is true. So there's a lot of noise and glitter around it to make you look like a kook. The people of Pont Saint-Esprit never got any answers and also have had generational impacts because of the poisoning of them by whoever or whatever.

And there won't be any accountability. And the government made it clear to you, your government, our government made it clear in January 1973 that you needed to stop asking so many questions because you weren't entitled to those answers and that those people would be protected. It's interesting, isn't it? It is. And it's kind of exasperating at the same time.

I just don't know. You know, I'm such a tenderhearted person. I don't even like to see animals suffer. I wouldn't do this to an animal of any kind, let alone human beings. I can't get over that. I can't get past that. I have to remind you that they were also doing this to animals in the jumper episode, the Frank Olson story. We covered Operation Harness. So if you haven't heard that, I'll just tell you that that was a secret biological warfare experiment carried out by the UK in the Caribbean off the Bahamas.

It started in December 1948. They had these inflatable dinghies anchored offshore. The plan was monkeys, sheep, and guinea pigs. And they would blow anthrax, tularemia, and brucella bacteria at these animals. And then they would pick them up and test them to see what the impacts of these aerosolized bacteria was on the animals. But they had to kill 500 of 600 sheep. The guinea pigs were a disaster and died.

Most of the monkeys were seasick and some got pneumonia and many, many died. And then there was a radio tower on Antigua and they didn't realize that the radio signals coming off the island would interfere with their monitoring equipment. And then the wind changed direction and they cheerfully blew anthrax, tularemia, and brucella bacteria onto the residents of Antigua who had no idea that this was happening. So we had a half-assed, batshit, three-month experiment called Operation Harness that yielded absolutely nothing but suffering and death for a bunch of people who were never told why.

So when you look at that, that is the perfect example of anything went. If you could dream it and conceive it, you could probably get the money for it and a green light during the MKUltra years. If Operation Harness was okay, in what world would not crop dusting a little rural French town seem like a plan? I know it seems like we want to believe that we're so much more involved now, but I don't really believe that and it makes me wonder what is going on now.

At this point, I was talking with my brother about it and I said to my brother, Mark, I was like, I have to be very honest with you and I'm curious, Max, if you will agree with this about yourself. I got to be really honest with you. I admit that since Max and I have been doing this show, I'm definitely way weirder than I was and that is saying something.

Yeah, I think I am too. It's hard. It's like super hard, but here's the thing. I have been immersed in the Epstein files and then even more so because we did the Jeffrey Epstein vampire episode and I'm here to tell you, the Epstein files suggest that September 11th was an inside job and when I say suggest, you need to understand that I mean document.

I don't want to believe it. I want to believe I'm stupid and I'm not understanding what I'm reading and it's all a coincidence. These things, these events are just coincidences that any kooky person like myself could build into a story. I'm actively talking myself out of perceiving the world as truly run by the Illuminati because at this point, it feels like the world is in the sweaty, filthy grip of a cabal of pedophile billionaire madmen.

It does. Now with AI, you don't even know what's real anymore. People say the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was killed by an Iranian bunker buster missile and he's missed all of these. As of this recording, if he is alive, we're going to bring him back just by talking about him being dead, but as of this recording, he's missed like seven or eight security briefings. His country is at war. Your country is being attacked. Your people are being bombarded and the only thing we've seen of him is this weird video where he's getting a cappuccino like, sir please, what?

I think he's dead, but everyone else is like, there's a video of him getting cappuccino and I'm like, what? That's the world we're living in, but that's the world, Max, we've always been living in and we didn't know it and didn't want it to be true because you can't tell me that if they're out floating dinghies full of guinea pigs and blasting the people of Antigua with anthrax, you can't tell me that things are any more like noble or coherent or less insane today. Do you believe that?

We seem to evolve technologically, but we don't seem to evolve as a species. It's just we have fancier stuff to drive around in and fly around in, but basically we still have the same kind of problems, the same kind of rationalizations for doing all kinds of crazy crap. We are people that just climbed out of the agrarian age into the industrial revolution and now we literally have magical powers. Our phones are these magical things, but I'll remind you that the CIA and scientist Dr. Frank Olson participated in Operation Sea Spray in 1950.

Paul Sanisbury was 1951, Frank Olson died in 1953. 1950, there they are, anchored off the coast of San Francisco, just blasting bacteria at the city, an outbreak of such weirdness that it made the medical literature and the textbooks like, there's Frank in 1950, there's Frank in 1951, there's Frank going through a window in 1953.

Probably just all coincidences because one thing I can tell you about a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy mindset, we saw this in the Jeffrey Epstein vampire, Andrew Jackson conspiracy. If you can find a handful of things that are demonstrably true like Operation Sea Spray which happened in 1950 but was declassified and revealed to the people of the world in 1977, that really happened. There's an anchor point that's true.

Frank Olson was a real person who specialized and had this expertise. That's an anchor point that's true. I've got two ingredients here, one more and I could spin a theory that will sound very compelling, right? Coincidences, maybe. Well, you put enough coincidences together and you go, there's something to this. I mean that's the thing about the coincidences.

You know what though? It's hard. Gosh, it's hard growing up and realizing that things are not as you thought or hoped they would be but it's even harder for me. There are people, there are a lot of people you'll go, did you know that our government did this? And they don't care. No, they don't. They don't care. Just because it's far away. It's long ago and it's far away.

But I have to say to you, governments and countries are just like individual peoples in this one specific way, that slippery slope. This will be like a co-worker that we used to have. You take Sharpies and notebooks home and you take a box of CD-ROM things home and you take a handful of coffee pods home and maybe another hand roll of toilet paper.

And then one day, you take four cases of coffee pods and you resell them at a flea market and you get caught and arrested and you lose your job and career. That actually happened to somebody we know. Yes, that absolutely did. His first move wasn't to steal it all and resell it at a flea market. His first move was, nobody's even going to notice this case of CD-ROMs are gone, right?

People lose their way by inches and so do governments and countries and CIA agents. That's just how that works. Sadly. We start off fighting the Soviet Union in an ethical way. We're trying to be good stewards and scientists. You look at the Manhattan Project and the Oak Ridge Laboratory experiments under MKUltra. You look at how very gradually we went from a group of scientists in a laboratory to a single agent behind two-way glass at a brothel to a doctor in Canada being allowed to do whatever as long as he can develop an interrogation technique.

Step by step by step by step. I don't think it ever happens all at once. No, I think you're right. It happens incrementally and at each step along the way, you say, but this is why and this is a really good reason and we're saving lives and we're saving our country's lives. There's a point at which you have decisions to make. Are you going to go with that? I would never have wanted to be in Truman's shoes deciding whether or not to drop the atomic bomb to end World War II, to drop it on the Japanese people.

Civilians, I'll remind you, who were just living their lives. A lot of them were vaporized. I'm glad that there's somebody else doing those jobs, but I don't kid myself about the compromises that get made and the corners that get cut. Yeah, I mean, certainly when it came to Truman, that was not a decision that he took lightly.

And also with that, we sort of knew what would happen, but we weren't 100% sure what would happen and we weren't 100% sure if that would work. I always try because, you know, you have to live in this world and I always try, okay, well, is there anything that came of this particular story, Frank Olson's story and Pont Saint-Esprit and that whole weird chapter in the CIA's history?

Did something good come of it? Well, I can't find it if it did. No. I think that spraying American – I think for the American military and government to spray American citizens in San Francisco with biological weaponry, I got nothing. Poisoning anybody under any circumstances without their consent is absolutely – I mean it's so reprehensible.

I mean – and during this time, it seems like the CIA had no problem whatsoever doing that. Man, they were buck wild. And I've thought a lot about Operation Harness. And so here's the thing because you go – well, they did – how could – they didn't know what they didn't know. Well, some of what they didn't know, they didn't know because they didn't bother to ask.

Like for example, the problem with the radio transmission interference with the monitoring equipment. I feel like, Max, if that were us, you would come back to me and go, we're going to have an issue because Ron and I – Ron is our engineer. Ron and I tested it and we're having interference from the island's radio station.

Oh, well then we need to figure that out before we tow these animals out into these dinghies. Right? Like one of the things that is jaw-dropping for me is folks, we come from the radio industry and the bar is extremely low. And if you can't rise to our bar, oh my god. Hey, even a mad scientist is still a scientist. You know what I mean?

This is just – it's haphazard. It's haphazard. It's haphazard. And people did what they could because they could. And because there was no one to tell them no and it was all going to be a secret so it wasn't like your ass is going to get fired. It's a secret. We're not talking about this. We're not bragging about this.

The lack of like a plan or any legwork ahead of time in just Operation Harness, just that one thing is breathtaking. You can't run a Taco Bell off the interstate with that kind of slipshod half-assery and yet. Well, you can with the government because there's no – the money will still keep coming. There's no accountability.

There's no accountability. You're not running. You're not doing it as a business. So you can do that. You can look at some of these MKUltra projects and go, okay, well, did anything good come of it? What did we learn? Well, in Operation Harness, we learned that y'all should like check everything twice. And the radiation experiments at Oak Ridge Laboratory where they abducted a car crash victim and tortured and poisoned him.

Here's what we learned. If you ever find yourself in that situation, do what that man did. Wait for your first opportunity then go through a window and escape. That's what we learned from that. See, we already knew thanks to the Manhattan Project how absolutely devastating and toxic it would be to inject a human being with polonium.

We already knew it. So the point of that experiment was what? I'll tell you what the point was. We already knew it was going to kill him. We just wanted to see how and how long it would take on a human being who had not obviously consented. So like I'm over here trying to get MKUltra's back. It's impossible. It's breathtaking.

Again, folks, if at any time we say to you, what were you thinking? Always remember where we come from and that the bar is almost actually on the ground. That's the real business. So because we all need to sleep at night, here's what we have to say because we all need to sleep at night. Those days are over and things are different now.

The end. And if you haven't listened to the previous episode, listen to the previous episode because it really will. All of this will make a lot more sense. So we had I have like a weird personal connection to the story that I didn't know that I had. Oh, my older my older brother and I. He was the right amount of older to be aware of things that I wasn't paying attention to in the family.

And our grandfather was career Navy. He enlisted as a teenager and made it his whole career. He rose pretty high for an enlisted guy. And he retired. He was in world. He was in active duty in World War Two. He's in Japan. And then he was stationed in Korea. And then he came home and he retired. And he was young. So like he had his whole life in front of him because, you know, he lied about his age and went in when he was a kid.

Right. So he's he's be bopping along retired and minding his business and he learns how to fly a plane and he gets pilot license. And and this was the part of the story that my brother had that I didn't have. My grandfather is approached and invited to come back into active duty, which is not a thing that typically happens in the Navy, apparently.

Only in movies is that only in movies. But but it wasn't just come on back, sailor, and swab those decks. Then Naval Intelligence sent my grandfather to Temple University, my alma mater. I found his student ID card and I was mystified because nobody had ever talked about pop up being a temple owl. Right. So that was a weird thing, but I saved it.

I still have it. So they come back to my grandfather and they send him to temple and then they deploy him to Iran. And this was when the Shah was in power. So and the Shah was so in bed with the United States government, the military and the CIA that when the Shah unzipped to take a piss, it was Sidney Gottlieb waving at him.

OK, like it was so mobbed up. And my grandfather was part of a team that was connected to nuclear, bio and chemical weaponry. Wow. He came home from that deployment. He sent us these really cool little cool Persian bracelets and stuff when we were kids. Anyway, he came home from that deployment and he was so excited about the bicentennial.

My grandfather was a patriot, like the real patriot, loved America, wanted it to be the best it could be. He could not wait for July 4th, 1976. And his plane went down in October of 1975 and he was killed. Now, I don't think the CIA took his plane down. That was an accident. But I was little and, you know, there was no way to ask any questions.

And so I said to my brother, did you ever wonder why this regular guy who wasn't an officer, like a commissioned officer or any kind of like special anything, except to us, got tapped for that assignment? And my brother was like, it was strange, but now he's gone. You know, we could never find out. And I was like, did you know that the CIA scientist was screaming that the government had used biochemical weapons in Korea, where Popop was?

In Japan, where the nukes went, where Popop was? And then he's recruited back in and sent to Iran. It's probably all a coincidence. And yet, if you have enough, you have enough for coincidences. It's just, it's weird. And I had no, I had no idea. I didn't know what my brother knew and he didn't know about the Frank Olson allegations.

And he didn't know any of like Operation Sea Spray, Operation Harness. He didn't know any of that. And none of us know anything now. And I'm not a good enough hacker. I can't, I mean, I can't find, I can't find my grandfather's military records, if they even still exist. Because, of course, this would have been during the paper days.

And I have no idea that he would be digitized. I'm sure they still exist somewhere. Yeah. I don't know. And yeah, so it's like, for me, it's like a delightful little connection to a grandfather that I lost when I was very small. And I like the idea that he's peeking out at me from behind some of this true weird stuff.

CIA stuff and Navy stuff that we do. And, you know, I mean, we've done, we've done other episodes around the U.S. Navy. I'm super fascinated by the Navy. I think there's like a lot of intrigue and secrets. And the Navy is really something. The Navy is, the Navy is not the army and the water. The Navy is its own separate thing.

It is. It's fascinating. So it's kind of delightful to see my Pop Pop, who I remember so fondly, peeking out at us from behind this. I had that same feeling when we found your dad playing semi-proof football before World War II. Yeah, like, yeah, as a kid, so as a teenager. So, yeah. Next week, we're going to leave the CIA alone for a little bit because they've gotten two weeks worth of whooping.

And we're going to take a look at a really unusual case about the Ouija board, which is a very popular and profitable toy to this day. It couldn't be more simple, except some people don't think it's a toy. They think it's a portal. They think it's demonic and dangerous and you shouldn't even have it in your house. And I bet, speaking of the Navy, I bet retired Navy officer Ernest Turley would agree, because the Ouija board told his daughter to kill him.

And that's on the next True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website TrueWeirdStuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at TrueWeirdStuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2026, Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.