| 1960’s Musical Hippies Take LSD at Acid Tests Now, I don’t know about you, but if an ex-intelligence officer told me he knew about UFOs and to look into mind control, I would be paying 100 percent attention to that. We will now explore mind control technology that has been in development since the 1950s and was given a scientific boost with grants for MK-Ultra, the program that experimented with LSD. Let’s try not to get too paranoid as we travel down the rabbit hole and avoid becoming victims of our own imaginations. Most people are aware by now that the US government was in an all-out “cold war” with the Soviets at the end of WWII through the 1950’s attempting to figure out the best weapons of war which became a battle over the mind, instead of just a territorial battle. In 1943, Albert Hoffman, working for Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland had first ingested LSD he was working with since 1938 and the US government ended up stockpiling some of it for “research purposes.” The use of it for mind control was employed when prostitutes pulled customers from swanky bars and brought them back to motel rooms rigged with two-way mirrors and recording devices and they would slip acid to them and record the situation, while having the prostitute say and do things according to the agent’s instructions. This led to CIA acid parties in the 1950’s and Cary Grant and John Wayne became instant fans, as well as many other Hollywood socialites. The cat had genuinely slipped out of the bag at that point. One viewpoint among conspiracy minded people which is becoming more popular to discuss is the CIA pushing LSD on American Pop Culture intentionally for mind control purposes. To the contrary, I would contend, it was LSD that was the arch “conspirator” and not CIA agents. They were merely operatives for the LSD. In this, I mean, “consciousness” was the conspirator, and it was good CIA members who dosed each other for fun, then they were so inspired by that enlightenment they spread it out all over the world. It was no government conspiracy, it was the work of millionaires who had the means and the connections to make it all happen. Was Owsley or Nick Sand or Tim Scully working for the CIA? Not in any knowing or nefarious capacity, no. Was Ken Kesey aware he was being used in some way or was he aware of any such use? He may have suspected it, but he certainly was no active member of any club. There are known instances of discussions and conversations of Kesey and Ginsburg discussing whether or not the CIA was around them. If they were, Ginsberg and Kesey were oblivious to it. They appeared to be very knowledgeable about the sinister history of the institution, and as revolutionary minded people, they were not keen to be co-opted. To my knowledge Alfred Matthew Hubbard was the only one who anyone has claimed, was CIA connected, but Humphry Osmond does not think so and Hubbard’s role was not all that large in the scheme of things. |
It appears to me as well as many other researchers, that the CIA’s interest in mushrooms and LSD for the purpose of learning about the mind and how to control it. LSD made people too aware of their own person, and personal environment, so that, it would actually cause paranoia when someone was “studied” under the influence. Kesey himself, ended up writing One Few over the Cuckoo’s Nest after his experience at Stanford. It was not good for interrogation. The true reason for studying it may have been to understand the psychic factors of the mind better and how LSD itself created a mind state that they might be able to mimic somehow. The CIA already had an interest in the study of psilocybin for these exact reasons around this same time. LSD seems to have been used as a cover to study the mind and the desire to create a “truth serum” may have had little to do with it. In his book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, in 1979, John Marks first exposes the link between Gordon Wasson and the CIA, but Wasson is not implicated in knowing about the involvement of the CIA: “Thus Gordon Wasson described the first known mushroom trip by "outsiders" in recorded history. The CIA's men missed the event, but they quickly learned of it, even though Wasson's visit was a private non-institutional one to a place where material civilization had not reached. Such swiftness was assured by the breadth of the Agency's informant network, which included formal liaison arrangements with agencies like the Agriculture Department and the FDA and informal contacts all over the world. A botanist in Mexico City sent the report that reached both CIA headquarters and then James Moore. In the best bureaucratic form, the CIA description of Wasson's visions stated sparsely that the New York banker thought he saw "a multitude of architectural forms." Still, "God's flesh" had been located, and the MKULTRA leaders snatched up information that Wasson planned to return the following summer and bring back some mushrooms.” In the next paragraph we learn that: “During the intervening winter, James Moore wrote Wasson—"out of the blue," as Wasson recalls—and expressed a desire to look into the chemical properties of Mexican fungi. Moore eventually suggested that he would like to accompany Wasson's party, and, to sweeten the proposition, he mentioned that he knew a foundation that might be willing to help underwrite the expedition. Sure enough, the CIA's conduit, the Geschickter Fund, made a $2,000 grant. Inside the MKULTRA program, the quest for the divine mushroom became Subproject 58.” (58) (58) The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John D. Marks, 1978, p. 113-14 |