arfare specialist named Frank Olson, who was working on an MKULTRA project, was slipped a solid dose of LSD in his drink. Then, after spending eight days stumbling about in what many observers described as a paranoid, depressed state, Olson jumped through his hotel window in New York and fell ten stories to his death.The Agency covered up its role in Olsons demise, and twenty-two years would pass before his family would learn of the events leading up to his death. When the CIAs acid exploits were made public in the mid-1970s, the Agency found itself facing heavy criticism. One Senate committee put it this way in 1975:From its beginning in the early 1950s until its termination in 1963, the program of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting non-volunteer human subjects demonstrates a failure of the CIAs leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals and to provide effective guidance to CIA employees. Though it was known that the testing was dangerous, the lives of subjects were placed in jeopardy and were ignored. Although it was clear that the laws of the United States were being violated, the testing continued.Although the most prominently discussed aspect of MKULTRA is the CIAs LSD work, the program included many other unusual investigations relating to the science of mind control. CIA researchers probed the potential of numerous parapsychological phenomena, including hypnosis, telepathy, precognition, photokinesis and remote viewing.These studies werent conducted merely to satisfy the CIAs scientific curiosity the Agency was looking for weapons that would give the United States the upper hand in the mind wars. Toward that objective, the Agency poured millions of dollars into studies probing literally dozens of methods of influencing and controlling the mind. One 1955 MKULTRA document gives an indication of the size and range of the effort; the memo refers to the study of an assortment of mind-alteri...
