Why MKULTRA Matters More Than Ever

The CIA’s MKULTRA program is one of the most secretive research programs that have existed involving mass experimentation on unwitting subjects.

On Tuesday, Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna will be holding a hearing on MKULTRA Experiments and Its Impact on Public Trust according to the Committee on Oversight’s press release.

Its ‘impact on public trust’ may be the least of our concerns.

Allen W. Dulles authorized the clandestine program in 1953 as Director of Central Intelligence.

In a speech delivered the same year at Princeton University’s National Alumni Conference, Dulles remarked about understanding alleged Soviet mind-control techniques: “We, in the West, are somewhat handicapped in getting all the details. (…) [W]e have no human guinea pigs, ourselves, on which to try out these extraordinary techniques.”

As history shows, a lack of ‘human guinea pigs’ wasn’t going to stop the CIA when the American people would suffice.

After at least two decades of unimaginable, inhumane, and unethical human experimentation centering around overarching behavior control, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all files related to the MK-ULTRA program in 1973.

The program was only made public because the CIA failed to destroy a number of financial records, the discovery of which led to a Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources before the United States Senate in 1977.

What was uncovered wasn’t an isolated scandal it was an operating system.

The 1977 Senate Intelligence Committee document shows MKULTRA was divided into 149 sub-projects. The report states:

“We are now in the possession of the names of 185 nongovernment researchers and assistants who are identified in the recovered material dealing with these 149 subprojects. There are also names of 80 institutions where work was done or with which these people were affiliated. The institutions include 44 colleges or universities, 15 research foundation or chemical or pharmaceutical companies or the like, 12 hospitals or clinics, in addition to those associated with the universities, and 3 penal institutions.”

The CIA used philanthropic organizations as “cut-outs” for the MULTRA experiments related to the control of human behavior, which were carried out in 89 different institutions, including universities, according to the limited documents shown to the public.

The psychological manipulation and behavioral control techniques tested during MKULTRA on the few arguably became streamlined and expanded to a greater portion of the population.

In 2020, the media gleefully boasted that the UK Army’s 77th Psychological Operations Brigade was being unleashed upon the public for information warfare. Meanwhile, in 2022, a group of 40 psychologists warned Parliament of “grossly unethical” uses of its “nudge” tactics inflated fear among the public during the Covid pandemic, stating in their letter it was:

“Highly questionable whether a civilised society should knowingly increase the emotional discomfort of its citizens as a means of gaining their compliance”

The works and writings of both Psychologist Mattias Desmet (the theory of mass formation as it applies to the COVID-19 pandemic) and Michael Nehls and his book The Indoctrinated Brain go deeper into the far-reaching effects of the behavior modification that was forced upon the public during the pandemic response.

When looking throughout history, the MKULTRA program appears not to be an outlier but a logical extension of the U.S. government’s affinity for barbaric medical testing. From the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study (1932–1972) to the Willowbrook hepatitis experiment (1956-1971) where researcher Saul Krugman intentionally infected intellectually disabled children with live strains of Hepatitis in order to develop a vaccine.

A pattern emerges along with the infamous ‘Godfather of Vaccines’, Dr. Stanley Plotkin’s early research, where he admits to conducting vaccine experiments on babies born to incarcerated mothers, people with mental illness, and people with disabilities.

Even the genesis of the current human augmentation and transhumanism push was seeded within MKULTRA experiments. 1961 documents from CIA archives of subproject 94 state:

“The purpose of this subproject is to provide a continuation of activities in selected species of animals. Miniaturized stimulating electrode implants in specific brain center areas will be utilized.”

McGill University was a notorious center for MKULTRA experiments. A research journal chronicling medical discoveries writes:

“Just over fifty years ago, psychologists James Olds and Peter Milner, working at McGill University in Canada, carried out their pioneering experiments which discovered that rats would repeatedly press levers to receive tiny jolts of current injected through electrodes implanted deep within their brains…”

Although MKULTRA’s chapter has been buried in U.S. history, its tentacles continue to reach to the present.

In 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard launched the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG), a temporary task force to operate as an independent declassification and oversight unit focusing on highly scrutinized topics and historical events like COVID origins, “Havana Syndrome” incidents, and declassification of records on the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK.

In May 2026, CIA whistleblower James Erdman III testified at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing regarding a cover-up of the federal assessment of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During testimony, Erdman stated:

“When the DIG ceased operations, the CIA also took back 40 boxes of JFK files and MKULTRA files to be processed for declassification by DNI Gabbard.”

What else happened under this secretive program that has yet to be revealed? Will the public ever know the full scope of what happened and how it influenced the trajectory of society to this day? Will greater numbers of people be able to recognize and question the more subtle methods of behavior control now being employed in our daily lives through things like algorithmic behavior modification?