The CIA once tested mind control on unwitting prisoners
Cold War paranoia led government scientists to dose unsuspecting citizens with massive amounts of LSD, sometimes playing looped audio messages for sixteen hours straight to rebuild their personalities.
In the early 1950s, the CIA launched Project MKUltra to master the mechanics of the human mind, fearing that Soviet forces had already perfected brainwashing techniques. The agency recruited scientists from the former Nazi regime through Operation Paperclip to experiment on vulnerable populations, including mental patients and prisoners. At one facility, a doctor named Donald Ewen Cameron pioneered a technique called psychic driving. He would chemically induce a coma for weeks at a time, using electroshock therapy and barbiturates to shatter a subject's memory before playing looped audio messages for up to sixteen hours a day to 'reprogram' their behavior.