O’Brien has written two books about her experiences in a government-funded program called Project Monarch, which involved testing mind-control techniques on children.
There’s no evidence to suggest MKUltra experiments were actually performed on kids, but Cathy O’Brien sure thinks they were. That hasn’t stopped sensory deprivation’s proliferation or use by the government, nor has the long-standing debate over whether it constitutes torture. Though it’s not clear whether he was using a tank or some other form of sensory deprivation – like earplugs and blindfolds – some of the patients who underwent his experiments ended up permanently comatose. Donald Ewen Cameron used a combination of hallucinatory drugs like LSD, electroshock therapy and sensory deprivation on unwitting patients, many of whom came in for things as innocuous as anxiety treatment. While working on a subproject of MKUltra, psychiatrist Dr. Lilly was nice enough to test it on himself first, but sensory deprivation didn’t stay nice for long. Lilly, the isolation tank (like the saltwater kiddie pool seen on the show) was developed as a means of sensory deprivation. In real life, they mostly trigger hallucinations.įirst invented in the 1950s by neuroscientist and dolphin enthusiast John C. In Stranger Things, sensory deprivation tanks are used to trigger Eleven’s powers to help her listen in on far-away conversations and sneak up on the monster from the Upside Down. When not being used to coerce testimony out of suspected terrorists at government black sites, sensory deprivation can be a relaxing and meditative experience probably happening at a spa near you. Were any of these experiments performed on women who didn’t know they were pregnant? Did those pregnancies then yield psychokinetic children that could be used as secret government weapons? For some reason, that doesn’t appear in the transcript, so let’s rule it a solid “maybe.” It’s hard to know exactly how far-reaching the experiments were or who knew about them (even some of the researchers involved had no idea they were participating in a government-funded project), but the transcript of the 1977 Select Committee on Intelligence is a fascinating read – and not only for the reference to the MKUltra subproject that studied “magicians’ arts as applied to covert operations.” Researchers tried to see if hallucinogens had the power to control minds, erase memories and even work as truth serum. Of particular interest to the government were the drugs that could be used to extract sensitive information, especially LSD. It’s enough to paint a terrifying picture of a wide-ranging government project that sought to capitalize on mind-control techniques that could, theoretically, be used against enemies during the Cold War. Most of the documents relating to the project were destroyed by the CIA in 1973 because of course they were, but what we know comes from witness testimony, a couple congressional investigations and a cache of 20,000 incorrectly-filed budgetary documents found during a Freedom of Information Act request in 1977.
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