When Spies Turned to Sorcery: The CIA's Dark Dance with the Occult
Inside America's Most Disturbing Intelligence Experiments
From remote viewing to mind control, the U.S. government's desperate pursuit of paranormal warfare left a trail of broken minds and shattered ethics
The article below is based on the content in the Weird Darkness episode, “CIA MIND CONTROL: The Terrifying Truth About MKUltra, Remote Viewing & Psychic Spies”. You can hear the episode in the player below.
The fluorescent lights hummed in the underground bunker as Ingo Swann felt his consciousness slip from his body. His physical form remained motionless in a chair at Fort Meade, Maryland, but his mind soared across continents, penetrating the iron curtain to peer into Soviet military installations. This wasn't science fiction—this was Project Stargate, and the United States government was paying psychics to spy on its enemies.
SECTION ONE: THE PSYCHIC COLD WAR
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION ONE in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
When Fear Breeds Desperation
The year 1970 brought a peculiar terror to American intelligence agencies. Soviet television broadcasts showed a middle-aged woman named Nina Kulagina sitting at a plain wooden table, her face contorted in concentration. Without touching them, objects began sliding across the surface—matchboxes, salt shakers, compass needles spinning wildly. Most disturbing of all, in one filmed laboratory session, she allegedly stopped a frog's heart using only her mind.
American intelligence officers watched these grainy films with mounting dread. Their hands trembled slightly as they wrote urgent memos warning of a "psychoenergetic threat" that could render conventional warfare obsolete. The possibility that Soviet agents might kill American officials from thousands of miles away using only their thoughts sent the CIA scrambling for answers.
The panic was palpable in the sterile conference rooms of Langley. If the Soviets had cracked the code of psychic warfare, America faced a threat more terrifying than nuclear missiles—an enemy that could reach directly into minds, manipulate thoughts, even stop hearts without leaving a trace.
The Stargate Opens
In October 1978, the lights never went off in Buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade. Inside these nondescript structures, a bizarre unit took shape under the leadership of Lieutenant Frederick Holmes Atwater, who described himself as a "psychic headhunter." The windows were painted black. Strange geometric symbols adorned the walls. This was the birthplace of America's psychic spy program.
The recruitment process defied all military convention. Instead of physical fitness tests or marksmanship trials, candidates underwent sessions where they attempted to describe the contents of sealed envelopes or sketch distant locations they'd never visited. Those who showed promise—often no more than twenty at any given time—became America's supernatural soldiers.
One early success sent shockwaves through the intelligence community. In September 1979, remote viewer Joe McMoneagle settled into his viewing chair, clutching only a sealed envelope. Inside was a photograph of a Soviet naval base. As McMoneagle's breathing slowed and his eyes rolled back, he began describing industrial smells, a shoreline, and most peculiarly, a massive "shark-like" weapon system housed in what resembled a coffin.
Intelligence analysts initially dismissed his visions as nonsense. But when satellite imagery arrived months later showing the Soviets' new Akula-class submarine—"akula" being Russian for "shark"—with its distinctive fin-like protrusions, skeptics fell silent. The submarine's existence had been completely unknown to Western intelligence.
SECTION TWO: MUSHROOMS, MADNESS, AND MK-ULTRA
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION TWO in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
The Doctor's Deadly Curiosity
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb's hands didn't shake as he prepared the syringe. The year was 1953, and in the basement laboratories of the CIA's Technical Services Division, he was about to cross a line that would haunt American intelligence for decades. The syringe contained LSD—lysergic acid diethylamide—a drug so powerful that a microscopic dose could shatter a human mind like a hammer hitting glass.
Gottlieb, a clubfooted chemist with a disarming stutter, had already tested the drug on unwitting subjects. But Frank Olson, an Army chemist who'd been slipped LSD at a CIA retreat, presented an unexpected problem. After ingesting the drug, Olson's personality fractured. He spoke of terrible visions, of his soul being pulled from his body, of seeing his own death. Nine days later, he plunged through a closed tenth-floor window of New York's Statler Hotel.
The official story claimed suicide. But when Olson's body was exhumed four decades later, forensic examiners found evidence of blunt force trauma to his skull, inconsistent with a fall. Someone had struck him before he went through that window.
Operation Midnight Climax
George White lit another Lucky Strike and watched through the two-way mirror as the businessman loosened his tie. The year was 1955, and White—a Bureau of Narcotics officer on loan to the CIA—had transformed a San Francisco apartment into a grotesque laboratory. The walls were adorned with Toulouse-Lautrec posters and red velvet. A well-stocked bar gleamed in the corner. This was a CIA brothel, and the prostitutes working here had a special mission.
The women, recruited from the city's underworld, would slip LSD into their clients' drinks while White observed from behind the mirror, scribbling notes about the men's reactions. Some clients believed they were going insane. Others experienced profound terror, convinced that their bodies were dissolving or that demons were crawling through the walls. White later wrote that it was "fun, fun, fun" and asked where else "could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?"
The operation expanded to New York, where White established another safe house in Greenwich Village. Here, the experiments grew darker. CIA documents reveal they weren't just studying the effects of LSD—they were learning how to break down human personalities completely, to create what they called "expendable agents" who could be programmed to kill without conscience or memory.
The Mushroom Hunters
While White ran his houses of horror, other CIA operatives ventured into the remote mountains of southern Mexico. Their quarry wasn't Soviet agents but something far stranger—the legendary "magic mushrooms" that local shamans had used for centuries to commune with gods.
R. Gordon Wasson, a banker by day and mycologist by passion, had no idea that his companion on the journey, James Moore, was a CIA chemist tasked with weaponizing whatever they found. As they trudged through humid valleys where ancient knowledge survived in whispered Mazatec prayers, Moore's mind raced with possibilities. Could these mushrooms provide the key to controlling human consciousness?
In a dirt-floored hut, they met Maria Sabina, a weathered curandera whose ancestors had guarded the mushroom's secrets for generations. Through clouds of copal incense, she performed the velada ceremony, chanting in the darkness as participants consumed the sacred fungi. Wasson experienced visions of fantastic cities and geometric patterns that seemed to reveal the architecture of reality itself. But while he marveled at the spiritual experience, Moore was already calculating dosages and delivery methods.
SECTION THREE: MANUFACTURING MANCHURIAN CANDIDATES
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION THREE in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
The Sleep Room Nightmares
The screams echoing through the Gothic towers of Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute in 1961 weren't from mental patients having nightmares—they were from patients being turned into blank slates. Dr. Ewen Cameron, funded secretly by the CIA, had transformed portions of the psychiatric hospital into a factory for manufacturing amnesia.
His "depatterning" technique involved massive doses of electroshock—up to forty times the standard strength—combined with drug-induced comas lasting months. Patients who entered with mild depression emerged unable to recognize their own children. Linda MacDonald went in as a young mother with postpartum depression; she came out incontinent, unable to feed herself, with no memory of her first twenty-six years of life.
In the sleep rooms, tape recorders played messages on endless loops—sometimes a single phrase repeated half a million times while patients lay helpless in drug-induced stupors. Cameron believed he could wipe the human mind clean like a blackboard, then write new personalities onto the blank slate. His patients' minds shattered, but they never reassembled the way he intended.
One survivor, Val Orlikow, recalled lying in darkness for weeks, her mind dissolving as recorded voices burrowed into her unconscious. She remembered standing on a Montreal street corner afterward, unable to recall her own name, considering throwing herself under passing cars because the mental anguish was unbearable. Only the thought that she might survive as a vegetable stopped her.
The Perfect Assassin
In a nondescript building in Virginia, CIA psychologist John Gittinger developed what he called the Personality Assessment System—a method to identify the exact pressure points that could shatter any individual's psyche. His goal was breathtakingly ambitious: to create assassins who would kill on command, then forget they'd done it.
The CIA's documents, declassified decades later, reveal discussions about targeting Fidel Castro with such a "Manchurian Candidate." Theoretical models showed it was possible—through a combination of hypnosis, drugs, and psychological manipulation—to create an assassin with no memory of their actions. But the plan had a fatal flaw: an agent under total control couldn't adapt to unexpected situations. As one officer noted, "If you have 100% control of a guy, you have 100% dependency. If something happens and you haven't programmed it in, you've got a problem."
SECTION FOUR: WARRIORS OF THE MIND
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION FOUR in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
Mars, Monsters, and Military Madness
Randy Cramer's story sounds like the fevered dream of a science fiction writer, yet he swears every word is true. According to his testimony, given to MUFON investigators and anyone else who would listen, he spent twenty years as a super-soldier fighting underground creatures on Mars before being age-reversed and sent back in time to 1987, waking up in his teenage body with only fragmented memories of carnage on the red planet.
His descriptions of Martian combat were viscerally specific—the way the thin atmosphere made his lungs burn despite his enhanced physiology, the clicking sounds the indigenous reptilian beings made before attacking, the weight of the pulse rifle in his hands as he mowed down waves of hostile creatures in underground tunnels. He spoke of watching his own arm regrow in holographic medical beds after being torn off in combat, the phantom pain lingering long after new flesh had formed.
Whether Cramer's accounts represent recovered memories, elaborate delusions, or something else entirely, they mirror disturbing patterns in testimonies from other alleged participants in secret space programs. The age reversal, the memory suppression, the advanced medical technology—these elements appear again and again in accounts that span decades and continents.
The Jupiter Journey
In 1973, Ingo Swann lay on a cot in a windowless room at Stanford Research Institute, electrodes attached to his skull. The tasking seemed impossible: psychically travel to Jupiter and describe what he found there. As his handlers watched EEG monitors spike wildly, Swann's body went rigid.
According to the official transcripts, he reached Jupiter in three minutes—a journey that takes space probes years. He described a thin ring system around the gas giant, crystals of ice glittering in the cosmic darkness. Scientists present scoffed; every astronomer knew Jupiter had no rings.
Six years later, Voyager 1's cameras revealed exactly what Swann had described—Jupiter's previously unknown ring system. The vindication was bittersweet; by then, Swann had seen things that made planetary rings seem mundane by comparison.
The Forbidden Moon
Swann's most disturbing remote viewing session came in 1975 when a mysterious "Mr. Axelrod" arrived with coordinates for the far side of the moon. As Swann's consciousness soared through space, what he found there made his handlers panic.
He described vast structures of glass and metal, atmospheric processors humming with alien purpose. But it was the moment when the base's inhabitants noticed his psychic presence that truly terrified his handlers. "Pull back!" Axelrod shouted. "Come away from there immediately!"
Swann returned to his body shaking, demanding answers. Were there really extraterrestrial bases on the moon? Axelrod's only response was a cryptic "Isn't that something?"
SECTION FIVE: THE LILLY WAVE AND ELECTRONIC POSSESSION
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION FIVE in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
The Devil in the Details
Dr. John Lilly's breakthrough came not from mystical visions but from painstaking electrical engineering. Working with dolphins for the Navy, he discovered a specific waveform that could bypass the brain's natural resistance to external programming. The Lilly Wave, as it became known, was elegant in its simplicity—a balanced bidirectional pulse that moved neural ions back and forth without damaging brain tissue.
What Lilly didn't anticipate was how his discovery would be weaponized. By the 1980s, mysterious black boxes appeared in power stations across America. These devices, according to investigators like Adam Trombly, injected Lilly Wave patterns into the 60-hertz electrical current flowing into every American home.
The implications were staggering. Every lamp, every television, every electrical device became a potential carrier for subliminal programming. The very walls hummed with frequencies designed to make minds pliable, suggestible, obedient.
Patrick Flanagan, inventor and consciousness researcher, measured these signals across the country. He found emotional signatures embedded in the electrical noise—the frequency of fear broadcast during times of social unrest, waves of artificial apathy during elections, pulses of aggression when war support was needed. The power grid had become a nationwide mind control apparatus, and most Americans plugged themselves into it willingly every day.
Digital Demons
The transition to digital television in 2009 wasn't about picture quality—it was about precision. Analog signals were blunt instruments; digital broadcasting could target specific neural pathways with surgical accuracy. The flicker rates, the color frequencies, even the compression algorithms were calibrated to induce specific mental states.
Former intelligence officers, speaking on condition of anonymity, described "cognitive firewalls" built into digital broadcast standards. These systems could identify individual viewers through their unique neural responses and tailor content accordingly. What one person saw as a commercial for laundry detergent, another might experience as a hypnotic trigger sequence, depending on their psychological profile and past programming.
SECTION SIX: THE POLYBIUS PROTOCOL
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION SIX in the blog post, which you can read athttps://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
The Arcade Apocalypse
In 1981, Portland's arcade scene was thriving. Kids pumped quarters into Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, their faces bathed in cathode-ray glow. Then Polybius arrived—a black cabinet with abstract graphics that seemed to shift and writhe even when the screen was static.
Within days, lines formed around the machine. Players reported strange symptoms: migraines that felt like burning wires in their brains, nightmares of endless geometric mazes, episodes where they'd lose hours of time and wake up miles from the arcade with no memory of traveling.
Men in black suits visited weekly, ignoring the cash box but downloading data from the machine's memory banks. They spoke to no one, but arcade owners noticed they paid special attention to certain players—usually those who'd had the strongest reactions to the game.
Brian Mauro, who claimed to have played Polybius extensively, described the experience years later: "The game didn't just test your reflexes—it tested your sanity. The patterns would sync with your brainwaves. I could feel it rewiring me, changing how I thought. After a week of playing, I started seeing the game's patterns everywhere—in wallpaper, in clouds, in people's faces. I had to stop when I realized I was unconsciously tracing the game's maze patterns with my finger during conversations."
Six weeks after arriving, every Polybius machine vanished overnight. No receipts, no shipping records, no explanation. Just empty spaces where the machines had stood, and dozens of Portland teenagers with symptoms eerily similar to those reported by MK-Ultra subjects.
SECTION SEVEN: MODERN SORCERY
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION SEVEN in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
The Trauma Factory
Today's mind control operates on an industrial scale. Dr. Colin Ross, a psychiatrist who's studied declassified CIA documents extensively, argues that programs like MK-Ultra never ended—they simply went deeper underground and emerged in new forms.
Modern techniques don't require drugs or electrodes. Social media algorithms create personalized echo chambers that gradually shift users' beliefs. Smartphone screens flicker at frequencies that induce dopamine addiction. News broadcasts use neuro-linguistic programming techniques refined from decades of experimentation.
The fragmenting of attention spans, the epidemic of anxiety disorders, the polarization of society into warring tribes—these aren't accidents or unfortunate side effects of technology. They're features, not bugs, in a system designed to keep populations distracted, divided, and dependent.
Celebrity Slaves
When Roseanne Barr spoke to RT News about MK-Ultra "ruling Hollywood," industry insiders dismissed her as another celebrity having a breakdown. But the patterns were disturbingly consistent—young stars who suddenly shave their heads, speak in different accents, or have public breakdowns always around age 30, when early programming supposedly begins to fragment.
Britney Spears telling a tattoo artist she shaved her head because she was "tired of people touching her and plugging things into her." Kanye West ranting about being an "alien starseed sent to help Earth" before being forcibly hospitalized. Amanda Bynes tweeting "I will not be manipulated or brainwashed by anyone anymore" before disappearing from public view.
Each breakdown followed the same pattern: erratic behavior, psychiatric hospitalization, emergence with a flat affect and compliance that friends described as "not the same person." The entertainment industry's mental health crisis looked less like coincidence and more like evidence of an ongoing program.
The Networks of Control
By 2020, the infrastructure for mass mind control had evolved beyond the wildest dreams of MK-Ultra's architects. 5G towers capable of broadcasting specific frequencies to target individuals' unique brainwave patterns. Smart devices that monitor speech patterns, eye movements, and emotional states. AI systems that could predict and influence behavior with terrifying accuracy.
The new generation of mind control didn't need secret facilities or unwitting subjects. People volunteered their minds willingly, carrying tracking devices everywhere, sharing their thoughts online, submitting to endless surveillance in exchange for convenience and connection.
Former NSA analyst William Binney warned that the capability now existed to not just monitor thoughts but to insert them. "We're dealing with technology that can beam voices into your head, induce emotions, even create false memories. And unlike the crude experiments of the past, modern systems can do this remotely, precisely, and on a massive scale."
SECTION EIGHT: THE SHADOW WAR CONTINUES
(The below section is just a sample of the full-length deep dive in SECTION EIGHT in the blog post, which you can read at https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/)
Battlefield: Mind
The documents paint a picture of ongoing psychic warfare that makes the Cold War experiments look quaint. Modern remote viewing programs, according to leaked documents, have achieved success rates approaching 85% for certain types of targets. Psychic soldiers no longer just observe—they claim the ability to influence electronics, induce hallucinations in enemy combatants, even stop hearts from thousands of miles away.
At Fort Meade, Building 2561 still stands, its windows still painted black. Locals report strange electromagnetic readings in the area, and former employees speak in hushed tones about projects that make Stargate look like a warmup act. The psychic arms race that began with fears of Soviet mind control has evolved into something far more sinister—a war for human consciousness itself.
The Price of Power
The true horror of these programs isn't found in their successes but in their failures—the countless minds shattered in pursuit of superhuman abilities, the families destroyed by experiments, the ethical boundaries obliterated in the name of national security.
Frank Olson's son Eric spent five decades investigating his father's death, uncovering layer after layer of deception. Linda MacDonald slowly rebuilt her life, learning to recognize her children again through years of therapy. The survivors of Cameron's depatterning experiments won a class-action lawsuit, but no amount of money could restore their stolen memories.
For every documented victim, how many remain unknown? How many people dismissed as mentally ill were actually casualties of experiments that officially never happened? The questions multiply like cancerous cells, each answer revealing ten new mysteries.
The Unfinished Symphony
As this investigation reveals, the U.S. government's dance with the occult and paranormal continues its dark waltz into the 21st century. The players change, the technology evolves, but the fundamental goal remains constant—the complete control of human consciousness.
The remote viewers still report for duty, though their offices have moved from military bases to private contractors. The mind control experiments continue, though now they're called "enhanced interrogation" or "influence operations." The psychic warriors train in secret, preparing for battles that will be fought in the space between thoughts.
In the end, the most disturbing revelation isn't that these programs existed—it's that they succeeded. Not in creating psychic super-soldiers or perfect assassins, but in something far more insidious: normalizing the unthinkable. In a world where minds can be hacked like computers, where thoughts can be inserted like malware, where consciousness itself becomes a battlefield, paranoia isn't madness—it's the only sane response.
The fluorescent lights still hum in underground facilities across America. Behind black-painted windows, the work continues. And somewhere, in a building with no signs and no windows, someone's consciousness is leaving their body, searching for secrets in the darkness between stars.
The dance continues. The music never stops.
And we are all, whether we know it or not, part of the performance.
SOURCES: https://weirddarkness.com/cia-occult-experiments-mind-control/
Man Loses Wife AND Disability Benefits After Taking Ex-Girlfriend BIGFOOT Hunting
When your marriage ends over Sasquatch… and the judge sides with the cryptid!
Listen to this article using this audio player!
There’s losing your marriage… and then there’s losing it because you took your ex-girlfriend on a Sasquatch hunt.
This, unfortunately, is not the plot of a low-budget horror comedy. It is an actual legal decision from British Columbia, Canada — a place known for maple syrup, moose, and now, emotionally catastrophic camping trips.
The case involved a 57-year-old man who argued he couldn’t work due to injuries he sustained while doing something many consider life-changing and noble: slipping on ice outside a hotel in Sayward while looking for Bigfoot. Sayward, for those unfamiliar, is a remote village so small it has more bears than baristas. And apparently, at least one guy willing to suffer spinal damage in pursuit of a blurry forest goblin.
But don’t worry — this man is no slouch. After falling down the stairs in 2016 and collecting a $350,000 settlement, he did what any rational person would do: continued going on quad-riding, off-the-grid camping adventures into the wilderness to find a mythical creature with questionable hygiene.
Naturally, his wife found all this inspiring and romantic. No. Just kidding. She divorced him because he went on one of these cryptid quests with his ex-girlfriend without bothering to mention it. He just sort of packed the bug spray, the bear repellent, and the ex, and forgot to bring his marriage along.
The wifey didn’t wait. The second she found out about the romantic wilderness getaway, she texted: “Congrats on your new girlfriend… and your ex. Say hi to Bigfoot — and that smelly, hairy, invisible ape, too.”
She never changed her mind (about her marriage, or about his ex being ugly), not even when he presumably tried to explain that it was totally platonic Sasquatch-hunting. An explanation that smelled even worse than the hairy hominid they were hunting.
Flash forward to the courtroom, where our hero was now asking for spousal support on the grounds that he was too injured to work. Now, you might be wondering how someone who claims to be “totally disabled” is also routinely stomping around British Columbia’s mountain ranges with a GoPro and beef jerky looking for a seven-foot-tall cryptid. – all while wooing his ex-girlfirend. That’s exactly what the judge wondered, too.
Justice Robin Baird, who deserves a raise for not bursting into laughter at any point during this trial, noted that the man was clearly still active. Not just “goes for walks in the park” active — we’re talking “riding quad bikes into the woods to chase a mythical primate” active. The judge even pointed out that the man had referred to himself as intellectually gifted, with “superior aptitudes.” Which, the court gently noted, could be used for things like, say, employment.
There was no medical paperwork newer than a 2018 disability application, and the man had made no visible effort to find work since 2016. Apparently, cryptozoology doesn’t come with dental, but it does provide enough adrenaline to ignore sciatica.
In the end, the court ruled that if you have the strength to hunt Bigfoot in the wilderness, you probably also have the strength to stock shelves, run a cash register, or at least file a resume. No spousal support was awarded. Neither party got legal costs. But the man presumably got to keep his tent, his quads, and the undying loyalty of that one guy on YouTube who also thinks Bigfoot is just misunderstood.
I have a few unanswered questions though…
How does one prepare for a romantic Sasquatch expedition with an ex? A couple sleeping bags, matching flannel, and absolutely no discussion of boundaries?
Was Bigfoot consulted as a character witness at the trial? If so, did he testify by attending through a blurry video feed?
Is there a secret dating app just for people who seek monsters and relationships in equal measure? Because that would explain so much… and I would totally get behind that and be their spokesperson.
And perhaps most importantly: what exactly did this guy think was going to happen? That he’d bag a Squatch, rekindle an old flame, and come home to a wife who’d say, “You rascal! You and your enchanted forest trysts!”
No. No, she did not say that.
Moral of the story?
If you’re going to fake being unable to work, maybe don’t do it while filming yourself running up hills doing Squatch calls.
Bigfoot still hasn’t been found, by the way. But at least one Canadian judge is now 100% certain that he exists — because the courtroom evidence and final decision was literally built around chasing the big guy.
MindOfMarlar™, WeirdDarkness®, Copyright ©2025
SOURCES: CTV News, Unexplained Mysteries
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And a Final Thought…
“Until you realize how easy it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game.” – Evita Ochel
NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is not an AI voice.