Table of Contents
- Project Sunshine
- Dalai Lama
- Poisoning Alcohol
- Gaydar Machine
- Tuskegee Experiments
- MKUltra
- Operation Mockingbird
- Operation Northwoods
- Government Spying
Before I begin, I want to say I’m not a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist. I own a tinfoil hat of course, but these days, I only wear it on weekends and holidays.
I understand there are some loony toon theories out there. However, the truth is, people felt the same way about every one of these insane conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.
After you learn about the conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. Next time you hear something and assume it’s too outrageous to be real, hopefully, you’ll investigate before deciding it’s fake.
Let’s begin with a whopper of a conspiracy theory.
Project Sunshine
This one somehow flew under my radar until I started working on this.
In the 1950s, the U.S. government established a worldwide trade network of dead baby bodies. To be specific: tissue and bones. Yes, you read that right. The United States wanted the dead bodies of babies and they wanted them in the worst kind of way.
Because they needed young tissue, they recruited a worldwide network of agents to find recently deceased babies and children, and then take samples and even limbs – each collected without notification or permission of the more than 1,500 grieving families.
In June 1995, a Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, set up by former President Clinton released classified documents from the Atomic Energy Commission, which showed that scientists working on Project Sunshine were aware of the dubious ethical and legal grounds on which their research was being conducted.
In a transcript of a secret meeting on Jan. 18, 1955, Dr. Willard Libby, a University of Chicago researcher, who went on to win the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, acknowledged that the difficulty in getting human samples was resulting in “great gaps” in the project’s findings.
“I don’t know how to get them,” Libby is quoted as saying. “But I do say that it is a matter of prime importance to get them and particularly in the young age group. So, human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country.”
It wasn’t only the United States involved in this, the Australian and British Governments were stealing parts of babies and shipping them to the United States as well.
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a CIA agent, no way, right? I must’ve lost the little bit of mind I had left, right? Wrong.
He most definitely was an agent for the CIA.
Perhaps the reason the Dalai Lama is always smiling in photos has something to do with the six-figure salary he pulled down from the U.S. government during the 1960s.
According to declassified intelligence documents, he earned $180,000 in connection with the CIA’s funding of the Tibetan Resistance to the tune of $1.7 million per year.
The idea was to disrupt and hamper China’s infrastructure. Judging by the way China has reasserted itself on the world stage I’m not so sure it was money well spent. Then again, what do I know? Not much, that’s what.
With the knowledge that even the Dalai Lama was compromised, bought & paid for by the United States Government, the question becomes, is anything we’re told true? In my opinion, not very much.
Poison Alcohol
During Prohibition, the United States government poisoned alcohol to keep people from drinking.
Between 1926 and 1933, the federal government pushed manufacturers to use stronger poisons to discourage bootleggers from turning the alcohol into moonshine.
That didn’t stop the bootleggers or their customers, and by the end of Prohibition, more than 10,000 Americans had been killed by tainted booze.
“Gaydar“
The Canadian government was so paranoid about homosexuality that it developed a “gaydar” machine.
Yes, It happened: In the 1960s, the government hired a university professor to develop a way to detect homosexuality in federal employees.
He came up with a machine that measured pupil dilation in response to same-sex-erotic imagery; the Canadian government used it to exclude or fire more than 400 men from civil service, the military, and the Mounties.
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
In 1932, the United States Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute began the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male to record the natural history of syphilis and analyze differences between black and white men.
The study involved 600 black men in Macon County, Alabama, 399 of whom had contracted syphilis and 201 of whom had not. It was supposed to last only 6 months but would go on for 40 years, during which the men were merely told that they had “bad blood”.
Participants received free medical exams, meals, and burial insurance, but they were never told that they had syphilis and were never treated for it. Many discovered their illness after registering for the draft in World War II, but they were still denied penicillin or an exit from the study.
In 1972, the Associated Press published a story that led to public outcry and the appointment of an Ad Hoc Advisory Panel that found the study ethically unjustified. The study ended and was followed by a class-action lawsuit that was settled out of court for 10 million dollars and lifetime medical benefits.
For many, it was too late; by the 1970s, only 128 of the original 399 still lived, while 49 wives and 19 children had also contracted the disease. Despite a presidential apology, the Tuskegee Experiment remains a powerful symbol of American racism and government abuse of the poor.
Project MKUltra
For a long time, the United States government denied that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been running experiments on citizens from the 1950s onwards. However, a Freedom of Information Act filing in 1977 brought 20,000 previously classified documents to light that would lead to a series of Senate hearings on the CIA’s mind control program.
When all was said and done, the evidence clearly showed that the government had organized the treatment of American citizens with drugs, hypnosis, subliminal persuasion, sensory deprivation, electroshock therapy, verbal and sexual abuse, and even torture. The goal of all such methods was to experiment with behavioral modifications in the hopes of developing programming for government agents.
Despite the large amount of damning evidence involved, CIA Director Richard Helms most likely destroyed the most damning files on MKUltra in 1973. Furthermore, the government contracted out such projects to over 80 different pharmaceutical companies, prisons, hospitals, and universities. As a result, a great deal of the program’s operations remains unclear. To this day no one has been brought to justice for this abusive program or the negative impacts upon participants.
Operation Mockingbird
Although contemporary media often face critiques for seemingly collaborating with government officials, the CIA once actively tried to control mass media outlets. Near the beginning of the Cold War, Director of the Office of Special Projects Frank Wisner launched a top-secret project to buy influence at major media outlets.
He specifically established Mockingbird based on directions from above to craft an organization to engage in sabotage, propaganda, and subversion of hostile states through domestic and foreign media. Wisner would then enlist journalists and news organizations, including current figures like Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. In effect, they would become veritable spies and propagandists. Agents held posts at ABC, NBC, CBS, the Associated Press, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, and other key players in news media.
By the 1950s, the CIA had a vast network of agents at America’s most prominent news organizations, businesses, and universities. It was only in the 1970s that Rolling Stone and The New York Times reported on the overlap between the CIA and prominent news organizations.
A Congressional report followed in 1976 that documented the CIA’s reliance upon networks of several hundred foreign individuals around the world for intelligence and influence upon public opinion through propaganda. Although Mockingbird was said to have ended, anyone who believes it did, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Find out how the media brainwashed you
Operation Northwoods
In the past, supposedly wacky conspiracy theorists proposed that the United States military had developed plans to provoke war with Cuba. For a long time, the theory seemed outlandish – at least until Congress passed a law in the 1990s to make records surrounding President John F. Kennedy more transparent.
As it turned out, Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer led the military Joint Chiefs of Staff in drawing up and approving just such a plan. In the early 1960s, they developed a detailed guide for a wave of terrorist actions that would build support for a war against their Communist neighbor.
- Citizens would be bombed and shot in the street.
- A Cuban aircraft would shoot down a plane of college students
- Boats of refugees would sink in the Gulf of Mexico.
Other plans also included the explosion of a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and the apparent murder of astronaut John Glenn mid-flight – with Cubans and Fidel Castro taking the blame.
If the government was willing to kill its own citizens then, what is different now?
Government Spying
Another long dismissed conspiracy theory is the notion that the National Security Administration (NSA) illegally eavesdrops on its citizens. While this particular theory has a long history, it gained new life after the events of 9/11 and a push by government agencies to monitor all communication to prevent terrorist acts.
As the Director of National Intelligence recently revealed, the surveillance state is incredibly robust. As the Snowden documents also show, multiple programs, institutions, and companies constantly monitor cell phone, email, and other communication records. The scope of government surveillance is now far beyond the wildest dreams of most conspiracy theorists.
However, constant data collection does not have clear benefits. In 2014, The Washington Post reported that almost 90% of data collected by NSA surveillance was unrelated to terrorism. At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit claiming that this surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy and First Amendment rights to free speech and association.
Furthermore, collecting every possible piece of data is self-defeating. Not only are financial costs hefty, but, even when information like Syria’s use of chemical weapons comes to light, the U.S.A. cannot necessarily intervene. The greatest cost, though, is the loss of privacy, freedom, liberty, and mutual respect that should hold a society together.
In Conclusion
The next time you hear a seemingly delusional conspiracy theory, take the time to investigate before you decide that it’s too impossible to be true. Otherwise, you might regret it.
