August 31, 2018 • 49 mins
In the era of the Cold War, intelligence agencies on both sides of the iron curtain desperately raced to secure any possible technological advantage, even if it meant breaking the law along the way. Join the guys as they interview filmmaker Bret Wood, the creator of The Control Group podcast, about the real-life events that inspired the first fiction podcast by HowStuffWorks.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is not They call me Ben. We are joined
with our super producer, Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are you,
and you are here, and that makes this stuff they
don't want you to know a very special episode of
our show today, because we are delving into something that
(00:45):
has always fascinated us. I think as individuals and as
a group, and that is the strange intersection of ethics
and experimentation science right science versus UH, the humanity of
both the UH, the experiment ers and the experimentees. But
(01:05):
we are not alone in this endeavor. Today we are
joined with a friend of the show, a filmmaker Brett Wood,
who just recently created How Stuff Works first fiction podcast,
the Control Group. Brett, thank you so much for coming
on the show with us today. Brett, what is excited
to be here and you are well. We haven't fully confirmed.
(01:30):
I haven't seen any identification. Did you guys get IDENTIFICA?
I got it at the front desk, then we have
a new policy. Okay, he's cool. He looks a lot
like Brett would he at least signed his name. Brett
would when he got in here, which is about the
level of our security. Wow, man, you're really throwing our
security team under the bus. Back so Brett. We were.
We were extremely excited about the Control Group as we
(01:54):
were learning more about the show and more about the
real life things, events, people in places that inspired the
narrative of the Control Group. And from what we understand,
this originally was a screenplay, is that correct? Right about
(02:17):
six years ago? I wanted to make it as a
film and quickly realized that it was sort of beyond
my means as an independent filmmaker to have, you know,
this large hospital facility and a fair number of of
extras as patients in the hospital. And also, as we
may get into a little bit later on, I ran
into some problems with the locations where I wanted to
(02:40):
shoot um, so I then moved over to a different
project which is mostly set in a house, which was
much more manageable for me. Is that one called Those
who Deserve to Die that's coming up next. That one
I've just finished and have not yet shown anywhere where
we're just finishing up the sound and music. The Unwanted
is the one we did instead of the Control Group, right,
(03:03):
And for anyone unfamiliar with the work, you are quite
a prolific creator. Made the Unwanted in Psychopathia Sexualist in
two thousand six, a documentary that we leaned on pretty
heavily in another show called car Stuff. It's called Hell's
Highway The True Story of Highway Safety Films in two
(03:24):
thousand three, which I cannot recommend enough if you want
something with a disturbing twist, those are upsetting. Oh yes,
I remember the carst Of episode that was back in
my heyday as superproducer Noel Brown. That's true, that's true.
We go we all go way back in this regard.
And so I like, I like where your work has
taken you thus far and kind of where it's headed.
Can you tell us, like exactly what the Control Group is,
(03:47):
what it's about? Sure, it's a sort of a narrativization
of uh A couple of different threads that were going
on in sort of psychological medicine and covert government activities
in the nineteen fifties and sixties. One of which is
the government's drug testing programs better known as MK Ultra
(04:10):
of course, Artichoke, Bluebird. There were lots of names for
what they were doing, which is basically secretly testing drugs
on people, preferably unsuspecting people, and trying to determine if
these could be useful tools for either mind control or interrogation.
And then the other threat of it is the u
(04:30):
c I a sponsorship of experimental psychological testing, uh, you know,
without any apparent connection to the you know, covert interrogation
arm of what they were doing. So they would just
they just set up a front organization to fund colleges, hospitals,
(04:53):
doctors to just do experiments that might kind of fit
in with the kind of stuff they're interested in, namely
things like erasing someone's memory, getting them to unlock the
secrets which they may be protecting. Um, you can sort
of see anything that might be applicable. They were kind
of open to and a lot of the doctors who
(05:14):
did the research didn't know they were sort of doing
it under the sponsorship of the CIA, And they say,
I called it a cutout, which I love that instead
of up front we have we have several cutouts that
we can hide this behind, and we're gonna hide this
behind the cutout known as the Society for the Investigation
of Human Ecology. It's just like such an important sounding
(05:38):
like who doesn't believe in that human ecology? That's what
they called it. And well, I guess that we can
announce here for the first time that pretty soon we
are going to make available Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology t shirts at our Control Group merchandise shops,
So just stand by for more details on at But um,
(06:01):
I just love the idea of this, of this UH
nonprofit organization handing out money to UH ambitious researchers. And
there's a bit of an ego feed to right. It's like,
we believe in your work. Sounds kind of like Illumination
Global Unlimited. And it's funny. This is why I feel
(06:23):
so at home here, you know, within the house stuff works.
Family is because like with the Driver's documentary, and I
know that MK Ultra has been a subject on stuff
they don't want you to know and other shows because
you know, your audience sort of relishes the secret histories
of not always the underbelly of what's going on in
our society. And government. But just like being in the
(06:44):
know of the things that were not in your high
school textbook, well said, So, let's dive into your research
process as you were gathering material and documentation for the
script itself and for the story. What what kind of
stuff did you find? Where did you look? Um? Mostly? Well,
(07:08):
the interesting is there's not much first generation information about
this stuff. Um. The whole thing would have been secret
and forgotten were it not for the survival of I
think seven boxes of financial records, receipts, and it was
from those documents that people were able to piece together
this history. Um. But there are a number of great
(07:28):
books on the subject. As far as the CIA testing,
there is UM the Search for the Manchurian Candidate by
John Marks and UM. As far as the medical research,
there's one person in particular who I was, who is
kind of the unofficial inspiration for our main doctor in
the control group, and the real life doctor's name is
(07:50):
you and Cameron, and he was a doctor in Quebec.
He was the head of the American Psychiatric Association. You know,
you couldn't be more highly regarded. But yet he was
conducting these today we might consider ethically questionable experiments in
manipulation of the mind, which I can't wait for us
(08:11):
to start talking about the details of those. But you know,
the thing is, when you read about all this stuff,
it just doesn't seem possible. It's it's outrageous, it's fascinating,
but you can't really imagine it actually happening. And so
what I wanted to do with the control group is
sort of imagine what would it be like to actually
be subjected to UM something we call psychic driving, which
(08:36):
is where Dr Cameron would UM. He would often record
it himself. He would a tape which would play in
a constant loop. You are not being kind to others.
You need to open up and be more open with
your emotions. You need to you know, and just sort
of a mantra or a reinforcement of the kind of
(08:56):
behavior the person should have. And so that tape would
play constantly, constantly, constantly in days at a time, for
days at a time, and UH in headphones, and sometimes
they would have like a helmet where it's wired so
a person could get up and walk around. And they
even had UM speakers built into mattresses so that when
(09:18):
someone is asleep, you will be kind to others you
will be more responsive to treatment. Um, that's psychic driving. Okay,
so that psychic driving. Was it done on patients in
like a psychiatric word or where Who was this done to? Yeah,
and it wasn't. That's the thing it was done to
just like regular people. UM. There was a tendency to
(09:40):
do a lot of this more on women, and we
of course addressed that. That's a big part of what
the control group is. UM. Some of that, I think
is the ego of the doctor who if he's gonna
shape and sculpt a patient Pygmalion style, he tends to
want to do that more with a woman than a man.
But I think also it feeds a lot into the
(10:02):
fact that, UM, psychological issues are have traditionally sort of
been tilted towards women. Like the best examples hysteria, that
is something that, if you take it by its original
technical definition, has to do, you know, with the reproductive
organs of a woman. That was the source from which
(10:23):
the psychological problem emanated. Or we think a lot about
housewives in the fifties being prescribed tranquilizers and for the
men they would just you know, have an extra martini
at lunch that was their way of dealing with it.
So there has often been this focus on psychological problems
on women and and so that sort of became an
(10:46):
important part of the control group as well as an
avenue of control. I think given the misogyny that was
institutionalized and still exists today, it seems like in many cases,
with the benefit of true respect, we're able as a
society to look back and say, well, that person wasn't
mentally ill. They just didn't want to be forced to
(11:07):
marry that jerk, you know. And this I think that's
I think that's a powerful thing. But the the idea
of psychic driving too, I don't want us to lose that.
At first, when you first hear it, it's easy to think, well,
I'm I'm familiar with that. I've had a song stuck
in my head before. How bad can it be? You know,
it can't be any worse than despicito or something. But uh,
(11:32):
there there are some other techniques that Dr Cameron was using.
Could you tell us a little bit about those, maybe
starting with the sleep treatments, So as part of the
psychic driving um, you would need to have your mind
sort of neutralized before the fresh messages, these reinforcements are
being allowed in your mind. They need to wipe the
(11:54):
slate clean, and so they did that a couple of
different ways, UM. But the cleaning process was called patterning,
and that means fix the mind so it no longer
has a regular pattern of thought. It's open and neutral.
And even people you know had memory loss, long term
memory loss, they could remember what was happening to them now,
(12:15):
but couldn't think back into their past. That was the
whole point. Wipe this late clean so that we can
replace it with the fresh messages, with the psychic driving.
So the one way they would do that is uh
e c T. Electro convulsive therapy better known today as
shock treatment. UM doubled up with sleep therapy, where they
(12:38):
would tranquilize someone and have them sleep around the clock.
And you know, sleep is great, and to a certain degree,
shock therapy even now is considered of of use when
correctly applied. But what they would do is give people
shock treatment multiple times in a single day, and according
(12:58):
to one source, six times the voltage or dosage at
which it is normally given. So it wasn't just like
you know, you're your need mental tune up It was
an attempt to really um flatten the brain waves of
the mind by excessively delivering shock treatment and then rest
(13:19):
so that the body and the mind would just shut
down and you get woken up, fed more E C
T and which puts you right back to sleep, and
then they would continue the drip or the pills. I
think someone was telling me that phena barbital is more
commonly given as pills, So that was I guess how
they would keep you in that deep sleep? Wow? And
(13:42):
how how effective was this at least the deep patterning
aspect um you know there, like I said, people did.
After this all came out, a number of patients got
together and sued you and Cameron, claiming that they had
erased their memories and you know, cross these ethical barriers.
(14:06):
So it certainly didn't seem to have the curative effect
that he was proclaiming it was going to have. Uh,
it didn't completely mess up people's minds the way say, uh,
you know, transorbital lobotomy might. So the effect it was
(14:26):
never proven to be especially effective either as a um
sort of a treatment for you know, general psychological difficulties,
and it certainly was never applied to the kind of
use that the CIA thought it might be viable for.
So we'll never know if it was an effective way
(14:47):
of interrogating or brainwashing someone. And it doesn't seem to
have been an especially effective way of curing someone's mental ills.
And we'll learn more about that right after a quick
word from our sponsor. But you know, there is one
thing that perhaps didn't exactly come out of this, but
(15:09):
was utilized within the mk Ultra trials and specifically within
the world of the control group, which is confinement the uh.
I don't want to give it away too much, but
the cages um, because that's something that we do see
used in what we would I guess consider modern interrogation
techniques isolating someone uh not not allowing them to sleep
(15:33):
for long periods of time um. And we see some
of that in this story as well. Yeah, and the
when we talk about the cages in the in the podcast,
it's a little bit of a fictionalization just in terms
of that, it's that it's true to the spirit of
what was going on. I mean, we had a lot
of sensory deprivation where someone be kept in the dark
(15:56):
with something over their eyes and something over their ears,
so they can't hear, and sometimes with their hands inserted
into something so they can't feel. As it's sort of
like a version of the sleep therapies. So just just
see how long a person could exist in that state
before their mind gets weakened and becomes open to you know,
(16:17):
better programming. I guess um. And in the podcast, the
characters talk about how, uh you know, back in the
day when the section this ward was called the cages,
people would just be left to wander and sit in
their own filth. I mean, that's very well documented from
like back in the nineties and forties, where do you
(16:37):
would have wards of people naked, sitting in their own
filth and just being given no treatment per se um
a condition that existed I think, you know, there was
a lot of uh, mental hospital reform in the nineteen fifties,
so it was mostly cleaned up at that time. But um,
(16:59):
you know, so you have this this dichotomy between like
excessive treatment and then no treatment where it's just a
matter of pump some drugs and someone neutralized the symptoms.
And ultimately that's what all this kind of was about.
And if we talk a lot about some of the
other medical visionaries who have done some pretty crazy things
(17:20):
over history. Usually the justification for what they did was
that it eliminated the symptoms, but it didn't actually cure
the disease. Um and my favorite, and I've thought about
trying to dramatize this guy's work somehow. Um, it was
a guy named Henry Cotton, and in the nineteen twenties
(17:43):
he had a big theory that mental illness and health
problems was were triggered by different kinds of infection and uh,
it's like bacterial infection. Yeah, and uh, chronic dental infection
was one of the big ones because you know, they
didn't have great gental care back in the nineteen twenties,
(18:03):
no fluoridation of water. And so he would pull teeth
and remove tonsils. And he had two sons and completely
pulled all their teeth, adult teeth and gave people ton
selectomies the colon, you know, lots of bacteria and the colon.
He would remove people's colons, He would remove portions of
their stomach, he would remove the spleens. So it was
(18:26):
just all about taking out anything that was a possible
source of infection. And you would be amazed at how
you know, high highly regarded this guy was, and how
high up the professional ladder he was able to climb.
He became the superintendent of the Trenton State Hospital in
New Jersey. In New Jersey, and uh, you know, eventually
(18:49):
people kind of realized, ah ha, will his numbers look
good on paper. But all he's doing is removing a call,
you know, a potential cause. He's getting rid of symptoms,
but he's not actually treating the illness. And usually in
cases like that, what happens is, we don't do that anymore,
and we don't talk about that anymore. And so like
(19:11):
lobotomies are another great example. The botomies were considered so
effective because they wiped out the symptoms. To say, they
don't do the bad stuff anymore. Yeah, and so diff
rid of their part of their brain that makes them
act like a human. And part of it is the
fact that you've you've physically changed them to not be
able to do that anymore. And in the case of
something like shocked therapy, they change their behavior because they
(19:36):
don't want more shocked therapy. Of course you're still not
treating the cause, but you're causing the symptom to go
away either medically or through the fear instilled in them
by well, it's like that idea that torture isn't particularly
effective and getting good confession. It's just effective at getting
what you want to hear, or you'll get some kind
of confession, some amazing stories. And if you torture someone enough,
(19:58):
don't tell you everything anything. This you're talking about it
reminds me of like sort of like a sick twisted
John Harvey Kellogg type almost where he's like into all
this like holistic stuff, but he's treating the symptoms more
than he is the actual illness. You know, enemas for everything,
like yogurt enemas and all this stuff. Kellogg's a great
guy because he's like the lighter side the same kind
(20:18):
of visionary and it's all about a good a good cold, right,
and we can kind of have fun with him. But
then when you get into someone who has a little
more barbaric in their treatments. But you know, but it's
the same, it's two sides of the same coin. This
sort of visionary uh medicine that is not that grounded
(20:43):
in the science of the illness is being treated well.
And this guy, the guy you're talking about it, sounds
like he kind of developed a bit of a god
complex around it too. When you're unchecked and you can
do this stuff and you have this vision, you know,
but no one's stopping you, then of course you're just
gonna push it as far as you can, right, and
no one's stopping you. And like in the case of
you and Cameron, you're being made the head of the
(21:05):
American Psychiatric Association. That's like total valid and should like
go take it further and so well, back to the
control group. One of the things I wanted to do
is what would one of these conversations be like with
the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, where they're
coaxing him along, and like, maybe you should try pushing
the envelope a little bit. And because I wanted to,
(21:27):
because because the doctors who are doing these things are
not monsters. They're ambitious, and I think they all have
good intentions, even if they have egos kind of running rampant,
And it doesn't take a whole lot of encouragement to
get someone to maybe cross the threshold into something a
little less ethical than they might if they were, um
(21:48):
not being fueled by so much encouragement and adoration. I
think that's a really good point because in the real
world we see these sorts of situations coalescing in degrees
of increments. It's not as if some shady person from
what was that phrase, Britt cut out comes to you
when comes to you and says, let's see how much
(22:11):
LSD we can pump into someone before we ruin their lives.
We're gonna just get like ten people and just take
a spaghetti at the wall approach. You know that that's
something that we ease into as people, and it's very
easy to rationalize those further steps, especially and I think
(22:32):
this is this even goes to um the degree of
victimization that some of the medical professionals experience, which is
much lower than the patients obviously, but there there being
um convinced that one must make certain sacrifices for the
(22:53):
quote unquote greater good. And we actually have a clip
from the controlled group that I think touches on this, right, Matt, Oh, yeah,
this is this is great. This is from episode four. Uh.
The name is phenobarbital, and it's a discussion between a
character named Summer Hill and Dr Hayes and they're discussing
(23:15):
funding for the I guess the research that's being done
at the hospital as well as what types of things
need to be done in order to continue that funding
of the research. Get us a name, start with that.
It'll be a good measure of your progress. But if
you hold that a little longer, do the detective work.
(23:36):
Connect the dots. I'll try, but I can't help wondering
whether or not we should be I'll stop thinking about should.
Should is a dirty word in research. Take yourself off
the leash, Dr Hayes. Allow yourself to run. You have
(23:56):
a hunch, follow it, got an inch, scratch it and
urge indulge it, and don't stop to ask whether it's
something you should be doing. If it gives you a
better understanding, that's all that matters. I love and detest
this so much because it feels too real to me,
(24:17):
having this person from the outside group that controls the
money that's gonna gonna fund the research come in and say, well,
you know, don't you want to do something that's going
to be different and beyond. I mean, I know you're fifty,
but you've really got to think like a twenty six
year old and push things harder, but he never once
says anything about you know, this is exactly what you
(24:40):
need to do or anything like that. So he's got
this weird plausible deniability with with him and his cutout, um.
But at the same time he's convincing this doctor to
push himself ethically to the to the boundary and perhaps beyond.
And it makes me wonder just how much of that
is actually what A heard during the mk Ultra trials,
(25:01):
how much they were just pushing people without the CIA
actually being the ones who are these dastardly who come
up with the dastardly ideas that we then think about
as being perhaps evil if you look back with hindsight,
it just makes you wonder if they're they're literally just
the pushers, just getting the scientists to keep going that
(25:22):
extra mind, right, I think, giving them the resources to
keep going, giving them the encouraging, uh you know, stroking
the ego a little bit. And then also you have
to remember in the nineteen fifties, um, a couple of
big things were happening at the time, and the biggest
one is the Cold War. And even though they didn't
specifically talk about the applications of this too, you know,
(25:44):
CIA activities. There was this sort of attitude that certainly
within the CIA, that we're behind in the race with
the Russians and the Chinese and the Koreans for mind
control because they believed brain watched was a real thing,
and to some degree it is, but not everyone believed
that it was going to be the thing that was
(26:06):
gonna You're gonna either transmit something to change the way
people think, or put something in the water supply. At
one point, they wanted to put LSD in an entire
city's water supply, just see what would happen. M or like,
have some kind of drug or tool, and essentially the Americans,
as we are, we love gadgets. Uh, the Americans always
(26:26):
wanted some kind of James Bondian type thing, whether it's
a drug or a tool or a shot. You know,
you give someone rather than the more effective means of
mind control, which is to have a conversation with someone,
earned their trust, left them talk and uh, you know,
share your ideas and eventually get them to come around
to your way of thinking. That is the most effective
(26:49):
means of mind control. But we don't have time for that.
We want, you know, we want the magic bullet, we
want the the spy device. So there was almost like
a sense of espionage to what was going on at
the time that there was there was a race to
find um either the secret of brainwashing on the part
of the CIA, or with medical science, there's always like
(27:10):
a race to either find the cure or find the
best treatment, or be the person to break through the
next threshold of psychological medicine. And a lot of times
there's this attitude of yeah, well, you know, there are
some ethical issues with this, but if we succeed, it's
for the greater good, so we're going to go ahead
and do the do the experiment. And you know that
(27:32):
persists today. There's always this sort of suggestion that if
you break a few eggs, that's fine, but as you know,
think of the millions of lines it's going to save
if these test subjects die for the sake of science.
You know, there's there's so many ways you can justify
doing something unethical, so many ways you can talk yourself
into believing that you're actually doing it for the greater good.
(27:55):
The greater good is one of those things that is
always such a when you hear phrase, you have to
be very suspicious of it because when someone trucks it out,
someone's gonna get hurt. It's a power move, right. It's
like I can tell you what the greater good is
because I have the master plan. I see the big picture,
and you need to get on board. Yeah. Our superproducer
(28:16):
Paul uses the phrase the greater good? Is it? Okay,
I'll play Devil's advocating for a moment. Isn't there a
greater good overall for humanity in some way? And this
is just me Devil's advocating. It's called God's plan. But
(28:38):
I'll being completely serious, like, there are maybe things that
humanity is going to face in our not so distant future.
Choices are gonna have to make sure. They're gonna be
really hard and are probably gonna end up killing lots
and lots of people. Yeah, but isn't the problem that
it's like the people in power, whether it's in like
an organization like a psychiatric hospital or a government, that
(29:00):
usually the ones that dictate the agenda of what that
greater good is, and they're typically looking out for their
best interests or the best interest of their cronies in
some way, not necessarily the greater greater good. It's more
like this notion of I it's my greater good. I
don't know that's what I see it. Maybe that's cynical,
but I think you're right on. It's in that kind
of situation. Is very easy to define the greater good
(29:22):
as the things that are that make things that are
good for me greater. I mean, I would describe it
as the status quo in many ways. Sure, yeah. And
also they're differing definitions. I mean, it was being a
little bit lived, but there are differing definitions for some people.
A spiritual greater good is a world in which one
of all living people follow the same specific religion. In uh,
(29:46):
if we're looking at a purely soulless biological imperative, then
the greater good is one in which no individuals matter.
The human species just metastasizes and eventually gets to the stars.
Neither of those are particularly great things for individuals. Right, well,
let me tell you about migraat or good. All right,
(30:10):
so so we can see that motivation. And I think Brett,
your words of warning are astute and sorely needed, both
in the current age and in past ages. But we
don't want to lose some of the conversation we're having
about other mad scientists is okay, if we call the
(30:31):
mad scientists, is that is that out of bounds because
they're not necessarily insane, right, they're just mad with power? Yeah,
they're not that. They're not always angry either. Okay, So
scientists here we go, hold on one. Okay, so these
these perturbed scientists, could you tell us a little more.
(30:52):
It sounds like you may have found a rogues gallery
of people that you considered, uh, investigate further. Well, you know,
so we talked about Henry Cotton and Walter Freeman is
the person who's really behind the lobotomy, and I don't
know that we need to add too much to his legacy. Um.
(31:12):
Jean Martin Charcot was a nineteenth century scientist and his
big thing was hysteria. And on the plus side, he
was one of the first to say hysteria is not
just a female malady. Men can have symptoms of hysteria
as well. And but then he kind of got the
show business bug, not literally, but um he would have
(31:36):
these demonstrations and invite people into the surgical theater and
have patients come out and perform for this audience of
medical dignitaries, and what would happen is women who suffered
from this particular brand of hysteria would have seizures and contortions,
(31:57):
and their bodies would twist into very strange uh positions
and then sometimes have something UH sort of called an
erotic ecstasy. And these became very popular among the intelligencia
in the medical community. And there's even one woman named
Blanche Whitman who became known as the Queen of hysterics
(32:18):
because when she would perform, she could always be relied
upon to have the convulsions at the right time and
really exhibit her erotic ecstasy in a way that was dramatic.
So at a certain point, what are we what are
we proving and studying anymore? Um? But it's and again
it's it's women who were the ones put on exhibit.
(32:40):
And there's a very famous painting of Charcot holding UM
Blanche Whitman in front of an audience of men in
this surgical environment. UM. But careful with the mad scientist thing,
because I have a favorite doctor who, by a lot
of standards would be considered a mad doctor, but actually
(33:02):
was a brilliant surgeon. And UM, contributed an awful lot
to our understanding of anatomy. And that's John Hunter, who
was eighteenth century resurrectionist, and he was the first who
really championed anatomizing bodies, cutting open bodies to understand them
that way. This is when there was still a big
taboo on it, and you would only get a body
(33:25):
if if someone was hanged or executed, the surgeons could
have their bodies, and that became a big trade. And
then eventually they started robbing graves to get the body
so that the students would have any something to practice on.
And when I first was reading about him, it was
in a book, a really sensational book about like the
corpse robbers and robbers of eighteenth century. But I read
(33:47):
a really amazing biography of this guy, and it totally
showed that he was breaking down these, um, these sort
of notions we have that you can't cut open a
human body, and that it's degrading to have your body
um you know, uh violated. Yeah, and that's what they
would call it, right yeah. And and and it was
(34:09):
like when people would be executed there, it would be
a very frightening thing for them to realize that their
body is going to be given to the school for
the young surgeons to practice on. But he totally believed
in it and anatomized so many bodies over his lifetime
and really broke that barrier and helped facilitate getting to
(34:29):
the point where bodies were provided to medical schools so
that you could learn from the thing that's gonna you know,
you're gonna actually be operating on. I'm going to tell
you this anecdote, which you may want to cut out
for sensitive listeners, or we should just give a little
trigger warning. Um, go right ahead. One of my favorite
(34:49):
stories of him, and it's shocking, but at the same
time it shows this guy, John Hunter was so believed
in what he was doing. Um, you didn't have a
lot of way of testing certain things, and so he
wanted to find out, like certain liquids in the body,
how they've aged after death. And so one of the
great they quoted in this book, um where he took
(35:10):
the semen of a corpse and put it in his
mouth and like kind of switched it around and it
was like, yep, it has a a a metallic brackish taste,
and so you know, how else are you gonna like
test things like that, But that just shows to him
that the body it was not it had so been,
(35:32):
had been demystified for him. He just wanted to learn
about the flesh and all of it's this little glory exactly,
and was willing to do everything to better understand it. So,
you know, on one hand, we have our scientists who
are doing shocking things, but at the same time, a
lot of times not always um it yields knowledge and
(35:55):
it leads to demystification and the loss of certain taboos
that we have about the body. Hold on a second, guys,
let's not go there quite yet. First, let's take a
quick sponsor break. You know, that's something we've discussed on
the show numerous times. What do you do with research
(36:19):
that's gained from human experimentation over the years, like Unit
one or some of the things that the Nazi Party
was doing. What do you do with the because there
is there's information, raw data that is collected there about
the horrible things a human can endure. And we we
(36:41):
kind of had a discussion last time, like do you
just throw that away? Do you keep it locked away somewhere?
Do you actually use it towards medical research in the future?
What do you think, Brett, what should we do with
all this stuff? I mean, once the deed is done,
you certainly have to try to gain from the knowledge
that provided, as long as you're not encourage ing further,
you know, an ethical experimentation. But do you feel like
(37:05):
there are things still going on? And I wanted to
try to suggest this with the Control Group, that we
look back on the horrors of the mid nineteen fifties,
and people in the mid nineteen fifties look back on
the horror of the turn of the century, and so
on and so on and so on. Do you sort
of feel like, what's the horror that people are gonna
look at us fifty years from now and sort of
(37:27):
realized they did what? Absolutely, And it's fantastic that you
bring this up. Well, tragic and disturbing, but also fantastic
because that's one of the questions that we had for you.
And it's sort of a two part question. So the
first is what do you see as the the importance
(37:50):
or the the crucial relevance of a work like the
Control Group in the modern age? And that's that's a
big question to throw someone. But then the second part
is exactly what you're asking us, do you think it
is possible that there is experimentation occurring today that will
(38:11):
later be looked at with approbrium by future historians. I
was just trying to make a list, and it was thinking,
you know, one of the big disadvantages is that a
lot of that stuff, if it is occurring, will be classified. Right,
So we only found out about things like psychic driving,
whereas you said, seven boxes escaped to purge you know, Um,
(38:36):
and what do we know now? We know that there
are some pretty uh boundary violating experiments with big data, right,
that might be something, But as far as suppressed medical experimentation,
I don't know what. I couldn't conjecture, you know. I
was thinking about this, and again I think it's uh.
(38:56):
And it's part of that double edged sword of while
we judged past, we shouldn't judge the past too harshly, because, um,
a lot of times, this was the best they had,
and so they were They were sincerely desperately trying to
deal with certain illnesses. And we may not agree with
the way they treated it, but they were desperate and
(39:18):
there were no other ways of really treating it. And
it's kind of you know, I've I've sort of feel
horrible bringing it up. But when you think about something
like chemotherapy, it's it's all we got right now. It's
it's it is the thing that is or one of
the things that is the most effective in treating cancer.
(39:39):
You know, fifty years from now when we look, if
someone looks back, they're going to say, you did what
you you know, you put radioactive material in someone's body
so that the body would kind of, you know, fight
and kill some portion of something that's growing inside it.
But it worked. It was what we were able to
do with the tech knowledgy we have. So I'm not
(40:02):
by that saying that chemotherapy is bad and radiation therapy
is bad, but um, you know, don't judge. Hopefully we
won't be judged harshly because it's it is the best.
We're doing the best we can, and we have to
cut some slack to the people who were you know,
it's hard to say that cut slack to people who
are performing lobotomies and you know, excessive shock treatment and
(40:26):
things in the past. I don't think it was malicious
and it was the best they had in treating these things.
And fortunately things have gotten a lot better. So the
treatments were using today we know are more effective and
they're focused and their specific. But at the same time,
technology is going to reach a point to where they
(40:48):
have genetic modification and these diseases just disappear, and they're
gonna look back and say, well, why didn't y'all do that?
And you know, we're going to be the people who were,
you know, putting people in iron lungs. Basically we didn't
have the cure. This was what we had, So you know,
it's a certain amount of tolerance for the quote unquote
(41:10):
mad scientists of the past is called for. I think
well said, yeah, that really answers the question that you
brought up to. Man, it's like, what do we do
with this research? And sometimes the means justify, not justify
the ends, but at least you can accept the results
as like something of value, even in retrospect. I don't know,
(41:33):
it's hard, it's really hard. How do we make it
not a total loss right almost to like honor the
people that were subjected to this stuff. It's like, you
don't what do you just, out of like pure ethical
kind of panicky outcry toss out positive results from these
experiments that seems counterproductive and and almost disrespectful to those
(41:53):
who may have lost their lives or been damaged in
these kinds of experiments. Yeah, I'm gonna be a little
bit conspiratorial and this this is just my opinion. I
would absolutely be unsurprised if it turned out that there
were unethical and indeed illegal experiments being conducted through some tenuous,
(42:14):
uh tenuously attached form of government funding. Because one thing
that's really interesting about you and Cameron that we missed.
I believe we mentioned it, but I don't think we
emphasized it enough. He was from Quebec. These experiments that
he was conducting occurred in Canada. So in this case,
the CIA and the various cutouts were not funding experimentation domestically.
(42:41):
It happened abroad. So if something like this is happening
in our current world, it is probably happening somewhere where
law enforcement or rule of laws a little more lacks
a little weaker. But I I feel like just with
all the medical breakthroughs that are occurring around the cusp
of occurring, it is less plausible that something like that
(43:04):
is not happening, which I know sounds like maybe I'm
a little tinfoil on this one, no, because and there's
there's a sort of a suggestion of that. In reading
accounts of UM the CIA CIA activities, there's a thing
which comes up, and we talked about it in episode
ten UH called terminal studies, and that's where you conduct
(43:25):
an experiment on someone to the point of no return.
And there's no evidence that any terminal studies were performed
in the United States, but at least one source sort
of says, well, but some studies were performed in other
countries on people who are not Americans, like prisoners of war,
(43:45):
and we don't know what happened there, and so there's
I wouldn't say, you know, a good chance. I would
just say that it's entirely plausible that terminal studies were
performed on you know. And and again, this is like
the Korean War. This is war or we were losing
or were we're behind in the race for the control
of the human mind, and it calls for, you know,
(44:08):
desperate measures. I would just say, with the number of
destabilized nations right now across the globe, it makes me
wonder if there isn't some kind of this is conspiratorial,
but some kind of smaller operation that's still studying interrogation
techniques out there in black sites. I mean, they're just
so there's so many places where it could be happening,
(44:30):
where there is a even a small CIA footprint. Yeah. Well,
on that note, we did get to the present day
a very scary way. We hope that you do not
consider this show a form of mind control, because it's
just hit me. When you were describing this bread you said, uh,
(44:53):
you said, you know, the real form of brainwashing and
mind controlling, it's just hanging out and talking with people, yeah,
and getting them over on your side. And it hit me.
I thought, oh, no, have we accidentally become Brett has
a very disarming smile, and it does make me a
little nervous. But we do want to we do want
(45:15):
to thank you so much for taking the time to
come on the show today and teach us a little
bit more about the real world inspirations behind the Control group,
which when you check out the show, uh, does sound
like there's no way it could have really happened, but
it's presented in a very plausible escalation because it did happen. Yeah,
(45:37):
And just to make sure Ronald Grant is that Frank Olson.
It's sort of miss Frank Olsen. Accept Yeah, Frank Olsen
did not die under the same circumstances in which, right,
there are a number of parallels between the Control Group
and the real life counterparts. So if you're a real fan,
you know that um Morgan Hall is the alias of
(46:01):
George White, who's the notorious former Bureau of Narcotics agent
who was in charge of the safe houses where Operation
Midnight Climax and other things went on. So there's there's
lots of sort of easter eggs for people who are
fans of this kind of information. We left a lot
of things unsaid in particular exactly just want to put
(46:25):
that out there. We don't want to spoil it there.
It's this is an interesting thing you could do right now.
I'm gonna do this after we conclude this show. I'm
gonna go back and listen to the mk Ultra episode
that we did. Then I'm going to go and finish
episode six because that's the one I'm currently on in
the Control Group, and I'm going to see where all
those parallels are, because it's I can see it already
(46:45):
up until this point, but Episode nine is Midnight Climax,
So I want to really listen to that one, and
thank you, of course folks for tuning in. We would
love to hear your stories or accounts, and this way
be opening a little bit of a risky door. But
if you have knowledge of what you consider to be
unethical or illegal human experimentation occurring in modern day, or
(47:10):
if you know of something that did happen and has
not yet reached the public sphere for one reason or another,
contact us. We would like to hear from you. You
can write to us on social media. Got the Facebook,
at the Instagram. We are Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram,
Conspiracy Stuff on Facebook and Twitter. Right, all right, you
(47:31):
know there's another way to get to us too, but
we'll hold off on that for a second. We want
to find out first a little bit more about our guest.
That's right, Brett. Where can we listen to the Control
Group and learn more about you and your films and
all of that stuff. We can find the Control Group
at Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms, and we
have a site which is a Control Group dot show.
(47:52):
And uh, as far as me, I'm on the Internet
Movie Database and I don't maintain like a regular profile
type page, but I try to stay active in the
social media's as much as I can, And you can
also find the Control Group social media on Instagram, Facebook,
(48:14):
and Twitter if you want to interact directly with the show.
There's some really cool visual aspects to it that I
think are definitely worth the digital trip. And all the
films that I've made, including The Unwanted and of course
Hell's Highway, are available on DVD from Keno Larber. So
get out there right now. You can go ahead and no,
(48:34):
don't pause, yeah, let it finish, but then subscribe to
the Control Group and then start listening to those episodes
right after this, uh, and then tell us what you
think about it. You can give us a call. We're
one eight three three s T d W y t
K damn. Now you guys are gonna do that? Oh yeah,
oh yeah, I prefer it that way. I just went perfect.
(48:55):
But if you if you don't want to call us,
but you should, you can send us an email. Were
conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. M
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. M Hello,
(00:24):
welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my
name is not They call me Ben. We are joined
with our super producer, Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are you,
and you are here, and that makes this stuff they
don't want you to know a very special episode of
our show today, because we are delving into something that
(00:45):
has always fascinated us. I think as individuals and as
a group, and that is the strange intersection of ethics
and experimentation science right science versus UH, the humanity of
both the UH, the experiment ers and the experimentees. But
(01:05):
we are not alone in this endeavor. Today we are
joined with a friend of the show, a filmmaker Brett Wood,
who just recently created How Stuff Works first fiction podcast,
the Control Group. Brett, thank you so much for coming
on the show with us today. Brett, what is excited
to be here and you are well. We haven't fully confirmed.
(01:30):
I haven't seen any identification. Did you guys get IDENTIFICA?
I got it at the front desk, then we have
a new policy. Okay, he's cool. He looks a lot
like Brett would he at least signed his name. Brett
would when he got in here, which is about the
level of our security. Wow, man, you're really throwing our
security team under the bus. Back so Brett. We were.
We were extremely excited about the Control Group as we
(01:54):
were learning more about the show and more about the
real life things, events, people in places that inspired the
narrative of the Control Group. And from what we understand,
this originally was a screenplay, is that correct? Right about
(02:17):
six years ago? I wanted to make it as a
film and quickly realized that it was sort of beyond
my means as an independent filmmaker to have, you know,
this large hospital facility and a fair number of of
extras as patients in the hospital. And also, as we
may get into a little bit later on, I ran
into some problems with the locations where I wanted to
(02:40):
shoot um, so I then moved over to a different
project which is mostly set in a house, which was
much more manageable for me. Is that one called Those
who Deserve to Die that's coming up next. That one
I've just finished and have not yet shown anywhere where
we're just finishing up the sound and music. The Unwanted
is the one we did instead of the Control Group, right,
(03:03):
And for anyone unfamiliar with the work, you are quite
a prolific creator. Made the Unwanted in Psychopathia Sexualist in
two thousand six, a documentary that we leaned on pretty
heavily in another show called car Stuff. It's called Hell's
Highway The True Story of Highway Safety Films in two
(03:24):
thousand three, which I cannot recommend enough if you want
something with a disturbing twist, those are upsetting. Oh yes,
I remember the carst Of episode that was back in
my heyday as superproducer Noel Brown. That's true, that's true.
We go we all go way back in this regard.
And so I like, I like where your work has
taken you thus far and kind of where it's headed.
Can you tell us, like exactly what the Control Group is,
(03:47):
what it's about? Sure, it's a sort of a narrativization
of uh A couple of different threads that were going
on in sort of psychological medicine and covert government activities
in the nineteen fifties and sixties. One of which is
the government's drug testing programs better known as MK Ultra
(04:10):
of course, Artichoke, Bluebird. There were lots of names for
what they were doing, which is basically secretly testing drugs
on people, preferably unsuspecting people, and trying to determine if
these could be useful tools for either mind control or interrogation.
And then the other threat of it is the u
(04:30):
c I a sponsorship of experimental psychological testing, uh, you know,
without any apparent connection to the you know, covert interrogation
arm of what they were doing. So they would just
they just set up a front organization to fund colleges, hospitals,
(04:53):
doctors to just do experiments that might kind of fit
in with the kind of stuff they're interested in, namely
things like erasing someone's memory, getting them to unlock the
secrets which they may be protecting. Um, you can sort
of see anything that might be applicable. They were kind
of open to and a lot of the doctors who
(05:14):
did the research didn't know they were sort of doing
it under the sponsorship of the CIA, And they say,
I called it a cutout, which I love that instead
of up front we have we have several cutouts that
we can hide this behind, and we're gonna hide this
behind the cutout known as the Society for the Investigation
of Human Ecology. It's just like such an important sounding
(05:38):
like who doesn't believe in that human ecology? That's what
they called it. And well, I guess that we can
announce here for the first time that pretty soon we
are going to make available Society for the Investigation of
Human Ecology t shirts at our Control Group merchandise shops,
So just stand by for more details on at But um,
(06:01):
I just love the idea of this, of this UH
nonprofit organization handing out money to UH ambitious researchers. And
there's a bit of an ego feed to right. It's like,
we believe in your work. Sounds kind of like Illumination
Global Unlimited. And it's funny. This is why I feel
(06:23):
so at home here, you know, within the house stuff works.
Family is because like with the Driver's documentary, and I
know that MK Ultra has been a subject on stuff
they don't want you to know and other shows because
you know, your audience sort of relishes the secret histories
of not always the underbelly of what's going on in
our society. And government. But just like being in the
(06:44):
know of the things that were not in your high
school textbook, well said, So, let's dive into your research
process as you were gathering material and documentation for the
script itself and for the story. What what kind of
stuff did you find? Where did you look? Um? Mostly? Well,
(07:08):
the interesting is there's not much first generation information about
this stuff. Um. The whole thing would have been secret
and forgotten were it not for the survival of I
think seven boxes of financial records, receipts, and it was
from those documents that people were able to piece together
this history. Um. But there are a number of great
(07:28):
books on the subject. As far as the CIA testing,
there is UM the Search for the Manchurian Candidate by
John Marks and UM. As far as the medical research,
there's one person in particular who I was, who is
kind of the unofficial inspiration for our main doctor in
the control group, and the real life doctor's name is
(07:50):
you and Cameron, and he was a doctor in Quebec.
He was the head of the American Psychiatric Association. You know,
you couldn't be more highly regarded. But yet he was
conducting these today we might consider ethically questionable experiments in
manipulation of the mind, which I can't wait for us
(08:11):
to start talking about the details of those. But you know,
the thing is, when you read about all this stuff,
it just doesn't seem possible. It's it's outrageous, it's fascinating,
but you can't really imagine it actually happening. And so
what I wanted to do with the control group is
sort of imagine what would it be like to actually
be subjected to UM something we call psychic driving, which
(08:36):
is where Dr Cameron would UM. He would often record
it himself. He would a tape which would play in
a constant loop. You are not being kind to others.
You need to open up and be more open with
your emotions. You need to you know, and just sort
of a mantra or a reinforcement of the kind of
(08:56):
behavior the person should have. And so that tape would
play constantly, constantly, constantly in days at a time, for
days at a time, and UH in headphones, and sometimes
they would have like a helmet where it's wired so
a person could get up and walk around. And they
even had UM speakers built into mattresses so that when
(09:18):
someone is asleep, you will be kind to others you
will be more responsive to treatment. Um, that's psychic driving. Okay,
so that psychic driving. Was it done on patients in
like a psychiatric word or where Who was this done to? Yeah,
and it wasn't. That's the thing it was done to
just like regular people. UM. There was a tendency to
(09:40):
do a lot of this more on women, and we
of course addressed that. That's a big part of what
the control group is. UM. Some of that, I think
is the ego of the doctor who if he's gonna
shape and sculpt a patient Pygmalion style, he tends to
want to do that more with a woman than a man.
But I think also it feeds a lot into the
(10:02):
fact that, UM, psychological issues are have traditionally sort of
been tilted towards women. Like the best examples hysteria, that
is something that, if you take it by its original
technical definition, has to do, you know, with the reproductive
organs of a woman. That was the source from which
(10:23):
the psychological problem emanated. Or we think a lot about
housewives in the fifties being prescribed tranquilizers and for the
men they would just you know, have an extra martini
at lunch that was their way of dealing with it.
So there has often been this focus on psychological problems
on women and and so that sort of became an
(10:46):
important part of the control group as well as an
avenue of control. I think given the misogyny that was
institutionalized and still exists today, it seems like in many cases,
with the benefit of true respect, we're able as a
society to look back and say, well, that person wasn't
mentally ill. They just didn't want to be forced to
(11:07):
marry that jerk, you know. And this I think that's
I think that's a powerful thing. But the the idea
of psychic driving too, I don't want us to lose that.
At first, when you first hear it, it's easy to think, well,
I'm I'm familiar with that. I've had a song stuck
in my head before. How bad can it be? You know,
it can't be any worse than despicito or something. But uh,
(11:32):
there there are some other techniques that Dr Cameron was using.
Could you tell us a little bit about those, maybe
starting with the sleep treatments, So as part of the
psychic driving um, you would need to have your mind
sort of neutralized before the fresh messages, these reinforcements are
being allowed in your mind. They need to wipe the
(11:54):
slate clean, and so they did that a couple of
different ways, UM. But the cleaning process was called patterning,
and that means fix the mind so it no longer
has a regular pattern of thought. It's open and neutral.
And even people you know had memory loss, long term
memory loss, they could remember what was happening to them now,
(12:15):
but couldn't think back into their past. That was the
whole point. Wipe this late clean so that we can
replace it with the fresh messages, with the psychic driving.
So the one way they would do that is uh
e c T. Electro convulsive therapy better known today as
shock treatment. UM doubled up with sleep therapy, where they
(12:38):
would tranquilize someone and have them sleep around the clock.
And you know, sleep is great, and to a certain degree,
shock therapy even now is considered of of use when
correctly applied. But what they would do is give people
shock treatment multiple times in a single day, and according
(12:58):
to one source, six times the voltage or dosage at
which it is normally given. So it wasn't just like
you know, you're your need mental tune up It was
an attempt to really um flatten the brain waves of
the mind by excessively delivering shock treatment and then rest
(13:19):
so that the body and the mind would just shut
down and you get woken up, fed more E C
T and which puts you right back to sleep, and
then they would continue the drip or the pills. I
think someone was telling me that phena barbital is more
commonly given as pills, So that was I guess how
they would keep you in that deep sleep? Wow? And
(13:42):
how how effective was this at least the deep patterning
aspect um you know there, like I said, people did.
After this all came out, a number of patients got
together and sued you and Cameron, claiming that they had
erased their memories and you know, cross these ethical barriers.
(14:06):
So it certainly didn't seem to have the curative effect
that he was proclaiming it was going to have. Uh,
it didn't completely mess up people's minds the way say, uh,
you know, transorbital lobotomy might. So the effect it was
(14:26):
never proven to be especially effective either as a um
sort of a treatment for you know, general psychological difficulties,
and it certainly was never applied to the kind of
use that the CIA thought it might be viable for.
So we'll never know if it was an effective way
(14:47):
of interrogating or brainwashing someone. And it doesn't seem to
have been an especially effective way of curing someone's mental ills.
And we'll learn more about that right after a quick
word from our sponsor. But you know, there is one
thing that perhaps didn't exactly come out of this, but
(15:09):
was utilized within the mk Ultra trials and specifically within
the world of the control group, which is confinement the uh.
I don't want to give it away too much, but
the cages um, because that's something that we do see
used in what we would I guess consider modern interrogation
techniques isolating someone uh not not allowing them to sleep
(15:33):
for long periods of time um. And we see some
of that in this story as well. Yeah, and the
when we talk about the cages in the in the podcast,
it's a little bit of a fictionalization just in terms
of that, it's that it's true to the spirit of
what was going on. I mean, we had a lot
of sensory deprivation where someone be kept in the dark
(15:56):
with something over their eyes and something over their ears,
so they can't hear, and sometimes with their hands inserted
into something so they can't feel. As it's sort of
like a version of the sleep therapies. So just just
see how long a person could exist in that state
before their mind gets weakened and becomes open to you know,
(16:17):
better programming. I guess um. And in the podcast, the
characters talk about how, uh you know, back in the
day when the section this ward was called the cages,
people would just be left to wander and sit in
their own filth. I mean, that's very well documented from
like back in the nineties and forties, where do you
(16:37):
would have wards of people naked, sitting in their own
filth and just being given no treatment per se um
a condition that existed I think, you know, there was
a lot of uh, mental hospital reform in the nineteen fifties,
so it was mostly cleaned up at that time. But um,
(16:59):
you know, so you have this this dichotomy between like
excessive treatment and then no treatment where it's just a
matter of pump some drugs and someone neutralized the symptoms.
And ultimately that's what all this kind of was about.
And if we talk a lot about some of the
other medical visionaries who have done some pretty crazy things
(17:20):
over history. Usually the justification for what they did was
that it eliminated the symptoms, but it didn't actually cure
the disease. Um and my favorite, and I've thought about
trying to dramatize this guy's work somehow. Um, it was
a guy named Henry Cotton, and in the nineteen twenties
(17:43):
he had a big theory that mental illness and health
problems was were triggered by different kinds of infection and uh,
it's like bacterial infection. Yeah, and uh, chronic dental infection
was one of the big ones because you know, they
didn't have great gental care back in the nineteen twenties,
(18:03):
no fluoridation of water. And so he would pull teeth
and remove tonsils. And he had two sons and completely
pulled all their teeth, adult teeth and gave people ton
selectomies the colon, you know, lots of bacteria and the colon.
He would remove people's colons, He would remove portions of
their stomach, he would remove the spleens. So it was
(18:26):
just all about taking out anything that was a possible
source of infection. And you would be amazed at how
you know, high highly regarded this guy was, and how
high up the professional ladder he was able to climb.
He became the superintendent of the Trenton State Hospital in
New Jersey. In New Jersey, and uh, you know, eventually
(18:49):
people kind of realized, ah ha, will his numbers look
good on paper. But all he's doing is removing a call,
you know, a potential cause. He's getting rid of symptoms,
but he's not actually treating the illness. And usually in
cases like that, what happens is, we don't do that anymore,
and we don't talk about that anymore. And so like
(19:11):
lobotomies are another great example. The botomies were considered so
effective because they wiped out the symptoms. To say, they
don't do the bad stuff anymore. Yeah, and so diff
rid of their part of their brain that makes them
act like a human. And part of it is the
fact that you've you've physically changed them to not be
able to do that anymore. And in the case of
something like shocked therapy, they change their behavior because they
(19:36):
don't want more shocked therapy. Of course you're still not
treating the cause, but you're causing the symptom to go
away either medically or through the fear instilled in them
by well, it's like that idea that torture isn't particularly
effective and getting good confession. It's just effective at getting
what you want to hear, or you'll get some kind
of confession, some amazing stories. And if you torture someone enough,
(19:58):
don't tell you everything anything. This you're talking about it
reminds me of like sort of like a sick twisted
John Harvey Kellogg type almost where he's like into all
this like holistic stuff, but he's treating the symptoms more
than he is the actual illness. You know, enemas for everything,
like yogurt enemas and all this stuff. Kellogg's a great
guy because he's like the lighter side the same kind
(20:18):
of visionary and it's all about a good a good cold, right,
and we can kind of have fun with him. But
then when you get into someone who has a little
more barbaric in their treatments. But you know, but it's
the same, it's two sides of the same coin. This
sort of visionary uh medicine that is not that grounded
(20:43):
in the science of the illness is being treated well.
And this guy, the guy you're talking about it, sounds
like he kind of developed a bit of a god
complex around it too. When you're unchecked and you can
do this stuff and you have this vision, you know,
but no one's stopping you, then of course you're just
gonna push it as far as you can, right, and
no one's stopping you. And like in the case of
you and Cameron, you're being made the head of the
(21:05):
American Psychiatric Association. That's like total valid and should like
go take it further and so well, back to the
control group. One of the things I wanted to do
is what would one of these conversations be like with
the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, where they're
coaxing him along, and like, maybe you should try pushing
the envelope a little bit. And because I wanted to,
(21:27):
because because the doctors who are doing these things are
not monsters. They're ambitious, and I think they all have
good intentions, even if they have egos kind of running rampant,
And it doesn't take a whole lot of encouragement to
get someone to maybe cross the threshold into something a
little less ethical than they might if they were, um
(21:48):
not being fueled by so much encouragement and adoration. I
think that's a really good point because in the real
world we see these sorts of situations coalescing in degrees
of increments. It's not as if some shady person from
what was that phrase, Britt cut out comes to you
when comes to you and says, let's see how much
(22:11):
LSD we can pump into someone before we ruin their lives.
We're gonna just get like ten people and just take
a spaghetti at the wall approach. You know that that's
something that we ease into as people, and it's very
easy to rationalize those further steps, especially and I think
(22:32):
this is this even goes to um the degree of
victimization that some of the medical professionals experience, which is
much lower than the patients obviously, but there there being
um convinced that one must make certain sacrifices for the
(22:53):
quote unquote greater good. And we actually have a clip
from the controlled group that I think touches on this, right, Matt, Oh, yeah,
this is this is great. This is from episode four. Uh.
The name is phenobarbital, and it's a discussion between a
character named Summer Hill and Dr Hayes and they're discussing
(23:15):
funding for the I guess the research that's being done
at the hospital as well as what types of things
need to be done in order to continue that funding
of the research. Get us a name, start with that.
It'll be a good measure of your progress. But if
you hold that a little longer, do the detective work.
(23:36):
Connect the dots. I'll try, but I can't help wondering
whether or not we should be I'll stop thinking about should.
Should is a dirty word in research. Take yourself off
the leash, Dr Hayes. Allow yourself to run. You have
(23:56):
a hunch, follow it, got an inch, scratch it and
urge indulge it, and don't stop to ask whether it's
something you should be doing. If it gives you a
better understanding, that's all that matters. I love and detest
this so much because it feels too real to me,
(24:17):
having this person from the outside group that controls the
money that's gonna gonna fund the research come in and say, well,
you know, don't you want to do something that's going
to be different and beyond. I mean, I know you're fifty,
but you've really got to think like a twenty six
year old and push things harder, but he never once
says anything about you know, this is exactly what you
(24:40):
need to do or anything like that. So he's got
this weird plausible deniability with with him and his cutout, um.
But at the same time he's convincing this doctor to
push himself ethically to the to the boundary and perhaps beyond.
And it makes me wonder just how much of that
is actually what A heard during the mk Ultra trials,
(25:01):
how much they were just pushing people without the CIA
actually being the ones who are these dastardly who come
up with the dastardly ideas that we then think about
as being perhaps evil if you look back with hindsight,
it just makes you wonder if they're they're literally just
the pushers, just getting the scientists to keep going that
(25:22):
extra mind, right, I think, giving them the resources to
keep going, giving them the encouraging, uh you know, stroking
the ego a little bit. And then also you have
to remember in the nineteen fifties, um, a couple of
big things were happening at the time, and the biggest
one is the Cold War. And even though they didn't
specifically talk about the applications of this too, you know,
(25:44):
CIA activities. There was this sort of attitude that certainly
within the CIA, that we're behind in the race with
the Russians and the Chinese and the Koreans for mind
control because they believed brain watched was a real thing,
and to some degree it is, but not everyone believed
that it was going to be the thing that was
(26:06):
gonna You're gonna either transmit something to change the way
people think, or put something in the water supply. At
one point, they wanted to put LSD in an entire
city's water supply, just see what would happen. M or like,
have some kind of drug or tool, and essentially the Americans,
as we are, we love gadgets. Uh, the Americans always
(26:26):
wanted some kind of James Bondian type thing, whether it's
a drug or a tool or a shot. You know,
you give someone rather than the more effective means of
mind control, which is to have a conversation with someone,
earned their trust, left them talk and uh, you know,
share your ideas and eventually get them to come around
to your way of thinking. That is the most effective
(26:49):
means of mind control. But we don't have time for that.
We want, you know, we want the magic bullet, we
want the the spy device. So there was almost like
a sense of espionage to what was going on at
the time that there was there was a race to
find um either the secret of brainwashing on the part
of the CIA, or with medical science, there's always like
(27:10):
a race to either find the cure or find the
best treatment, or be the person to break through the
next threshold of psychological medicine. And a lot of times
there's this attitude of yeah, well, you know, there are
some ethical issues with this, but if we succeed, it's
for the greater good, so we're going to go ahead
and do the do the experiment. And you know that
(27:32):
persists today. There's always this sort of suggestion that if
you break a few eggs, that's fine, but as you know,
think of the millions of lines it's going to save
if these test subjects die for the sake of science.
You know, there's there's so many ways you can justify
doing something unethical, so many ways you can talk yourself
into believing that you're actually doing it for the greater good.
(27:55):
The greater good is one of those things that is
always such a when you hear phrase, you have to
be very suspicious of it because when someone trucks it out,
someone's gonna get hurt. It's a power move, right. It's
like I can tell you what the greater good is
because I have the master plan. I see the big picture,
and you need to get on board. Yeah. Our superproducer
(28:16):
Paul uses the phrase the greater good? Is it? Okay,
I'll play Devil's advocating for a moment. Isn't there a
greater good overall for humanity in some way? And this
is just me Devil's advocating. It's called God's plan. But
(28:38):
I'll being completely serious, like, there are maybe things that
humanity is going to face in our not so distant future.
Choices are gonna have to make sure. They're gonna be
really hard and are probably gonna end up killing lots
and lots of people. Yeah, but isn't the problem that
it's like the people in power, whether it's in like
an organization like a psychiatric hospital or a government, that
(29:00):
usually the ones that dictate the agenda of what that
greater good is, and they're typically looking out for their
best interests or the best interest of their cronies in
some way, not necessarily the greater greater good. It's more
like this notion of I it's my greater good. I
don't know that's what I see it. Maybe that's cynical,
but I think you're right on. It's in that kind
of situation. Is very easy to define the greater good
(29:22):
as the things that are that make things that are
good for me greater. I mean, I would describe it
as the status quo in many ways. Sure, yeah. And
also they're differing definitions. I mean, it was being a
little bit lived, but there are differing definitions for some people.
A spiritual greater good is a world in which one
of all living people follow the same specific religion. In uh,
(29:46):
if we're looking at a purely soulless biological imperative, then
the greater good is one in which no individuals matter.
The human species just metastasizes and eventually gets to the stars.
Neither of those are particularly great things for individuals. Right, well,
let me tell you about migraat or good. All right,
(30:10):
so so we can see that motivation. And I think Brett,
your words of warning are astute and sorely needed, both
in the current age and in past ages. But we
don't want to lose some of the conversation we're having
about other mad scientists is okay, if we call the
(30:31):
mad scientists, is that is that out of bounds because
they're not necessarily insane, right, they're just mad with power? Yeah,
they're not that. They're not always angry either. Okay, So
scientists here we go, hold on one. Okay, so these
these perturbed scientists, could you tell us a little more.
(30:52):
It sounds like you may have found a rogues gallery
of people that you considered, uh, investigate further. Well, you know,
so we talked about Henry Cotton and Walter Freeman is
the person who's really behind the lobotomy, and I don't
know that we need to add too much to his legacy. Um.
(31:12):
Jean Martin Charcot was a nineteenth century scientist and his
big thing was hysteria. And on the plus side, he
was one of the first to say hysteria is not
just a female malady. Men can have symptoms of hysteria
as well. And but then he kind of got the
show business bug, not literally, but um he would have
(31:36):
these demonstrations and invite people into the surgical theater and
have patients come out and perform for this audience of
medical dignitaries, and what would happen is women who suffered
from this particular brand of hysteria would have seizures and contortions,
(31:57):
and their bodies would twist into very strange uh positions
and then sometimes have something UH sort of called an
erotic ecstasy. And these became very popular among the intelligencia
in the medical community. And there's even one woman named
Blanche Whitman who became known as the Queen of hysterics
(32:18):
because when she would perform, she could always be relied
upon to have the convulsions at the right time and
really exhibit her erotic ecstasy in a way that was dramatic.
So at a certain point, what are we what are
we proving and studying anymore? Um? But it's and again
it's it's women who were the ones put on exhibit.
(32:40):
And there's a very famous painting of Charcot holding UM
Blanche Whitman in front of an audience of men in
this surgical environment. UM. But careful with the mad scientist thing,
because I have a favorite doctor who, by a lot
of standards would be considered a mad doctor, but actually
(33:02):
was a brilliant surgeon. And UM, contributed an awful lot
to our understanding of anatomy. And that's John Hunter, who
was eighteenth century resurrectionist, and he was the first who
really championed anatomizing bodies, cutting open bodies to understand them
that way. This is when there was still a big
taboo on it, and you would only get a body
(33:25):
if if someone was hanged or executed, the surgeons could
have their bodies, and that became a big trade. And
then eventually they started robbing graves to get the body
so that the students would have any something to practice on.
And when I first was reading about him, it was
in a book, a really sensational book about like the
corpse robbers and robbers of eighteenth century. But I read
(33:47):
a really amazing biography of this guy, and it totally
showed that he was breaking down these, um, these sort
of notions we have that you can't cut open a
human body, and that it's degrading to have your body
um you know, uh violated. Yeah, and that's what they
would call it, right yeah. And and and it was
(34:09):
like when people would be executed there, it would be
a very frightening thing for them to realize that their
body is going to be given to the school for
the young surgeons to practice on. But he totally believed
in it and anatomized so many bodies over his lifetime
and really broke that barrier and helped facilitate getting to
(34:29):
the point where bodies were provided to medical schools so
that you could learn from the thing that's gonna you know,
you're gonna actually be operating on. I'm going to tell
you this anecdote, which you may want to cut out
for sensitive listeners, or we should just give a little
trigger warning. Um, go right ahead. One of my favorite
(34:49):
stories of him, and it's shocking, but at the same
time it shows this guy, John Hunter was so believed
in what he was doing. Um, you didn't have a
lot of way of testing certain things, and so he
wanted to find out, like certain liquids in the body,
how they've aged after death. And so one of the
great they quoted in this book, um where he took
(35:10):
the semen of a corpse and put it in his
mouth and like kind of switched it around and it
was like, yep, it has a a a metallic brackish taste,
and so you know, how else are you gonna like
test things like that, But that just shows to him
that the body it was not it had so been,
(35:32):
had been demystified for him. He just wanted to learn
about the flesh and all of it's this little glory exactly,
and was willing to do everything to better understand it. So,
you know, on one hand, we have our scientists who
are doing shocking things, but at the same time, a
lot of times not always um it yields knowledge and
(35:55):
it leads to demystification and the loss of certain taboos
that we have about the body. Hold on a second, guys,
let's not go there quite yet. First, let's take a
quick sponsor break. You know, that's something we've discussed on
the show numerous times. What do you do with research
(36:19):
that's gained from human experimentation over the years, like Unit
one or some of the things that the Nazi Party
was doing. What do you do with the because there
is there's information, raw data that is collected there about
the horrible things a human can endure. And we we
(36:41):
kind of had a discussion last time, like do you
just throw that away? Do you keep it locked away somewhere?
Do you actually use it towards medical research in the future?
What do you think, Brett, what should we do with
all this stuff? I mean, once the deed is done,
you certainly have to try to gain from the knowledge
that provided, as long as you're not encourage ing further,
you know, an ethical experimentation. But do you feel like
(37:05):
there are things still going on? And I wanted to
try to suggest this with the Control Group, that we
look back on the horrors of the mid nineteen fifties,
and people in the mid nineteen fifties look back on
the horror of the turn of the century, and so
on and so on and so on. Do you sort
of feel like, what's the horror that people are gonna
look at us fifty years from now and sort of
(37:27):
realized they did what? Absolutely, And it's fantastic that you
bring this up. Well, tragic and disturbing, but also fantastic
because that's one of the questions that we had for you.
And it's sort of a two part question. So the
first is what do you see as the the importance
(37:50):
or the the crucial relevance of a work like the
Control Group in the modern age? And that's that's a
big question to throw someone. But then the second part
is exactly what you're asking us, do you think it
is possible that there is experimentation occurring today that will
(38:11):
later be looked at with approbrium by future historians. I
was just trying to make a list, and it was thinking,
you know, one of the big disadvantages is that a
lot of that stuff, if it is occurring, will be classified. Right,
So we only found out about things like psychic driving,
whereas you said, seven boxes escaped to purge you know, Um,
(38:36):
and what do we know now? We know that there
are some pretty uh boundary violating experiments with big data, right,
that might be something, But as far as suppressed medical experimentation,
I don't know what. I couldn't conjecture, you know. I
was thinking about this, and again I think it's uh.
(38:56):
And it's part of that double edged sword of while
we judged past, we shouldn't judge the past too harshly, because, um,
a lot of times, this was the best they had,
and so they were They were sincerely desperately trying to
deal with certain illnesses. And we may not agree with
the way they treated it, but they were desperate and
(39:18):
there were no other ways of really treating it. And
it's kind of you know, I've I've sort of feel
horrible bringing it up. But when you think about something
like chemotherapy, it's it's all we got right now. It's
it's it is the thing that is or one of
the things that is the most effective in treating cancer.
(39:39):
You know, fifty years from now when we look, if
someone looks back, they're going to say, you did what
you you know, you put radioactive material in someone's body
so that the body would kind of, you know, fight
and kill some portion of something that's growing inside it.
But it worked. It was what we were able to
do with the tech knowledgy we have. So I'm not
(40:02):
by that saying that chemotherapy is bad and radiation therapy
is bad, but um, you know, don't judge. Hopefully we
won't be judged harshly because it's it is the best.
We're doing the best we can, and we have to
cut some slack to the people who were you know,
it's hard to say that cut slack to people who
are performing lobotomies and you know, excessive shock treatment and
(40:26):
things in the past. I don't think it was malicious
and it was the best they had in treating these things.
And fortunately things have gotten a lot better. So the
treatments were using today we know are more effective and
they're focused and their specific. But at the same time,
technology is going to reach a point to where they
(40:48):
have genetic modification and these diseases just disappear, and they're
gonna look back and say, well, why didn't y'all do that?
And you know, we're going to be the people who were,
you know, putting people in iron lungs. Basically we didn't
have the cure. This was what we had, So you know,
it's a certain amount of tolerance for the quote unquote
(41:10):
mad scientists of the past is called for. I think
well said, yeah, that really answers the question that you
brought up to. Man, it's like, what do we do
with this research? And sometimes the means justify, not justify
the ends, but at least you can accept the results
as like something of value, even in retrospect. I don't know,
(41:33):
it's hard, it's really hard. How do we make it
not a total loss right almost to like honor the
people that were subjected to this stuff. It's like, you
don't what do you just, out of like pure ethical
kind of panicky outcry toss out positive results from these
experiments that seems counterproductive and and almost disrespectful to those
(41:53):
who may have lost their lives or been damaged in
these kinds of experiments. Yeah, I'm gonna be a little
bit conspiratorial and this this is just my opinion. I
would absolutely be unsurprised if it turned out that there
were unethical and indeed illegal experiments being conducted through some tenuous,
(42:14):
uh tenuously attached form of government funding. Because one thing
that's really interesting about you and Cameron that we missed.
I believe we mentioned it, but I don't think we
emphasized it enough. He was from Quebec. These experiments that
he was conducting occurred in Canada. So in this case,
the CIA and the various cutouts were not funding experimentation domestically.
(42:41):
It happened abroad. So if something like this is happening
in our current world, it is probably happening somewhere where
law enforcement or rule of laws a little more lacks
a little weaker. But I I feel like just with
all the medical breakthroughs that are occurring around the cusp
of occurring, it is less plausible that something like that
(43:04):
is not happening, which I know sounds like maybe I'm
a little tinfoil on this one, no, because and there's
there's a sort of a suggestion of that. In reading
accounts of UM the CIA CIA activities, there's a thing
which comes up, and we talked about it in episode
ten UH called terminal studies, and that's where you conduct
(43:25):
an experiment on someone to the point of no return.
And there's no evidence that any terminal studies were performed
in the United States, but at least one source sort
of says, well, but some studies were performed in other
countries on people who are not Americans, like prisoners of war,
(43:45):
and we don't know what happened there, and so there's
I wouldn't say, you know, a good chance. I would
just say that it's entirely plausible that terminal studies were
performed on you know. And and again, this is like
the Korean War. This is war or we were losing
or were we're behind in the race for the control
of the human mind, and it calls for, you know,
(44:08):
desperate measures. I would just say, with the number of
destabilized nations right now across the globe, it makes me
wonder if there isn't some kind of this is conspiratorial,
but some kind of smaller operation that's still studying interrogation
techniques out there in black sites. I mean, they're just
so there's so many places where it could be happening,
(44:30):
where there is a even a small CIA footprint. Yeah. Well,
on that note, we did get to the present day
a very scary way. We hope that you do not
consider this show a form of mind control, because it's
just hit me. When you were describing this bread you said, uh,
(44:53):
you said, you know, the real form of brainwashing and
mind controlling, it's just hanging out and talking with people, yeah,
and getting them over on your side. And it hit me.
I thought, oh, no, have we accidentally become Brett has
a very disarming smile, and it does make me a
little nervous. But we do want to we do want
(45:15):
to thank you so much for taking the time to
come on the show today and teach us a little
bit more about the real world inspirations behind the Control group,
which when you check out the show, uh, does sound
like there's no way it could have really happened, but
it's presented in a very plausible escalation because it did happen. Yeah,
(45:37):
And just to make sure Ronald Grant is that Frank Olson.
It's sort of miss Frank Olsen. Accept Yeah, Frank Olsen
did not die under the same circumstances in which, right,
there are a number of parallels between the Control Group
and the real life counterparts. So if you're a real fan,
you know that um Morgan Hall is the alias of
(46:01):
George White, who's the notorious former Bureau of Narcotics agent
who was in charge of the safe houses where Operation
Midnight Climax and other things went on. So there's there's
lots of sort of easter eggs for people who are
fans of this kind of information. We left a lot
of things unsaid in particular exactly just want to put
(46:25):
that out there. We don't want to spoil it there.
It's this is an interesting thing you could do right now.
I'm gonna do this after we conclude this show. I'm
gonna go back and listen to the mk Ultra episode
that we did. Then I'm going to go and finish
episode six because that's the one I'm currently on in
the Control Group, and I'm going to see where all
those parallels are, because it's I can see it already
(46:45):
up until this point, but Episode nine is Midnight Climax,
So I want to really listen to that one, and
thank you, of course folks for tuning in. We would
love to hear your stories or accounts, and this way
be opening a little bit of a risky door. But
if you have knowledge of what you consider to be
unethical or illegal human experimentation occurring in modern day, or
(47:10):
if you know of something that did happen and has
not yet reached the public sphere for one reason or another,
contact us. We would like to hear from you. You
can write to us on social media. Got the Facebook,
at the Instagram. We are Conspiracy Stuff show on Instagram,
Conspiracy Stuff on Facebook and Twitter. Right, all right, you
(47:31):
know there's another way to get to us too, but
we'll hold off on that for a second. We want
to find out first a little bit more about our guest.
That's right, Brett. Where can we listen to the Control
Group and learn more about you and your films and
all of that stuff. We can find the Control Group
at Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms, and we
have a site which is a Control Group dot show.
(47:52):
And uh, as far as me, I'm on the Internet
Movie Database and I don't maintain like a regular profile
type page, but I try to stay active in the
social media's as much as I can, And you can
also find the Control Group social media on Instagram, Facebook,
(48:14):
and Twitter if you want to interact directly with the show.
There's some really cool visual aspects to it that I
think are definitely worth the digital trip. And all the
films that I've made, including The Unwanted and of course
Hell's Highway, are available on DVD from Keno Larber. So
get out there right now. You can go ahead and no,
(48:34):
don't pause, yeah, let it finish, but then subscribe to
the Control Group and then start listening to those episodes
right after this, uh, and then tell us what you
think about it. You can give us a call. We're
one eight three three s T d W y t
K damn. Now you guys are gonna do that? Oh yeah,
oh yeah, I prefer it that way. I just went perfect.
(48:55):
But if you if you don't want to call us,
but you should, you can send us an email. Were
conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. M
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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