Operation Midnight Climax

It's like American Horror Story.

It makes you wonder how these individuals would come to tie into the CIA's later projects, like Operation Midnight Climax, in which wealthy and valuable people were taken to CIA safe houses where they watched, they were watched behind double-sided mirrors as they partied with sex workers who gently leeched their secrets out of them.

It's fact.

You can look it up.

The name of the conspiracy.

Okay, the name of the conspiracy is Operation Midnight Climax.

All right.

All right.

Well, number one, is that real? Operation Midnight Climax.

So this is our show, Jimmy.

Yes, it is.

One of the ones, in case anybody out there hasn't heard of this one, I wanted to share it today.

Operation Midnight Climax.

Yeah, that's the real thing.

You can look that up if you've never heard of it.

But just this one thing that happened that the government did really is just such a window of insight into what kind of character, excuse me, got the hiccups.

We were dealing with, so I printed this off.

Operation Midnight Climax was a Central Intelligence Agency subproject of the Project MKUltra, the CIA mind control research program that began in the 50s.

Now, Operation Midnight Climax was established in order to study the effects of LSD on non-consenting individuals.

He's watching the whole thing, through what's really a sheet of one-way glass, taking notes.

this wasn't the mafia it wasn't a con to robin blind the man watching this unfold had a badge because the operation running that apartment and the drugging was funded staffed and directed by the united states government they called it operation midnight climax From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories.

They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by PAVE Studios.

Prisoners given enormous doses.

People put through electroshock and drug-induced comas, all in the name of research.

Operation Midnight Climax would be just one especially strange branch of a very large, very dark tree.

And the man they put in charge of all of it was not someone you'd expect.

of the show and there's a definite desire to keep all that from coming out publicly because it's not very uh not very flattering

My favorite part of MK Ultra was Operation Midnight Climax.

Does anybody know about that? The CIA set up whorehouses, and they would get these whores to bring guys in, and then they would dose them with LSD, and the CIA would be on the other side of the room watching and listening to what happens.

To our government.

You think you're going to get a piece, and then you just get dosed with LSD? And they were giving out pretty strong doses, so some of those people freaked the fuck out.

I've never done

a show on Operation Midnight Climax.

We've got to do

So Adam, another experiment that targeted ordinary members of the public was an operation the CIA actually ran for 10 years.

This one was titled Operation Midnight Climax.

That sounds like something else.

It was started in 1955 and initially operated just outside of Greenwich Village in New York City.

Unwitting Americans dosed with LSD in safe houses run by George White.

Operation Midnight Climax, prostitutes, two-way mirrors, the whole six circus.

Hospitals, prisons, universities, Canadian psychiatric patients under Ewan Cameron.

Frank Olson thrown out a window after being closed.

By the mid-60s, there were 149 documented subprojects at more than 80 institutions, 44 colleges, universities, hospitals, prisons, etc.

and pharmaceutical firms involving 185 outside researchers, often via cutouts such as the Gestrick Fund and Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.

1955 onward, Unwitting U.S. testing in safe houses, Operation Midnight Climax, run with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics agents George White in New York and San Francisco, used prostitutes to lure subjects who were dosed with LSD and observed.

Prisoners, mental patients, and others were used at multiple sites.