The Mystery Of Cursed French Bread (A Secret CIA Experiment?)
Ted Goodman on PhyOrg recounts the strange events of August 16, 1951, when dozens of villagers in the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit were struck with unexplainable and horrifying hallucinations of fire and snakes and beasts of all kinds, from, what was described as by villagers, eating le pain maudit (”cursed bread”).
Recently on Russia Today, Hank Albarelli, author of A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, suggests this incident was part of a CIA-funded experiment on foreign soil with LSD. According to Albarelli, five hundred people were affected by the “experiment” — resulting in forty people being taken to a nearby psychiatric institute and at least three suicides.
Albarelli specifically discusses this incident at around 5:10 into this video, and relates it to the work of Frank Olson, the subject of his book.
The U.S. and Soviet Union Considered Detonating Nuclear Bombs on the Moon
With all the hubub about NASA blowing up the Moon last October, I thought disinfo.com readers would like to know the U.S. (and the Commies!) had it in mind all along.
Here’s another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.
_____________________________________
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is an unused scene from Dr. Strangelove, but the United States and the Soviet Union have seriously considered exploding atomic bombs on the Moon.
It was the late 1950s, and the Cold War was extremely chilly. Someone in the US government got the bright idea of nuking the Moon, and in 1958 the Air Force Special Weapons Center spearheaded the project (labeled A119, “A Study of…
Not So Intelligent Intelligence: Four CIA Flops
Funny yet historically intriguing essay from Molly Mann on divine caroline. I really thought the Acoustic Kitty was BS, guess not:
Most of us don’t know much about what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actually does. Without some degree of mystery, after all, it can’t carry out its purpose to covertly collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals for American policymakers. So when we do learn anything about a specific CIA program, it’s usually after the fact, and usually because it was a big enough failure to garner media attention. With the understanding that all details about the agency’s dealings are sketchy, unconfirmed, and, well, secret, here are four of the twentieth century’s biggest CIA flops.
1. Operation Acoustic Kitty: The Cold War era of the 1960s was the CIA’s heyday. Americans were so worried about what the Communists were doing and whether they had nuclear weapons that we would have done just about anything to find out.
And the secret agents, glorified in spy novels and movies, who did get the dirt on the Reds were our heroes. The CIA’s carte blanche in chasing Communists led to rumors of some pretty bizarre ideas, like Operation Acoustic Kitty, which supposedly ran from 1961 to 1967, and involved the CIA’s surgically implanting cats with audio equipment to use them as bugging devices.
Learn How to Spike a Drink the CIA Way
From The Independent:
Forget poison-tipped umbrellas and exploding cigars. At the height of the Cold War, the CIA issued its top spooks with a more prosaic piece of equipment: a beginner’s guide to magic, educating them in the old-fashioned arts of conjuring and sleight-of-hand.
The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception was written in 1953 by a well-known performer called John Mulholland. It included tips for hiding objects up your sleeve, spiking someone’s drink (while pretending to light a cigarette) and communicating with colleagues by tying your shoelaces in a special way.
In 1973, as the Cold War showed signs of thawing, the CIA ordered every copy of the “top secret” document to be destroyed. But one managed to escape the agency’s paper shredders and was recently unearthed, in mysterious circumstances, by…
Did David Hasselhoff End the Cold War?
With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today, I found this story from the BBC in 2004 kinda funny. This headline also seemed to inspire the title of a book from a great publisher in the UK, Icon Books. If you don’t take Icon’s or the BBC’s word for it, watch the Hoff in action at the wall below (or better yet, the music video for “Looking for Freedom”):
Barely a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the city that had been divided by politics for more than 40 years was united in song. And leading the chorus of several hundred thousand voices was a man hitherto known to the rest of the world for driving a talking car.
David Hasselhoff, star of the hit 80s TV series Knight Rider, is renowned in celebrity-obsessed circles for being Big In Germany; not only as an actor, but as a purveyor of soft rock anthems. For that seminal concert, on New Year’s Eve 1989, Hasselhoff stood atop of the partly-demolished wall and belted out a tune called “Looking for Freedom.” (Continued on BBC News)
