The 13 Most Evil U.S. Government Experiments on Humans
The U.S. Government has been caught conducting an insane amount of vile, inhumane, and grisly experiments on humans without their consent… and often without their knowledge. These are the thirteen most evil, creepy, disturbing cases of human-testing ever conducted by the United States of America.
Conspiracy theory nuts are known for being a little out there, but once you read the wild government experiment stories on this list, you’ll be a believer too. Did the U.S. government really infect its own citizens with syphilis and not tell them? Sure did. Did other government agencies test nuclear weapons, resulting in radiation fallout on multiple innocent Pacific islands? Oh yes. And did top U.S. officials condone the research of corrupt doctors who were clearly torturing their research subjects?
Read the list below to find out.
1. Mind Control, Child Abuse – Project MKULTRA, Subproject 68
This is the stuff of nightmares. The CIA-run Project MKULTRA paid Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron for Subproject 68, AKA experiments involving mind-altering substances. The entire goal of the project was to look into methods of influencing and controlling the mind and extracting information from resisting minds.
In order to accomplish this, the doctor took patients admitted to his Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal (mostly for issues like bi-polar depression and anxiety disorders) and conducted “therapy” on them. The treatment they received was life-altering and scarring.
Between 1957 and 1964 Cameron was paid to administer electroconvulsive therapy at 30-40 times the normal power. He would put patients into a drug-induced coma for months on end and playback tapes of simple statements or repetitive noises over and over again.
The victims forgot how to talk, forgot about their parents, and suffered serious amnesia. All of this was performed on Canadian citizens because the CIA wasn’t willing to risk such operations on Americans.
To ensure the project remained funded, Cameron, in one scheme, took his experiments upon admitted children and in one situation had filmed the child engaging in sex with high-ranking government officials.
He and other MKULTRA officers blackmailed the officials to ensure more funding.
2. Mustard Gas Tested on Soldiers via Involuntary Gas Chambers
As bio-weapon research intensified in the 1940s, officials also began testing its repercussions and defenses on the Army itself. In order to test the effectiveness of various bio-weapons, officials were known to have sprayed mustard gas and other skin-burning, lung-ruining chemicals like Lewisite on soldiers, without their consent or knowledge of the experiment happening to them. Upon contact with the skin, this would cause extreme pain, itching, and swelling reminiscent of severe chemical burns.
They also tested the effectiveness of gas masks and protective clothing by locking soldiers in a gas chamber and exposing them to mustard gas and Lewisite, mimicking the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
It was also rumored that along with the soldiers, patients at VA hospitals were being used as guinea pigs for medical experiments involving bio-warfare chemicals, but that all experiments were changed to be known as “observations” to ward off suspicions.
3. U.S. Grants Immunity to Involuntary-Surgery Monster
As head of Japan’s infamous Unit 731 (a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II), Dr. Shiro Ishii carried out violent human experimentation on tens of thousands during the Second Sino-Japense War and World War II.
Ishii was responsible for testing vivisection techniques without any anesthesia on human prisoners. Vivisection is the act of conducting experimental surgery on living creatures (with central nervousness) and examining their insides for scientific purposes. So basically, he was giving unnecessary surgery to prisoners by opening them up, keeping them alive, and not using any anesthetic.
During these experiments he would force pregnant women to abort their babies. He also subjected his prisoners to change in physiological conditions and inducing strokes, heart attacks, frost bite, and hypothermia. Ishii considered these subjects “logs.”
Following imminent defeat in 1945, Japan blew up the Unity 731 complex and Ishii ordered all the remaining “logs” to be executed. Not soon after, Ishii was arrested. Then, the respected General Douglas McArthur allegedly struck a deal with Ishii. If the U.S. granted Ishii immunity from his crimes, he must exchange all germ warfare data based on human experimentation. So Ishii got away with his crimes because the U.S. became interested in the results of his research.
While not directly responsible for these acts, the actions of the American government certainly illustrated that it was more than willing to condone human torture for advancements in biological warfare that could kill even more people.
4. Deadly Chemical Sprays on American Cities
Showing once again that the U.S. always tends to test out worse-case scenarios by getting to them first, the Army, CIA, and government conducted a series of biochemical warfare simulations upon American cities to see how the effects would play out in the event of an actual chemical attack.
They conducted the following air strikes/naval attacks: – The CIA released a whooping cough virus on Tampa Bay using boats, and so caused a whooping cough epidemic. 12 people died. – The Navy sprayed San Francisco with bacterial pathogens and in consequence many citizens developed pneumonia.
– Upon Savannah, GA and Avon Park, FL, the army released millions of mosquitoes in the hopes they would spread yellow fever and dengue fever. The swarm left Americans struggling with fevers, typhoid, respiratory problems, and the worst, stillborn children.
Even worse was that after the swarm, the Army came in disguised as public health workers. Their secret intention the entire time they were giving aid to the victims was to study and chart-out the long term effects of all the illnesses the public was suffering.
5. US Infects Guatemalans With STDs
In the 1940s, with penicillin as an established cure for syphilis, the U.S. decided to test out its effectiveness on Guatemalan citizens. To do this, they used infected prostitutes and let them loose on unknowing prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and soldiers. When spreading the disease through prostitution didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, they instead went for the inoculation route.
Researchers poured syphilis bacteria onto men’s penises and on their forearms and faces. In some cases, they even inoculated the men through spinal punctures. After all the infections were transmitted, researchers then gave most of the subjects treatment, although as many as 1/3 of them could have been left untreated, even if that was the intention of the study in the first place.
On October 1, 2010, Hilary Clinton apologized for the events and new research has gone on to see if anyone affected is still alive and afflicted with syphilis. Since many subjects never got penicillin, its possible and likely that someone spread it to future generations.
6. Secret Human Experiments to Test the Effects of The Atomic Bomb
While testing out and trying to harness the power of the atomic bomb, U.S. scientists also secretly tested the bomb’s effects on humans. During the Manhattan Project, which gave way to the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. scientists resorted to secret human testing via plutonium injection on 18 unsuspecting, non-consenting patients.
This included injecting soldiers with micrograms of plutonium for Project Oak Ridge along with later injecting three patients at a Chicago hospital. Imagine you’re an admitted patient, helpless in a hospital bed, assuming that nothing is wrong when the government suddenly appears and puts weapons-grade plutonium in your blood. Out of the 18 patients, who were known only by their code-names and numbers at the time, only 5 lived longer than 20 years after the injection.
Along with plutonium, researchers also had fun with uranium. At a Massachusetts hospital, between 1946 and 1947, Dr. William Sweet injected 11 patients with uranium. He was funded by the Manhattan Project.
And in exchange for the uranium he received from the government, he would keep dead tissue from the body of the people he killed for scientific analysis on the effects of uranium exposure.
7. Injected Prisoners with Agent Orange
WARNING: the above video may be disturbing, but is a reality of what Americans used as biological warfare during Vietnam and what we, as Americans, VOLUNTARILY injected into people for “testing” purposes… with the help of a very popular American company.
While he received funding from Agent Orange producer Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army, and Johnson & Johnson, Dr. Albert Kligman used prisoners as subjects in what was deemed “dermatological research.”
The dermatology aspect was testing out product the effects of Agent Orange on the skin. For the effects Agent Orange had on the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, please click here. (WARNING images in this article may be extremely disturbing, as they include extreme human deformation, including that of infants.)
Needless to say the injecting of, or exposure to, dioxidin is beyond monstrous to voluntarily do to any human. Kligman, though, injected dioxidin (a main component of Agent Orange) into the prisoners to study its effects. What did happen was that the prisoners developed an eruption of chloracne (all that stuff from high school combined with blackheads and cysts and pustules that looked like the picture shown to the left) that develop on the cheeks, behind the ears, armpits, and the groin – yes, the groin.
Kligman was rumored to have injected 468 times the amount he was authorized to. Documentation of that effect has, wisely, not been distributed.
The Army oversaw while Kligman continued to test out skin-burning chemicals to (in their words) “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process” and test out many products whose effects were unknown at the time, but with the intent of figuring that out.
During these proceedings, Kligman was reported to have said, “All I saw before me were acres of skin … It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Using that analogy, it’s easy to see how he could plow straight through so many human subjects without an ounce of sympathy.
8. Operation Paperclip
Following World War II, the U.S. Government covertly instituted Operation Paperclip, a program of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in which over 1,500 German scientists, technicians, and engineers from Nazi Germany and other foreign countries were brought to the United States for employment.
They did this in part to keep German scientific expertise and knowledge from the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, and to keep post-war Germany from redeveloping its military research capabilities. The U.S. Government “bleached” the scientists of their Nazi ties, removing and/or destroying any documents or records tying them to the party.
Evacuations netted the U.S. Government an estimated 1,800 technicians and scientists, along with 3,700 family members. Any who had special skills or knowledge were taken to detention and interrogation centers, to be held and interrogated, sometimes for months at a time. Some were then transported to villages without research facilities or work and forced to report twice weekly to police headquarters to prevent them from leaving. A Joint Chiefs of Staff directive stated that the scientists should only be released “after all interested agencies were satisfied that all desired intelligence information had been obtained from them.”
9. Infecting Puerto Rico With Cancer
In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads was sponsored by the Rockefeller Institute to conduct experiments in Puerto Rico. He infected Puerto Rican citizens with cancer cells, presumably to study the effects. Thirteen of them died. What’s most striking is that the accusations stem from a note he allegedly wrote:
“The Porto Ricans (sic) are the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever to inhabit this sphere… I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more… All physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects.”
A man that seems to be hell-bent on killing Puerto Rico through a cancer infestation would not seem a suitable candidate to be elected by the U.S. to be in charge of chemical warfare projects and receive a seat on the United States Atomic Energy Commission, right?
But that’s exactly what happened. He also became vice-president of the American Cancer Society. Any shocking documentation that would have happened during his chemical warfare period would probably have been destroyed by now.
10. Pentagon Treats Black Cancer Patients with Extreme Radiation
In the 60s, the Department of Defense performed a series of irradiation experiments on non-consenting, poor, African-American cancer patients. They were told they would be receiving treatment, but they weren’t told it would be the “Pentagon” type of treatment: meaning to study the effects of high level radiation on the human body. To avoid litigation, forms were signed only with initials so that the patients would have no way to get back at the government.
In a similar case, Dr. Eugene Saenger, funded by the Defense Atomic Support Agency (fancy name), conducted the same procedure on the same type of patients. The African-Americans received about the same level of radiation as 7500 x-rays to their chest would, which caused intense pain, vomiting and bleeding from their nose and ears. At least 20 of the subjects died.
11. Operation Midnight Climax
Here’s a government experiment that, when you Google it, has completely different image results than web results. Operation Midnight Climax involved safe houses in New York and San Francisco, built for the sole purpose to study LSD effects on non-consenting individuals.
But in order to lure the individuals there, the CIA made these safe houses out to be – wait for it – brothels. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll (yes, that happened) lured “clients” back the houses. Instead of having sex with them, they dosed them with a number of substances, most famously LSD. This also involved extensive use of marijuana.
The experiments were monitored behind a two-way mirror, kind of like a sick, twisted peep show.
Furthermore, it’s alleged that the officials who ran the experiments described them as “fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and bidding of the All-highest?” The most horrifying part was the idea of dosing non-consenting adults with drugs they couldn’t possibly know the effects of.
12. Fallout Radiation on Unsuspecting Pacific Territories
After unleashing hell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States embarked on numerous thermonuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in response to increased Soviet bomb activity. They were intended to be a secret affair. However, this secret wasn’t well kept.
Detonated in 1954 over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Castle Bravo was the most powerful nuclear device the U.S. ever set off. What they didn’t expect was for the fallout from the blast to inadvertently be blown upwind onto nearby residents of other islands. The suffering included birth defects and radiation sickness. The effects were greater felt in later years when many children whose parents were exposed to the fallout developed thyroid cancer and neoplasms.
This created Project 4.1, a study to examine the effects of radiation fallout on human beings. Essentially, it was the latest in a long string of studies where humans act as guinea pigs without giving consent and a project remembered by the U.S. as a way to gather data that would otherwise be unobtainable. The U.S. moral standard that history best remembers is that even though the radiation fallout on the people of the Marshall Islands was an accident, it might as well have been intended.
In addition, perhaps as nature’s way of adding insult to injury, a Japanese fishing boat was caught in the fallout. The fishermen all fell ill and one died. The Japanese were livid that the U.S. was still affecting them with nuclear devices.
13. Tuskegee
Between 1932 and 1972, researchers recruited 400 black share-croppers in Tuskegee, Alabama to study the natural progression of syphilis. But the scientists never told the men they had syphilis. Instead, they went around believing that they were being treated for “bad blood” disease as researchers used them to find out the extent of syphilis symptoms and effects.
In 1947, penicillin became the standard cure for syphilis. But along with withholding information about the disease, scientists also “forgot” to tell their subjects that what they were being treated for had a cure. And so the study continued for nearly 30 years more.
Once it was discovered, the backlash to the study was so fierce that President Bill Clinton made formal apology, stating he was sorry that the government “orchestrated a study that was so racist.” Sadly, although horrific, this is one of the more docile, evil human experiments ever conducted by the U.S. Government.
Sources:
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Blum, William (2006). Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-84277-827-2.
Kaye, Jonathan. “Retin-A’s Wrinkled Past”, Pennsylvania History Review, Spring 1997.
Schultz Vento, Carol. Defense Media Network. Sep 14, 2013. (http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/…
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