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There have been some wild revelations over the years when it comes to declassified CIA documents, but these might be the craziest.
Recently, the CIA was accused of conducting numerous “non-human” UFO retrieval missions and had some of its Area 51 secrets revealed, but those secret projects were pretty tame compared to some of the items list on Monday in a new Reddit thread.
1) Project Acoustic Kitty. In the 1960s, at a cost of about $20 million, a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone and a small radio transmitter into a cat with the idea that it would eavesdrop on enemies of the state. It didn’t work out very well. In fact, one report claimed that the cat was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately after its release.
2) In the 1950s, one person wrote, “the CIA conducted research to figure out which sort of myths and superstitions the Philippine people had. They discovered that they were afraid of vampires.
“At one point they disrupted a group by snatching a local man, murdering him, and putting teeth marks on his neck. They then hung him upside down for his friends to find which terrified the village.
“This was all part of an effort to elect Ramon Magsaysay as president who basically acted as a puppet for the US. The CIA wrote his speeches and directed his policy.”
Sounds a little like what has been happening in the Peruvian village Haikito.
3) Operation Sea Spray. According to Smithsonian magazine, “Beginning on September 26, 1950, the crew of a U.S. Navy minesweeper ship spent six days spraying Serratia marcescens into the air about two miles off the northern California coast. The project was called ‘Operation Sea Spray,’ and its aim was to determine the susceptibility of a big city like San Francisco to a bioweapon attack by terrorists.”
Harmless, right?
“But there was a catch. At the time, the US military thought that Serratia couldn’t harm humans. The bug was mostly known for the red spots it produced on infested foods and had not been widely linked to clinical conditions. That changed when one week after the test, 11 local residents checked into a Stanford University Hospital complaining of urinary tract infections.”
Oh yeah, one person ended up dying and “some have suggested that the release forever changed the area’s microbial ecology.”
4) “The papers describing astral projection,” another Redditor wrote. “They brought a ‘psychic’ in and placed an envelope with coordinates and a timeframe on it. They asked him to describe what he saw. He described dying planet where people had left to discover a new place they could populate. It was revealed that the envelope contained coordinates on Mars in the distant past. It gets much more in depth where he describes large structures, etc. It’s not very long and very much worth the read.”
That took place in the 1980s, but its failures apparently didn’t stop Russian scientists from trying to train people to “contact aliens” using psychic abilities in the 1990s.
5) Operation Northwoods. According to ABC News, “America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.
“Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.”
Amazingly, these five stories are just the very, tip top of the iceberg when it comes to the crazy things the CIA and the American government have tried to do in secret over the decades. Read about more of these attempts over at Reddit.