American Mind Control: MK Ultra (2015) Student Film or Documentary? | Under the Docs 018

➡ This summary is about a film review on the 2014 documentary, “American Mind Control: MK Ultra”. The film explores the MK Ultra program, a secret CIA project that conducted mind control experiments. The reviewers discuss various aspects of the film, including its coverage of the program’s sub-projects, the involvement of universities and individuals, and controversial claims such as Michael Jackson being a product of MK Ultra. However, they criticize the film for its surface-level exploration of topics and lack of depth.
➡ The documentary about MK Ultra, a mind control program, was disappointing due to its lack of detail and coherence. It merely skimmed over important topics like Operation Midnight Climax and the connection between MK Ultra and Ted Kaczynski, without providing substantial facts. The film also had poor production value, with irrelevant B-roll footage and a confusing mix of music. Despite the interesting subject matter, the documentary was poorly executed and not recommended.
➡ The text discusses a movie, presumably about Frank Olsen, that the speaker found disappointing and poorly executed. They criticize the film for its lack of informative content, distracting filming style, and reliance on unrelated B-roll footage. Despite the interesting topic, the speaker feels the movie does a disservice to it and recommends other sources for learning about the subject. They also hint at upcoming discussions about Stanley Kubrick’s films and their symbolism.

Do you like student projects? Do you like fetish films? Even if you do, you still won’t like this movie. Under the docks yeah, under the docks Buried deeper We breaking the locks they collecting dots under the docks under the docks yeah under the docks. I’m Sean. Chris. This is Paranoid American. Welcome back to under the Docs. Today we’re going back on the Mind Control train. American mind control, MK Ultra, a 2014 film directed by Philip Gardner and narrated by Philip Gardner. Why are we covering this film? Well, it’s part of Mind Control MK ULTRA month and you can’t go out without this film.

I hadn’t seen this film prior to us watching it now, but you can’t. It fits right along with the last two we just watched. It’s almost as if we purposely set this up, which people don’t know. We just kind of scrambled them together and just kind of like, we’re like, ah, this sounds like kind of close to it, right? It has a little MK Ultra and the similarities and the threads that woven into each of these different documentaries actually fits in with the propaganda from the side war, with the experiments with the Manson family and all that in it.

It really, I think, finalizes what we’ve done in these last two documentaries. Plus, if you just go online and search for MK ULTRA documentary, this one gets some of the top search results. And if you go on Apple TV and you search for MK ultra, this thing is one of the only results on there. So even if you just come across this accidentally, there’s probably a lot of people that were just casually scrolling around, searched for mind control or this comes up on the normal feed and all of a sudden you’re watching a documentary about the actual MK ULTRA program, plotting the course, the premise and key claims, right? Like as we said, the premise is in the title, An American Mind Control MK Ultra.

Anybody that’s familiar with MK Ultra understands the projects behind it. I think one of the key claims for me, obviously already knowing about MK ULTRA and some of these other experiments going on, was the revelation of sub project 119, which I wasn’t super familiar with, which is also part of this tree and this. The roots of MK Ultra. Yeah, the MK Ultra program has somewhere around, I think, 160 sub projects that are known. The details on all of those are not known, but yeah, each individual one hap could have happened in a different city having different funding, different people ahead of it.

When we did chaos, we mentioned Dr. Jolly West. He just represented a small handful of those sub projects. One of the Other big ones was Operation Midnight Climax where they had these two way mirror, one way mirrors and they were recording officials and prostitutes and drug dealers on, you know, and on LSD and seeing what they did out in the normal world. That was just one of the other many different sub projects in this whole umbrella operation. 1. Another key claim that they kind of drop in here is that 44 colleges, like three prisons and multiple, you know, military vets are part of these experiments unknowingly.

Right. Like, I mean some of the professors that are working on it, or like scientists and chemists, they, they do know about this. But there’s so many people involved, I didn’t realize there was that many colleges that were like part of these programs. Oh yeah, well, there’s two different terms. If you actually look at some of these MK Ultra declassified docs and there’s two different categories of people. Usually when this context comes up, one of it is unknowing, but another one is unwitting, like unwittingly, which means that you know about it, but you just, you know, you’re being forced to go through it regardless.

So they talk about a lot of the unknowing, a lot of the unwitting, that these 44 different universities as an example, some of those might have just looked like a guy shows up and hangs out after your last class is out and he’s like, hey, I heard what you were saying back there. Would you like an extra 30 grand to just take some of that funding? Do you want to hire some of your best students and see if you want to run an actual, like, here’s your chance to fund this. Because I represent somebody that also is interested in knowing what your results could be.

And we just want to fund it. And if you take our money and do it, just send us the results first and that’s it. And as long as you didn’t ask any other questions, then you got the funding and now you are an unknowing participant in the CIA. If you’re high up enough in, you know, academia and you see some, you know, guy you’ve never seen before come in and start waving money around, are you smart enough to be like, oh, that’s a CIA, right? Like you probably know, you just don’t ask the, the questions that would exclude you from getting that funding.

So it’s a gray area as to how many knew and didn’t know and how many new and just didn’t ask the questions. So there was plausible deniability and some of the interesting facts of that of like where there was people that were participants in this that maybe didn’t know that they were participants. One of the people is Frank Olson that they talk about. And Frank Olsen was administered LSD and mysteriously died. And he was a part of a lot of these programs which people believe, are led to believe that he was maybe almost killed off or so he couldn’t speak anymore.

This, they don’t get very far into this or honestly any topic that comes up in this movie, it’s all very surface level. So like one of the. Frank Olsen. Yeah, they name drop them. They mentioned these questionable circumstances. But the questionable circumstances were that he knew that he got unknowingly dosed with LSD and he was having some very major second thoughts about the nature of his entire work at Edgewood Arsenal and some kind of biochem warfare stuff that they were getting into. And he felt bad about it. I think if, if you go deep enough into that rabbit hole, he felt bad about things that he knew were the end result of the stuff that he was doing at Edgewood Arsenal.

And he was maybe gonna come out about it or at least was so dissatisfied with his job that the superiors were like, let’s just nip this thing in the bud. And so his questionable death is really that the official story was that he jumped out of a window in this hotel, but really the window did not open. This was a, a non opening window. So the window was opened by someone else or you’re smashed by someone else. And he happened to have been staying with a CIA handler at that time. So I mean by all premise, this guy was clobbered then and pushed out of this.

Like the window was smashed and then he got thrown out the window and they exhumed the body and they did like a postmortem autopsy on like all of this was more or less proven and the CIA had to pay the Olson family a whole bunch of money because they lost these suits. And he’s just one example of so different. Many. I’m glad. Like anytime his name comes up, it’s worth looking into. My favorite claim though is towards the end of the film where they make the claim that Roseanne Barr makes the claim that Michael Jackson was a result of MK Ultra and Joe Jackson was a CIA asset.

And you know, all that beating on Michael and making him into a star was part of a CIA program. This, I mean, we’re gonna start venturing into like the overboard moment a little bit. Like for me, this was kind of one of the overboard moments of this movie where it. It starts out on a lot of historical fact, a lot of things that we’ve heard before. And then it just feels like as this guy was wrapping up his edit of the movie, some news broke. And it was Roseanne Barr now claims Michael Jackson, MK ultravic. And he’s like, oh, I’ve totally got to add this to that movie that I’m making.

And we get like an extra 20 minutes runtime where he just focuses. Not. Not in too much depth, mind you. Very shallow take. But, like, here’s what RoseAnne said on TV. So let’s go ahead and include that as part of this. Yeah. And no, like, details of like, backing it up of like, oh, well, here’s why we think Joe’s CIA said I just got a little chuckle out of it. Like, I was like, what? It kind of came out of nowhere. It was a key point I wasn’t expecting. Right. And now from left field, hidden treasures and overboard moments.

I’m gonna let you start to kick this one off. What was your Hidden Treasures? I’m just gonna cut to the chase and say, I do not recommend this film for anybody. It is the worst combination of a student project and even like a weird fetish film towards the end, which I was not expecting to happen. I’ve got all of the most pertinent details in this entire documentary in my little MK Ultra paranoid pamphlet. I recommend you check that out instead. This one might put you off on it. Don’t. Definitely don’t recommend this to normies. It’ll put them off.

You’ll look like a complete idiot. I don’t have a whole lot of hidden treasure here, man. This. I’m gonna start just like, you know, crapping all over this movie. Let me hear your hidden treasure and then I’ll go through my. My laundry list of overboard moments. I really don’t have any hidden treasures per se. I guess the only thing I kind of liked is they. They brought up the Black Sorcerer. But let’s see. The thing is, is that nothing’s in detail for me in just like, hey, you heard of Operation Midnight Climax? Yeah, we, you know, but they don’t go that.

That was probably the deepest dive they went on is Operation Midnight Climax. But everything else is a brief summary or like, very surface level of like, hey, have you heard of MK Ultra? Pretty crazy, right? If you went to Wikipedia and try to summarize the whole article in a paragraph, and then you tried to summarize that paragraph into just a sentence or two, and then you try to summarize those two sentences into just a short phrase. That’s a majority of this movie where, like, for example, they mentioned Ted Kaczynski when they’re talking about MK Ultra and all these universities.

And there’s legitimately some really interesting ties between the MK ULTRA program and what happened to Ted Kaczynski. The same way that he was sort of the university version of a Charles Manson and that he was this unknowing subject in this research. Anyways, they just like, oh yeah, MK Ultra Ted Kaczynski. And then they just keep going and they don’t mention anything like, okay, what. What are the substantiating facts about that? I’m interested. I want to know more. And they didn’t do that. But what they did do was they just straight up show porn with like a weird filter on top of it so you can’t see.

Like, it, it turns it black and white. It’s like an embossing filter. But I don’t know if the guy just ran out of B roll footage at a certain point or was like, man, I really, I really need to put this scene somewhere. And then it looks like he either records his girlfriend or he hires like a Fiverr model to do some weird BDSM kink footage. And now all of a sudden the last quarter of the movie is just this chick being strangled over and over again with like superimposed with his voice talking just about random MK ULTRA effects.

Like some of the B roll that he does manage to get off of archive.org or whatever, and like the Prelinger archives. But he’ll be talking about 1930s or 1940s, and it’ll be a clip of a 1980s shopping mall or something. It. It just had none of the production value that I would expect even from an absolute schizophrenic, you know, like conspiracy theorist that hasn’t seen the light of day. It. It still doesn’t have a lot of cohesion. Man. I, again, like, I could just keep going over and over again. It’s so much bad B roll. There’s.

They’ll just scroll the names of wars on the bottom of the screen as he’s also trying to explain all these complicated topics. And it’s like, what are these wars about? What’s the footage about? What are you talking about? None of these things are going together. It was just a straight up info dump. And I, and I want to just be clear. Like, I think that it’s noble to have a cause and want to make a documentary About MK Ultra and mind control and all that. And I’m not saying that this is like was planted to make anything look bad.

It was just not a great attempt, man. And. And I just definitely do not recommend it. No, I have to agree. One of the points that got me when you’re talking about those B roll film, to me it looked like that. I don’t even think he hired anybody. I think that woman is from, you know, like the eye stocks and all the stock footage sites. It looked like he just got stock footed, went to a stock footage site, paid 19.99amonth and was just like downloading whatever he could download. And another part that really IR was like he’s having these old archived moments of like, you know, with military guys talking about MK Ultra and different scenes of like in the past, like from the 40s and 50s, whatever.

They already have a bed of music. And he adds another bed of music. I was like, bro, this is like, what are you doing? It. It. I liked what you said. It’s like a schizophrenic take of like film filming a documentary. Not very well though. Yeah, I’m not. I want to go on all the different technical editorial challenges this movie went through. But yeah, it’s, it’s not a good entry point or exit point. It might be the last movie someone sees on MK Ultra where they’re just like, oh, I don’t like. What a confusing topic. I never want to hear about this again.

There’s so many others that I would recommend ahead of this one. No, no, Shade to the. Who was the Philip Gardner? I mean, I, I like the cut of your jib. Right. I just think that maybe we need a V2. I mean, hell, loose change had like five or six different versions and re edits. Like, maybe you can re edit this. But don’t, don’t just summarize Wikipedia articles and put random B roll in the background and call a documentary. Testing the waters on this one is, is a little bit suspect because like we’re gonna do. It’s like we’re gonna do the bulk of the work for the film.

You know what I mean? So that’s one thing. I almost even skipped the deep dive because I was like, wait a second, we’re gonna break it down? And it’s like, well, why are we even watching this film? But the deep dive I kind of got is Operation midnight climax, the 1954-1965 operation where it was a safe house of basically having prostitutes, you know, putting LSD and different Chemical compounds in their john’s would use for lack of better term drinks and, and you know, getting them all hied up, running around rampant and then, then doing studies on them and making them go crazy.

You, you’ve already given more background and context than this movie, this documentary and I, I can add on to that too because I all I’ve written a com. A short story on Operation Min Min Climax. It’s called that. It’s called Operation Midnight Climax. It’s in my paranoid American history anthology. But it’s this guy, George Hunter White, he’s the one that gets hired by the CIA in order to run this operation where yeah, he doses people behind a one way mirror and he’s got a little recording tool there and he’s making notes and, and a couple of things they’re trying to do.

They’re trying to see one of them if they dosed a military guy, if they dose an officer and they get him where he thinks that he’s, you know, just hooked up with some random on the street. He’s under the influence of LSD or any other drug you can think of. Will he give up state secrets to this prostitute? Will he give up state secrets to some, you know, drug dealer or something just to see is LSD viable as this interrogation drug where even if you know that you’ve got state secrets and you’re not allowed to talk about it, will this, you know, you know, loose lips help sink ships or whatever? That, that’s one part of it.

George Hunter White was under the wing of a guy named William Donovan who was instrumental in creating the OSS that eventually led into the CI, the actual creation of the CIA. He was involved with Jack Ruby. He. I believe that when George Hunter White was working for the fbn which is a precursor of the FBI and the dea, he busts Jack Ruby and flips Jack Ruby and turns Jack Ruby into sort of a state asset. It’s such a wild, complicated and, and interesting story and again I hate this movie for just being like Operation Midnight Climax.

Look into it and they just keep going. They don’t like man, there, there was so much in detail and interesting things you could have left and just, just mentioned it, just thrown out the word George Hunter White. Just throw that name out there. I’ll give, I’ll do you one better too that if you like that story, there’s a book called the Terrible Mistake. I believe that go. It’s like a 600 page book that goes all about, that talks about Frank Olson. There was also a Documentary series that I kind of wanted to recommend, but also was like eight episodes long.

I was like, hey, hey, Sean, let’s watch 10 hours and a 10 minute segment on it. But it’s called Wormwood, and it is a dramatized retelling of this factual story of Frank Olsen, all the way from him with his kids and his family to getting dosed to, like, the weird things that are going on through his head all the way to the point where he gets pushed out a window. I recommend both of those so much more than this particular movie. But, I mean, if. If you come across this or if you’ve seen it before, or even if you’re just like, I want to see what they’re complaining about.

If you like the topics that come up, I mean, it’s not going to give you a whole lot more than just the Wikipedia summary, but it will give you a whole bunch of different leads that maybe you can follow down the rabbit holes, including Michael Jackson and Roseanne Barr. And you might like the B roll footage of the skinimax lingerie woman in the background that’s blended in with another video. Well, you know what’s wild though, man, is that it. It was like the movie had been done. Or he got, you know, like three quarters of the way into it.

He could have called it a rap. And he was like, no, I’ve got another 30 minutes in me, but I’m all out of B roll. What am I gonna do? Oh, I know what makes sense. I’m gonna take some clips from literal porn movies and this weird, like, fiverr, you know, B roll footage, and I’ll just somehow splice that together and make that the rest of my move. It’s. It’s so weird. And again, it felt like I. If I had walked out of the room and come back in, be like, wait, what? What movie just came on now? What is.

This is not the thing I was just watching. It’s that time, man. Think or swim. Clearly. This is a swim, right? What a great. No, I’m just kidding. This. This one’s a sink for me. Again, no shade at Philip Gardner for putting this thing together. You gotta start somewhere. You can always make a version too, but yeah, again, I. I wouldn’t recommend this even to myself. The title, man. The title will get you, you know, and the COVID will get you. It looks like it’s something that you would want to watch, but just trust me, you do not want to watch this movie unless it’s in like a.

A very, like, morbid curiosity sort of way. Any other way that you could spend the next hour would be better. Even if you’re just going to go and look at weird B roll Fiverr. BDSM footage like that will be a better use of your time than this movie. It’s a thing for me. Fisher Price, my first documentary, right? They try to put it together and I know we’re being critical, but definitely it’s something that someone threw. It seems like an experimental class project that probably got a D minus and just barely passed because they’re like, all right, you A for effort, right? You try to do something, but it didn’t come out very well.

It’s not very informative. It’s very distracting. The way they filmed it. There’s all kinds of different background stuff. It’s like they watch Zeitgeist and like, you know, like the interchanging of like the different backgrounds when they had like the Jordan Maxwell, you know, like, they try to use some of that inspiration, but they failed. They missed the mark. This is a total sink for me. A shipwreck destroyed. Burn it. Don’t watch it. I wouldn’t watch it. Yeah, two thumbs down. Two tomato splats. Like whatever your metric is, this is on the bottom of that metric. And.

And I’ll be overly critical because when it’s a topic that I’m passionate about or something that I find is beyond interesting and. And someone does it a disservice, I think I would. I would rather prefer this movie to have just been about some random, like, horse dressage competition that kind of got, you know, bumbled. I’d probably give it more leeway. But when it’s about a topic so expansive that can go into so many cool rabbit holes and interesting things and then just straight up read summaries of Wikipedia articles over unrelated B roll footage, it’s a. It’s a crime, right? Like I.

It’s making me, you know, want to hate it even more as I just bring up that particular dynamic of it. So great topic, horrible execution. And I think you said it best earlier, man. It’s a little bit self promotion, but it’s true, man. Just get the paranoid pamphlet MK Ultra and that will lead you in the right direction. That will be a quick read compared to this hour. Like you actually could probably read that in 20, 30 minutes. And that was actually give you real information and links and names and dates and all of the things that you would need because I guess that’s the other biggest complaint that this movie, it barely even gives you enough information.

For you to go and look it up on your own, you’d have to be like, oh, sub project, what was that again? And then go and search for that without getting all that extra details. So yeah, just go, go and get paranoid. American History 101 or the MK Ultra pamphlet. Both of them have versions that are on Amazon. So, yeah, thank you for this movie for allowing me to do a shameless plug that I do not feel bad about one bit. On the horizon. What do we got up next? Let’s do a Kubrick month, man. I want to, I want to talk about the symbolism of Kubrick movies and the moon stuff and the Eyes Wide Shut Rothschild mansion stuff.

So there’s three in particular. One of them is called room 237, which is probably the most normie oriented. This is the one where you can get just, you know, co workers or your mom or something. Maybe check out and get into the idea that there’s more behind the scenes with Kubrick movies. And then we’re just gonna jump straight into the deep end with Kubrick’s Odyssey 1 and 2, which in my opinion are conspiracy theory documentary legends at this point. Oh, that sounds perfect. I mean, we got to be in that era, right? Like, if we’re not going with a little bit Kubrick and get a little crazy, I think that would be a great extension after what we just went through, especially that wash.

We gotta wash our hands of this. Whatever the crap. I’m not even gonna mention the name of the film. You can read it at the bottom, but you know, this is under the docks. Go to killthemockingbirds.com go to paranoidamerican.com go get that MK Ultra pamphlet. Go look at some of the comics. Let’s, let’s help share the show. This is under the docks. Peace. Ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings and the CIA. Go visit nasacomic.com CIA put us on this. While we’re still singing the song about NAS. Go visit NAS.com go visit NASA comic.com yeah, go visit NASA comic.com comic.com CIA’s biggest con Stanley Kubrick put us on.

That’s why we’re singing this song about NASA comic.com go visit nas.com go visit NASA comic.com yeah, go visit NASA.com never a straight answer is a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions. Yeah. Gold is a NASA comic dot com. This is the perfect read for comic Kubrick or conspiracy fans of all ages. For more details, visit nasacomic.com I scribbled my life away driven to write the page Will it enlight your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift thanks God decapitated matters the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I like my trees blow it off in the face you’re despising me for what though calculated and rather cutthroat paranoid American must be all the blood smoke for real Lord give me your day your way vacate they wait around to hate Whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit get weak it heavy rotate when the beat hits a thing cause you’re welcome for real you’re welcome they never had a deal you’re welcome man they lacking appeal you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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