Fellow conspiracy realist. We are exploring a classic that is near and dear to our collective heart. As you may know, Matt Noll and yours truly work extensively in the world of audio fiction. And we had just an amazing conversation with a good friend of the show, filmmaker Brett Wood, who created something called the Control Group. And though it may be fiction, it is very much based in fact.
Yeah, this is one of the first fiction pods we ever did. And this is kind of your baby, Ben. You really help with all the development and all of the stuff involving what led to this really really fantastic show.
Oh, credit where it's due, Paul Decant and I helped out with it.
There you go.
Oh, and there's human experimentation involved in this one.
I do believe that's correct. Let's get on the slab.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We are joined with our super producer Paul Decant. Most importantly, you are you, and you are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. A very special episode of our show today because we are delving into something that has always fascinated us. I think as individuals and as a group, and that is the strange intersection of ethics and experimentation. Science right science versus the humanity of both the experimenters
and the experimentees. But we are not alone in this endeavor. Today we are joined with a friend of the show, a filmmaker Brett Wood, who just recently created How Stuff Works, first fiction podcast, The Control Group. Brett, thank you so much for coming on the show with us today.
Brett, what is excited to be here?
And you are indeed Brett Wood. I, well, we haven't fully confirmed. I haven't seen any identification. Did you guys get identification?
They got it at the front desk. We have a new policy.
Okay, he's cool.
He looks a lot like Brett Wood.
He at least signed his name Brett Wood when he got in here, which is about the level of our security.
Wow, man, you're really throwing our security team under the bus.
So, Brett, we were extremely excited about the Control Group as we were learning more about the show and more about the real life things, events, people and places that inspired the the narrative of The Control Group, And from what we understand, this originally was a screenplay, is that correct?
Right? About six years ago?
I wanted to make it as a film and quickly realized that it was sort of beyond my means as an independent filmmaker to have this large hospital facility and a fair number of extras as patients in the hospital. And also, as we may get into a little bit later on, I ran into some problems with the locations where I wanted to shoot, so I then moved over to a different project which is mostly set in a house, which was much more manageable for me.
Is that one called Those Who Deserve to Die?
That's coming up next?
That one I've just finished and have not yet shown anywhere, or we're just finishing up the sound and music.
The Unwanted is the one we did instead of The Control.
Group, right, And for anyone unfamiliar with the work, you are quite a prolific creator. Made The Unwanted in twenty fourteen, Psychopathia Sexualist in two thousand and six, a documentary that we leaned on pretty heavily in another show called car Stuff. It's called Hell's Highway The True Story of Highway Safety Films in two thousand and three, which I cannot recommend enough if you want something with a disturbing twist.
Those are upsetting.
Oh yes, I remember the carst Of episode that was back in my heyday as super producer Nol Brown.
That's true, that's true. We all go way back in this regard.
So I like where your work has taken you thus far and kind of where it's headed. Can you tell us exactly what the control group is, what it's about.
Sure, it's a sort of a narrativization of a couple of different threads that were going on in sort of psychological medicine and covert government activities in the nineteen fifties and sixties, one of which is the government's drug testing programs better known as MK Ultra.
Of course, Artichoke, Bluebird.
There were lots of names for what they were doing, which is basically secretly testing drugs on people, preferably unsuspecting people, and trying to determine if these could be useful tools for either mind control or interrogation. And then the other thread.
Of it is the CIA sponsorship of experimental psychological testing, you know, without any apparent connection to the you know, covert interrogation.
Arm of what they were doing.
So they would they just set up a front organization to fund colleges, hospitals, doctors to just do experiments that might kind of fit in with the kind of stuff they're interested in, namely things like erasing someone's memory, getting them to unlock the secrets which they be protecting.
You can sort of see anything that might be applicable.
They were kind of open to and a lot of the doctors who did the research didn't know they were sort of doing it under the sponsorship of the CIA. And they say, I called it a cutout, which I love that term. Instead of a front, we have we have several cutouts that we can hide this behind. And we're going to hide this behind. The cutout known as the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology.
I love it.
What is that either?
Great? It's just such an important sounding like who doesn't.
Believe in that's real human ecology?
That's what they called it.
Yes, And well, I guess we can announce here for the first time that pretty soon we are going to make available Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology t shirts at our Control Group merchandise shop. So just stand by for more details on that. But I just love the idea of this, of this nonprofit organization and handing out money to ambitious researchers.
And there's a bit of an ego fee too, right, It's like, we believe in your work.
Sounds kind of like Illumination Global Unlimited.
Perhaps, But it's funny.
This is why I feel so at home here, you know, within the house, stuff works. Family is because Life with the Driver's a documentary and I know that MK Ultra has been a subject on stuff they don't want you to know and other shows because you know, your audience sort of relishes these secret histories of not always the underbelly of what's going on in our society and government, but just like being in the know of the things that were not in your high school textbook.
Absolutely well said. So let's dive into your research process as you were gathering material and documentation for the script itself and for the story. What kind of stuff did you find? Where did you look?
Mostly?
Well, the interesting is there's not much first generation information about this stuff. The whole thing would have been secret and forgotten were it not for the survival of I think seven boxes of financial records receipts, and it was from those documents that people were able to piece together this history. But there are a number of great books on the subject. As far as the CIA testing, there is the Search for the Manchurian Candidate by John Marx.
And as far as the medical research, there's one person in particular who I was, who is kind of the unofficial inspiration for our main doctor in the control group. And the real life doctor's name is Ewan Cameron, and he was a doctor in Quebec. He was the head
of the American Psychiatric Association. You know, you couldn't be more highly regarded, But yet he was conducting these today we might consider ethically questionable experiments in manipulation of the mind, which I can't wait for us to start talking about the details of those. But you know, the thing is, when you read about all this stuff, it just doesn't seem possible. It's outrageous, it's fascinating, but you can't really
imagine it actually happening. And so what I wanted to do with the control group is sort of imagine what would it be like to actually be subjected to something we call psychic driving, which is where doctor Cameron would he would often record it himself. He would a tape which would play in a constant loop. You are not being kind to others. You need to open up and be more open with your emotions. You need to you know, and just sort of a mantra or a reinforcement of
the kind of behavior the person should have. And so that tape would play constantly, constantly, constantly in days at a time, for days at a time in headphones, and sometimes they would have it like a helmet where it's wired so a person could get up and walk around. And they even had speakers built into mattresses so that when someone's asleep, you will be kind to others, you will be more responsive to treatment.
So that's psychic driving.
Okay, So that psychic driving. Was it done on patients in like a psychiatric word or where who was this done to?
Yeah? And it wasn't.
That's the thing it was done to just like regular people. There was a tendency to do a lot of this more on women, and we of course address that. That's a big part of what the control group is some of that, I think is the ego of the doctor who if he's going to shape and sculpt a patient Pygmalion style, he tends to want to do that more with a woman than a man. But I think also it feeds a lot into the fact that psychological issues are have traditionally sort of been tilted towards women. Like
the best example was hysteria. That is something that, if you take it by its original technical definition, has to do, you know, with the reproductive organs of a woman, that was the source from which the psychological problem emanated. Or we think a lot about housewives in the fifties being prescribed tranquilizers and for the men they would just you know, have an extra martine at lunch.
That was their way of dealing with it.
So there has often been this focus on psychological problems on women, and so that sort of became an important part of the control group as.
Well as an avenue of control. I think given the misogyny that was institutionalized and still exists today, it seems like in many cases, with the benefit of retrospect, weariable as a society to look back and say, well, that person wasn't mentally ill. They just did want to be forced to marry that jerk. Yeah, you know, yeah, and this I think that's I think that's a powerful thing. But the idea of psychic driving too, I don't want us to lose that. At first, when you first hear it,
it's easy to think, well, I'm familiar with that. I've had a song stuck in my head before. How bad can it be? You know, it can't be any worse than desposito or something. But there are some other techniques that doctor Cameron was using. Could you tell us a little bit about those, maybe starting with the sleep treatments.
So as part of the psychic driving, you would need to have your mind sort of neutralized before the fresh messages these reinforcements are being allowed in your mind. They need to wipe the slate clean, and so they did that a couple of different ways. But the cleaning process was called depatterning, and that means fix the mind so it no longer has a regular pattern of thought.
It's open and neutral. And even people you know.
Had memory loss, long term memory loss, they could remember what was happening to them now, but couldn't think back into their past. That was the whole point, wipe the slate clean so that we can replace it with the fresh messages, with the psychic driving. So the one way they would do that is ect electroconvulsive therapy better known today as shock treatment, doubled up with sleep therapy, where they would tranquilize someone and have them sleep around the clock.
And you know, sleep is great, and to a certain degree, shock therapy even now is considered of use when correctly applied. But what they would do is give people shot treatment multiple times in a single day, and according to one source, six times the voltage or dosage at which it is normally given. So it wasn't just like, you know, you're
need a little mental tune up. It was an attempt to really flatten the brain waves of the mind by excessively delivering shot treatment and then rest so that the body and the mind would just shut down and you'd get woken up, fed more e CT and which puts you right back to sleep, and then they would continue to drip or the pills. I think someone was telling me that phenobarbital is more commonly given as pills, so that was I guess how they would keep you in that deep sleep.
Wow, And how how effective was this at least the deep patterning aspect.
You know, the like I said, people did you know?
After this all came out, a number of patients got together and sued you and Cameron, claiming that they had you know, erased their memories and you know, cross these ethical barriers. So it certainly didn't seem to have the curative effect that he was proclaiming it was going to have. It didn't completely mess up people's minds the way say,
you know, uh, transorbital lobotomy might. So the effect it was never proven to be especially effective either as a sort of a treatment for you know, general psychological difficulties, and it certainly was never applied to the kind of use that the CIA thought it might be valuable for. So we'll never know if it was an effective way of interrogating or brainwashing someone. And it doesn't seem to have been an especially effective way of curing someone's mental ills.
And we'll learn more about that right after a quick
word from our sponsor. So you know, there is one thing that perhaps didn't exactly come out of this, but was utilized within the mk Ultra trials and specifically within the world of the control group, which is confinement the uh I don't want to give it away too much, but the cages, because that's something that we do see used in what we would I guess consider modern interrogation techniques isolating someone not allowing them to sleep for long periods of time, and we see some of that in
this story as well.
Yeah, and when we talk about the cages in the in the podcast, it's a little bit of a fictionalization just in terms of it's that it's true to the spirit of what was going on. I mean, we had a lot of sensory deprivation where someon would be kept in the dark with something over their eyes and something over their ears so they can't hear, and sometimes with their hands inserted into something so they can't feel.
As it's sort of like a version of the sleep therapies.
So to just see how long a person could exist in that state before their mind gets weakened and becomes open to you know, better programming, I guess. And in the podcast, the characters talk about how, you know, back in the day when the section this ward was called the cages, people would just be left to wander and sit in their own filth.
I mean, that's very well documented from.
Like back in the nineteen thirties and forties, where you would have wards of people naked, sitting in their own filth and just being given no treatment per se, a condition that existed. I think, you know, there was a lot of mental hospital reform in the nineteen fifties, so it was mostly cleaned up at that time. But you know, so you have this this dichotomy between like excessive treatment and then no treatment where it's just a matter of pump some drugs and someone neutralized the symptoms.
And ultimately that's what all this kind of was about.
And if we talk a lot about some of the other medical visionaries who have done some pretty crazy things over history, usually the justification for what they did was that it eliminated the symptoms, but it didn't actually cure the disease. My favorite, and I've thought about trying to dramatize this guy's work somehow. It was a guy named Henry Cotton, and in the nineteen twenties he had a big theory that mental illness and health problems was work triggered by different kinds of infection, and.
It's like bacterial infection yeah, okay.
And chronic dental infection was one of the big ones because you know, they didn't have great dental care back in the nineteen twenties, no fluoridation of water. And so he would pull teeth and remove tonsils and he had two sons and completely pulled all their teeth, adult teeth, oh wow, and gave people tons electomies the colon. You know, lots of bacteria in the colon. He would remove people's colons, he would remove portions of their stomach, he would remove
the spleens. So it was just all about taking out anything that was a possible source of infection.
And it would be amazed at how, you.
Know, high highly regarded this guy was, and how high up the professional ladder he was able to climb. He became the superintendent of the Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey, in New Jersey, and you know, eventually people kind of realized, Aha, well, his numbers look good on paper, but all he's doing is you know, removing a cause, you know, a potential cause. He's getting rid of symptoms, but he's not actually treating
the illness. And usually in cases like that, what happens is we don't do that anymore, and we don't talk about that anymore. And so like lobotomies are another great example. The botomies were considered so effective because they wiped out the symptoms.
To say, they don't do the bad stuff anymore.
Yeah, and so different of their part of.
Their brain that makes them act like a human.
And part of it is the fact that you've you've physically changed them to not be able to do that anymore. And in the case of something like shock therapy, they change their behavior because they don't want more shock therapy. Of course you're still not treating the cause, but you're causing the symptom to go away, either medically or through the fear instilled in them by well.
It's like that idea that torture isn't particularly effective and getting good confession. It's just effective at getting what you want to hear, or you'll get some kind of confession, some.
Amazing stories, and if you torture someone enough, they'll tell you everything anything.
This guy you're talking about reminds me of like sort of like a sick, twisted John Harvey Kellogg type almost where he's like into all this like holistic stuff, but he's treating this symptoms more than he is the actual illness, you know, enemas for everything, like yogurt enemas and all this stuff.
It's a great guy because he's like the lighter side, yeah, right, the same kind of visionary and it's all about a good a good colon flor.
And we can kind of have fun with him.
But then when you get into someone who as a little more barbaric in their treatments, but you know, it's the same. It's two sides of the same coin. This sort of visionary medicine that is not that grounded in the science of the illness that's being treated well.
And this guy you're talking about, it sounds like he kind of developed a bit of a god complex around it too. When you're unchecked and you can do this stuff and you have this vision, you know, but no one's stopping you, then of course you're just gonna push it as far as you can, right.
Yeah, And no one's stopping you.
And like in the case of you and Cameron, you're being made the head of the American Psychiatric Association.
That's like total validation. I go take it further.
And so well, back to the control group one of the things I wanted to do is what would one of these conversations be like with the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, where they're coaxing in along and like, maybe you should try pushing the envelope a little bit. And because I wanted to, because the doctors who are
doing these things are not monsters. They're ambitious, and I think they all have good intentions, even if they have egos kind of running rampant, And it doesn't take a whole lot of encouragement to get someone to maybe cross the threshold into something a little less ethical than they might if they were not being fueled by so much encouragement and adoration.
I think that's a really good point, because in the real world we see these sorts of situations coalescing in degrees of increments. It's not as if some shady person from what was that phrase, Brett cutout comes to you, comes to you and says, let's see how much LSD we can pump into someone before we ruin their lives. We're going to just get like ten people and just
take a spaghetti at the wall approach. You know that that's something that we ease into as people, and it's very easy to rationalize those further steps, especially and I think this is this even goes to the degree of victimization that some of the medical professionals experience, which is much lower than the patients obviously, but there they're being convinced that one must make certain sacrifices for the quote
unquote greater good. And we actually have a clip from the control group that I think touches on this, right, Matt.
Oh, yeah, this is this is great. This is from episode four. The name is phenobarbital, and it's a discussion between a character named Summer Hill and doctor Hayes, and they're discussing funding for the I guess the research that's being done at the hospital, as well as what types of things need to be done in order to continue that funding of the research.
Get us a name.
Start with that.
It'll be a good measure of your progress. But if you hold that a little longer, do the detective work. Connect the dots. I'll try, but I can help wondering whether or not we should be I'll stop thinking about should Should is a dirty word in research. Take yourself off the leash, doctor Hayes. Allow yourself to run you have a hunch, follow it, got an inch, scratch it and urge indulge it, and don't stop to ask whether
it's something you should be doing. If it gives you a better understanding, that's all that matters.
I love and detest this so much because it feels too real to me, having this person from the outside group that controls the money that's going to fund the research come in and say, well, you know, don't you want to do something that's going to be different and beyond. I mean, I know you're fifty, but you really got to think like a twenty six year old and push things harder. But he never once says anything about you know, this is exactly what you need to do or anything
like that. So he's got this weird plausible deniability with him and his cutout. But at the same time he's convincing this doctor to push himself ethically to the boundary
and perhaps beyond. And it makes me wonder just how much of that is actually what occurred during the mk Ultra trials, how much they were just pushing people without the CIA actually being the ones who are these dastardly who come up with the dastardly ideas that we then think about as being perhaps evil if you look back with hindsight, it just makes me wonder if they're literally just the pushers just getting the scientists to keep going that extra mind right.
I think, giving them the resources to keep going, giving them the encouraging, you know, stroking the ego a little bit. And then also you have to remember in the nineteen fifties a couple of big things were happening at the time,
and the biggest one is a Cold War. And even though they didn't specifically talk about the applications of this to you know, CIA activities, there was this sort of attitude that certainly within the CIA that were behind in the race with the Russians and the Chinese and the Koreans for mind control because they believed brainwashing was a real thing, and to some degree it is, but not everyone believed that it was going to be the thing
that was gonna You're gonna either transmit something to change the way people think, or put something in the water supply. At one point, they wanted to put LSD in an entire city's water supply just see what would happen, or like have some kind of drug or tool. And it's interesting the Americans.
As we are, we love gadgets.
The Americans always wanted some kind of James Bondian type thing, whether it's a drug or a tool or a shot, you know, you give someone rather than the more effective means of mind control, which is to have a conversation with someone, earn their trust, let them talk and you know, share your ideas and eventually get them to come around to your way of thinking. That is the most effective means of mind control.
But we don't have time for that.
We want, you know, we want the magic bullet, we want the the spy device. So there was almost like a sense of espionage to what was going on at the time that there was there was a race to find either the secret of brainwashing on the part of the CIA or with medical science, there's always like a race to either find the cure or find the best treatment, or be the person to break through the next threshold
of psychological medicine. And a lot of times there's this attitude of yeah, well, you know, there are some ethical issues with this, but if we succeed, it's for the greater good, So we're going to go ahead and do the experiment. And you know that persists today. There's always this sort of suggestion that if you break a few eggs, that's fine, but as you know, think of the millions of lives it's going to save if these test subjects
die for the sake of science. You know, there's so many ways you can justify doing something unethical, so many ways you can talk yourself into, you know, believing that you're actually doing it for the greater good. The greater good is one of those things that is always such a When you hear that phrase, you have to be very suspicious of it because when someone trucks it out, someone's gonna get hurt.
Well, it's a power move, right, It's like I can tell you what the greater good is because I have the master plan.
I see the big picture, and you need to get on board.
Yeah.
Our super producer Paul uses the phrase the greater good?
Is it okay?
I hope play Devil's advocating for a moment. Isn't there a greater good overall for humanity in some way? And this is just me Devil's advocating.
It's called God's plan.
Oh geez. But I'll be completely serious, Like there are maybe things that humanity is going to face in our not so distant future, choices we're gonna have to make sure. They're gonna be really hard and are probably gonna end up killing lots and lots of people.
Yeah, but isn't the problem that it's like the people in power, whether it's in like a an organization like a psychiatric hospital or a government, that are usually the ones that dictate the agenda of what that greater good is, and they're typically looking out for their best interest or the best interest of their cronies in some way, not necessarily the greater greater good. It's more like this notion of my it's my greater good. I don't know that's why I see it. Maybe that's cynical, but.
I think you're right on. It's in that kind of situation, it's very easy to define the greater good as the things that are that make things that are good for me greater.
I mean, I would describe it as the status quo in many ways, you.
Know, sure.
Yeah.
And also there are differing definitions. I mean, I was being a little bit lid, but there are differing definitions For some people, as spiritual greater good is a world in which one hundred percent of all living people follow the same specific religion. In if we're looking at a purely soulless biological imperative, then the greater good is one in which no individuals matter. The human species just metastasizes
and eventually gets to the stars. Neither of those are particularly great things for individuals.
Right, well, let me tell you about migrator good.
We're kidding, all right, So so we can see that motivation. And I think Brett your words of warning are astute and sorely needed, both in current age and in past ages. But we don't want to lose some of the conversation we were having about other mad scientists. Is it okay if we call the mad scientists, is that is that out of bounds? Because they're not necessarily insane? Right, they're just mad? Yeah, they're not that.
They're not always angry either, Okay, so perturbed scientists.
There we go.
Hold on one. Okay, so these these perturbed scientists, could you tell us a little more. It sounds like you may have found a rogues gallery of people that you considered investigating further.
Well, you know, so we I talked about Henry Cotton, and Walker Freeman is the person who really behind the lobotomy, and I don't know that we need to add too much to his legacy. Jean Mortin Charcout was a nineteenth century scientist and his big thing was hysteria. And on the plus side, he was one of the first to say hysteria is not just a female malady. Men can
have symptoms of hysteria as well. But then he kind of got the show business bug, not literally, but he would have these demonstrations and invite people into the surgical theater and have patients come out and perform for this audience of medical dignitaries. And what would happen is women who suffered from this particular brand of hysteria would have seizures and contortions, and their bodies would twist into very strange positions and then sometimes have something sort of called
an erotic extra see. And these became very popular among the intelligencia and the medical community. And there's even one woman named Blanche Whitman who became known as the Queen of Hysterics because when she would perform, she could always be relied upon to have the convulsions at the right time and really exhibit her erotic ecstasy in a way that was dramatic. So at a certain point, what are we proving and studying anymore? But it's and again it's
it's women who were the ones put on exhibit. And there's a very famous painting of Charcot holding Blanche Whitman in front of an audience of men in this surgical environment.
But careful with the mad scientists thing, because.
I have a favorite doctor who, by a lot of standards would be considered a mad doctor, but actually was a brilliant surgeon and contributed an awful lot to our understanding of anatomy. And that's John Hunter, who was an eighteenth century resurrectionist, and he was the first who really championed anatomizing bodies, cutting open bodies to understand them that way. This is when there was still a big taboo on it, and you would only get a body if someone was
hanged or executed. The surgeons could have their bodies and that became a big trade, and then eventually they started robbing graves to get the bodies so that the students would have any something to practice on. And when I first was reading about him, it was in a book a really sensational book about like the corpse robbers and
the grave robbers of the eighteenth century. But I read a really amazing biography of this guy, and it totally showed that he was breaking down these these sort of notions we have that you can't cut open a human body and that it's degrading to have your body, you.
Know, violated.
Yeah, and that's what they would call it, right yeah.
And it was like when people be executed there, it would be a very frightening thing for them to realize that their body is going to be given to the school for the young surgeons to practice on. But he totally believed in it and anatomized so many bodies over his lifetime and really broke that barrier and helped facilitate getting to the point where bodies were provided to medical school so that you could learn from the thing that's gonna you know, you're going to actually be operating on.
I'm going to tell you this anecdote, which you may want to cut out for sensitive listeners, or we should just give a little trigger warning.
Go right ahead.
BRT one of my favorite stories of him, and it's shocking, but at the same time, it shows this guy John Hunter was so believed in what he was doing. You didn't have a lot of way of testing certain things, and so he wanted to find out, like certain liquids in.
The body, how they've aged after death.
And so one of the great they quote it in this book where he took the semen of a corpse and put it in his mouth and like.
Kind of switched it around, and.
It was like, yep, it has a a a metallic brackish taste, and so you know, how else are you gonna like test things like that? But that just shows to him that the body it was not it had so been has been demystified for him. He just wanted to learn about the flesh and all of it's this little glory exactly, and was willing to do everything to better understand it.
So, you know, on one hand, we have.
Our scientists who are doing shocking things, but at the same time, a lot of times, not always, it yields knowledge and it leads to demystification and the loss of certain taboos that we have about the body.
Hold on a second, guys, let's not go there quite yet. First, Let's take a quick sponsor break.
You know, that's something we've discussed on the show numerous times. What do you do with research that's gained from human experimentation over the years, like Unit seven thirty one or some of the things that the Nazi Party was doing. What do you do with the because there is there's information, raw data that is collected there about the horrible things a human can endure. And we kind of had a discussion last time, like do you just throw that away?
Do you keep it locked away somewhere? Do you actually use it towards medical research in the future. What do you think, Brett, what should we do with all this stuff?
I mean, once the deed is done, you certainly have to try to gain from the knowledge it provided, as long as you're not encouraging further, you know, an ethical experimentation. But do you think there are things still going on? And I wanted to try to suggest this with a control group, that we look back on the horrors of the mid nineteen fifties, and people in the mid nineteen fifties look back on the horror of the turn of the century, and so on and so on and so on.
Do you sort of feel like, what's the horror that people are going to look at us fifty years from now and sort of realize they.
Did what Absolutely, And it's fantastic that you bring this up. Well, tragic and disturbing, but also fantastic because that's one of the questions that we had for you. And it's sort of a two part question. So the first is what do you see as the importance or the the crucial relevance of a work like the control group in the modern age?
And that's.
A big question to throw answer one. But then the second part is exactly what you were asking us, do you think it is possible that there is experimentation occurring today that will later be looked at with opprobrium by future historians. Were trying to make a list, and I was thinking, you know, one of the big disadvantages is that a lot of that stuff, if it is occurring, will be classified. Right, so we only found out about things like psychic driving, where as you said, seven boxes
escaped a purge. Yeah, you know, And what do we know now? We know that there are some pretty boundary violating experiments with big data, right, that might be something, But as far as suppressed medical experimentation, I don't know. I couldn't conjecture.
You know, I was thinking about this, and again I think it's and it's part of that double edged sword of while we judge the past, we shouldn't judge the past too harshly because a lot of times this was the best they had and so they were sincerely desperately trying to deal with certain illnesses. And we may not agree with the way they treated it, but they were desperate and there were no other ways of really treating it.
And it's kind of you know, I sort of feel horrible bringing it up, but when you think about something like chemotherapy, it's all we got right now. It's it is the thing that is we're one of the things
that is the most effective in treating cancer. You know, fifty years from now when we look if someone looks back, they're going to say, you did what you you know, you put radioactive material in someone's body so that the body would kind of, you know, fight and kill some portion of something that's growing inside it.
But it worked. It was what.
We were able to do with the technology we have. So I'm not by that saying that can therapy is bad and radiation therapy is bad.
But.
You know, don't judge. Hopefully we won't be judged harshly because it's it is the best. We're doing the best we can, and we have to cut some slack to the.
People who were.
You know, it's hard to say that cut slack to people who are performing lobotomies and you know, excessive shock treatment and things in the past. I don't think it was malicious and it was the best they had in treating these things. And fortunately things have gotten a lot better. So the treatments we're using today, we know are more
effective and they're focused and they're specific. But at the same time, technology is going to reach a point to where they have genetic modification and these diseases just disappear, and they're going to look back and say, well, why didn't y'all do that? And you know, we're going to be the people who were, you know, putting people in iron lungs.
Basically, we didn't have the cure. This was what we had.
So you know, it's a certain amount of tolerance for the quote unquote mad scientists of the past is called for.
I think well said.
Yeah, it really answers the question that you brought up to.
Man, it's like, what do we do with this research, and sometimes the means justify, not justify the ends, but at least you can accept the results as like something of value, even in retrospect. I don't know.
It's hard, It's really hard.
How do we make it not a total loss right.
Almost to like honor the people that were subjected to this stuff. It's like, you don't what do you just, out of like pure ethical kind of panicky outcry toss out positive results from these experiments that seems counterproductive and almost disrespectful to those who may have lost their lives or been damaged in these kinds of experiments.
Yeah, I'm going to be a little bit conspiratorial and this, and this is just my opinion. I would absolutely be unsurprised if it turned out that there were unethical and indeed illegal experiments being conducted through some tenuous, tenuously attached form of government funding. Because one thing that's really interesting about Ewen Cameron that we missed. I believe we mentioned it, but I don't think we emphasized it enough. He was
from Quebec. These experiments that he was conducting occurred in Canada. So in this case, the CIA and the various cutouts were not funding experimentation domestically. It happened abroad. So if something like this is happening in our current world, it is probably happening somewhere where law enforcement or rule of
laws a little more lax, a little weaker. But I feel like, just with all the medical breakthroughs that are occurring or on the cusp of occurring, it is less plausible that something like that is not happening, which I know sounds like maybe I'm a little tinfoil on this one.
No, because there's a sort of a suggestion of that ends reading accounts of the CIA activities. There's a thing which comes up and we talk about it in episode ten called terminal studies, and that's where you conduct an
experiment on someone to the point of no return. And there's no evidence that any terminal studies were performed in the United States, but at least one source sort of says, well, but some studies were performed in other countries on people who are not Americans, like prisoners of war, and we don't know what happened there, And so there's I wouldn't say,
you know, a good chance. I would just say that it's entirely plausible that terminal studies were performed on and again, this is like the Korean War.
This is war.
We're losing or we're behind in the race for the control of the human mind, and it calls for, you know, desperate measures.
I would just say, with the number of destabilized nations right now across the globe, it makes me wonder if there isn't some kind of this is conspiratorial, but some kind of smaller operation that's still studying interrogation techniques out there in black sites. Sure, I mean, they're just so there's so many places where it could be happening, where there is a even a small CIA footprint.
Yeah.
Well, on that note, we did get to the present day.
Yeah, in a very scary way.
We hope that you do not consider this show a form of mind control, because it's just that it hit me when you were describing this, Brett, you said, you said, you know, the real form of brainwashing and mind controlling is just hanging out and talking with people, yeah, and getting them over on your side. And it hit me I thought, oh, no, have we acts deadly become Brett Brett.
Yeah, Brett has a very disarming smile, and it does make me a little nervous.
But we do want to We do want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today and teach us a little bit more about the real world inspirations behind the Control Group, which when you check out the show does sound like there's no way it could have really happened, but it's presented in a very plausible escalation because it did happen.
Yeah, and just to make sure, Ronald Grant is that Frank Olsen.
It sort of is Frank Olsen, except Frank Olsen did not die under the same circumstances in which there are a number of parallels between the Control Group and the real life counterparts. So if you're a real fan, you know that Morgan Hall is the alias of George White, who's the notorious former Bureau of Narcotic agent who's in charge of these safe houses where Operation Midnight, Climax and
other things went on. So there's there's lots of sort of easter eggs for people who are fans of this kind of information.
We left a lot of things unsaid in one particular exactly, I just want to put that out of there. We don't want to spoil it.
There.
This is an interesting thing you could do right now. I'm gonna do this after we conclude this show. I'm gonna go back and listen to the mk Ultra.
Episode that we did.
Then I'm going to go and finish episode six because that's the one I'm currently on in the control group, and I'm going to see where all those parallels are because it's I can see it already up until this point. But episode nine is midnight climax, so I want to really want to listen to that one.
And thank you, of course, folks for tuning in. We would love to hear your stories or accounts, and this might be opening a little bit of a risky door, but if you have knowledge of what you can sysidered to be an ethical or illegal human experimentation occurring in modern day, or if you know of something that did happen and has not yet reached the public sphere for one reason or another, contact us. We would like to hear from you.
You can write to us on social media. Get the Facebook, Got the Instagram. We are conspiracy stuff show on Instagram, Conspiracy stuff on Facebook and Twitter?
Right mean? All right? Coolah?
And you know there's another way to get to us too, but we'll hold off on that for a second. We want to find out first a little bit more about our guest.
That's right, Brett. Where can we listen to the Control Group and learn more about you and your films and all of that stuff.
We can find the Control Group at Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms, and we have a site which is a Control Group dot show. And as far as me, I'm on the Internet Movie Database and I don't maintain like a regular profile type page, but.
I try to stay in the social medias as much as I can.
And you can also find the Control Group social media on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter if you want to interact directly with the show. There's some really cool visual aspects to it that I think are definitely worth the digital trip.
And all the films that I've made, including The Unwanted and of course Hell's Highway, are available on DVD from Keno Larber.
So get out there right now. You can go ahead and no, don't pause this yet, let it finish, but then subscribe to the Control Group and then start listening to those episodes right after this. And that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode. You can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is
one eight three three STDWYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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