Truth May Be Stranger Than Fiction
When I read the story about CIA experimenting with LSD laced bread in a French village back in the 50s, I was shocked. Is this believable? The story was published in The Telegraph of UK, and subsequently carried by many U.S. news media.
In 1951, Pont-Saint-Esprit in the Gard, a small scenic village in southern France was suddenly gripped with wide spread insanity and hallucinations. Five died, dozens were interned in asylums, and hundreds suffered various afflictions.
A man tried to drown himself screaming that snakes were eating him. Another man yelled, “I am a plane," and jumped out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs in the process. Despite that serious injury, he stood up and ran another 50 yards. Another pleaded a doctor to reinsert his heart which he believed had escaped through his feet. Many people were admitted to the local asylum.
For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, H. P. Albarelli, Jr., an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting that the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.
In his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Albarelli stated that the French experiment was directed by the CIA and the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
To some of us, even an absolute criminal story committed by legal authorities would appear believable for those are conditioned to accept the “big brother” theory; some others would doubt even a story with all logical leads leading to heinous activity by the governments. Such is the polarization in our time.
Rabindra Nath Tagore, the Indian Nobel laureate, wrote in one of his poem, “poet, know that in your mind Ram (the Hindu god) is born, the fact has no consequence.” What he meant was, people discover truth only through the pen of the writers’, and the written becomes the reality, the truth notwithstanding.
Do you think this story is real, or writer’s fiction?
Follow Technorati