- 5 weeks ago
The truth is stranger than fiction! Join us as we count down shocking government programs and covert operations that were once dismissed as paranoid fantasies. From CIA-funded modern art to spy cats, weather control experiments to mind control programs - these aren't tall tales from internet forums, but declassified realities. Which revelation shocked you the most?
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00:00I became aware that it was sweeping up everybody's data indiscriminately.
00:06Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we'll be counting down our picks for those long-standing rumors and stories concerning government
00:12programs that wound up having connections to real life.
00:15Tuskegee study. No penicillin allowed.
00:19How come I can't get a shot like Caleb got a shot?
00:23Number 30, the CIA and modern art.
00:25This program tells a bizarre story. How, during the Cold War, an arm of the U.S. government provided covert
00:32funding for a huge variety of cultural activity.
00:35For decades, skeptics dismissed the abstract expressionist movement of the 1950s as a pretentious bubble, or worse, a cultural scam.
00:43Critics felt artists like Jackson Pollock were being artificially propped up by unseen forces.
00:47It turns out the skeptics were right. In the heat of the Cold War, the CIA secretly weaponized American abstract
00:53art against the Soviet Union.
00:54While the Soviets pushed rigid, realistic propaganda, the CIA used the Congress for Cultural Freedom to showcase American creativity as
01:01a symbol of liberty.
01:03The agency covertly funded gallery tours and promoted favorable critics, turning modern art into a global phenomenon, largely to prove
01:10a point to the Russians.
01:11And I don't think it's any more reasonable to say that Pollock was supported by the CIA, and therefore, you
01:18know, that's why he became important.
01:19He became important because other painters could see what and how he'd enriched the traditions of art.
01:27Number 29, the FBI versus John Lennon.
01:30I'd know, you know, just by reading.
01:33But know what?
01:35You know, if what I was thinking was true.
01:38Well, what, is it true?
01:40Well, I guess not.
01:41Right, I'm just a guy, man.
01:44But then, yeah.
01:45In the early 1970s, John Lennon sounded like a paranoid wreck.
01:49He claimed the U.S. government was tapping his phones, tailing his car, and trying to deport him to silence
01:53his anti-war activism.
01:55At the time, most dismissed this as the ramblings of an eccentric rock star.
01:58However, released government files later proved Lennon was absolutely correct.
02:02The Nixon administration, fearing Lennon could sway the youth vote in the 1972 election, launched a massive surveillance campaign via
02:09the FBI and INS.
02:11J. Edgar Hoover's own files confirmed that they were building a bogus deportation case solely to neutralize Lennon's political voice.
02:17But no, they did not kill him.
02:19Not every conspiracy is correct.
02:21Remember the one, um, you can radiate everything you want, you can penetrate anywhere you go?
02:26Yeah.
02:27Syndicated.
02:28Yeah.
02:29That was just having fun with words.
02:31Number 28.
02:32Project 100,000, or McNamara's Morons.
02:36I wrote McNamara's Folly to tell the story of a very sad and tragic chapter in the Vietnam War.
02:49A dark rumor persisted during the Vietnam War that the government viewed soldiers as disposable meat, targeting the most vulnerable
02:56to fight in an unpopular meat grinder.
02:57This was confirmed by Project 100,000, a program initiated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1966.
03:04As troop levels dwindled, the military lowered their standards to draft men who had previously failed mental aptitude tests, many
03:11with IQs falling well below average.
03:13Dubbed McNamara's Morons by cruel contemporaries, these men were sentenced to combat with little understanding of the complex warfare they
03:19faced.
03:20Indeed, they died at three times the rate of other GIs, proving the government was willing to sacrifice the mentally
03:25disabled just to meet a quota.
03:27And then he said, make sure he doesn't get lost.
03:32He's one of McNamara's Morons.
03:36I had never heard the term.
03:38Number 27.
03:39Operation Fast and Furious.
03:54The idea that the U.S. government would arm the very drug cartels they claimed to be fighting sounds like
03:59a Hollywood script.
04:00Yet between 2009 and 2011, this became a shocking reality.
04:04In a botched sting operation known as Fast and Furious, the ATF allowed licensed firearm dealers to sell weapons to
04:10illegal straw buyers.
04:12The plan was to track the guns across the border and catch Mexican cartel leaders.
04:15Instead, the ATF lost track of over 1,400 high-powered weapons.
04:20Oops.
04:21The incompetence was tragically exposed when two of these lost guns were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol
04:26agent Brian Terry,
04:27the government inadvertently allowing the death of one of their own.
04:30Eight minutes pass now to this other story.
04:32There might be big developments now in the 2010 killing of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
04:38Authorities in Mexico have made an arrest.
04:41Terry's death, you might remember.
04:43Exposed and eventually ended the gun running operation known as Fast and Furious.
04:47Number 26.
04:48Project Azorian.
04:49It wasn't safe enough, though, for us to just go out in a U.S. Navy carrier.
04:53And we also needed to create the technology that would go down and grab the submarine from the bottom of
04:57the ocean floor
04:58and that vessel to house it.
04:59So really what we needed was the perfect cover mechanism, and that came in the form of Howard Hughes.
05:05In the 1970s, billionaire Howard Hughes announced he was building a massive ship to mine the ocean floor.
05:10While the media bought the story, conspiracy theorists suspected Hughes was fronting for something far more sinister.
05:16He was.
05:16The ship, the Hughes-Glamour Explorer, was actually a giant floating claw built by the CIA for about $5 billion
05:22in today's money.
05:24Its true mission was Project Azorian, a daring attempt to lift a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean floor and
05:29recover its nuclear secrets.
05:31FYI, the sub broke apart while it was being razed, so the whole thing was a massive waste.
05:35When asked about the operation, the government famously responded that they could neither confirm nor deny its existence.
05:42Did you know that the phrase we can neither confirm nor deny started right here at CIA?
05:50On November the 9th, 1990, the Prime Minister of Italy, Giulio Andriotti, revealed to his own parliament and the world
05:58the existence of a top-secret European-wide network of secret agents.
06:03It was called Gladio.
06:05Post-war Europe was a hotbed of rumors about shadow armies, answering to no government.
06:09For years, people whispered that NATO had secret paramilitary squads hiding in plain sight.
06:14In 1990, the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andriotti, finally admitted the truth, Operation Gladio.
06:20During the Cold War, the CIA and NATO established secret stay-behind armies across Western Europe, designed to act as
06:26a resistance force if the Soviets ever invaded.
06:28However, in countries like Italy, these networks didn't stay dormant.
06:31They allied with right-wing extremists to carry out false flag terror attacks and then blame the communists, hoping to
06:37frighten the public away from voting for left-wing parties.
06:41Right-wing people were, of course, afraid of what they called communist danger in Belgium.
06:47Number 24, Operation Sea Spray.
06:49Now, if you see graffiti like this in your neighborhood, you can suspect your DNA is being targeted by a
06:55release of aluminum into the atmosphere through chemtrails.
06:59A systematic spreading of a substance that triggers a genetic response.
07:03One of the most persistent conspiracy theories is that the government sprays chemicals on its citizens from the sky.
07:08While the practice of using chemtrails has been consistently debunked, Operation Sea Spray is basically the same thing.
07:14In September 1950, the U.S. Navy spent six days spraying Serratia marcescens, a bacteria they believed was harmless, into
07:21the fog off the coast of San Francisco.
07:24Why? Because they wanted to test a coastal city's vulnerability to bio-warfare.
07:28How messed up is that?
07:29The experiment was a success for the Navy, but a disaster for the city.
07:33The bacteria caused a massive outbreak of urinary tract infections, hospitalizing residents and even killing a 75-year-old man.
07:39Maybe they're poisoning our water on the food supply.
07:43Maybe they're putting it in those chemtrails behind all those commercial jets that fly over our country every single day.
07:49Number 23, Operation Popeye.
07:51I'm cold too.
07:53Well, damn, Jackie.
07:53I can't control the weather.
07:55The government controls the weather is usually the rallying cry of the tinfoil hat brigade.
07:59But during the Vietnam War, the U.S. military made weather modification standard operating procedure.
08:04Under Operation Popeye, the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron flew top-secret cloud-seeding missions over Laos and Vietnam.
08:13Their slogan?
08:13Make mud, not war.
08:14The objective was to extend the monsoon season by dispersing canisters of silver and lead iodide into the atmosphere.
08:21This resulted in intense rain washing out the Ho Chi Minh Trail and disrupting enemy logistics.
08:26It actually worked.
08:27In fact, it worked so well that when the program finally leaked, it led to an international U.N. treaty
08:32banning the use of environmental warfare.
08:34One day, it started raining, and it didn't quit for four months.
08:39Number 22, Acoustic Kitty.
08:41If you told someone the government was abducting house cats, performing surgery on them, and turning them into cyborgs, you'd
08:47be laughed out of the room.
08:48Yet, the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology actually tried this in the 1960s.
08:53In a project known as Acoustic Kitty, they surgically implanted a microphone in a cat's ear and a radio transmitter
08:59at the base of its skull.
09:00This cost about $150 million in today's money, by the way.
09:03The plan was to have the cat sit near Soviet agents on park benches and record their conversations.
09:08No, seriously, this is a real thing they actually tried.
09:11But the concept of cat spies unraveled quickly.
09:13According to legend, during the very first field test, the cat wandered into the street and was promptly hit by
09:17a taxi.
09:18Number 21, The Stargate Project.
09:21The Pentagon feels that the Stargate Project, while exposing Earth to considerable danger, is yet to produce any practical returns.
09:29For years, rumors persisted that the U.S. government was wasting taxpayer money on studying the paranormal.
09:34Guess what? The government was studying the paranormal.
09:37Fearing the Soviets were developing psychotronic mind-control weapons, the DIA and CIA spent roughly $20 million on the Stargate
09:45Project.
09:45Running for two decades, the program employed so-called psychic spies, like Uri Geller, to use remote viewing to see
09:52inside secret enemy bunkers.
09:53Yeah, this is basically what they did with Eleven and Stranger Things.
09:56The program was eventually declassified and shut down in 1995, after concluding that magic wasn't reliable enough for genuine military
10:04intel.
10:04Bummer.
10:22Number 20, Project Mockingbird.
10:25Thomas says although the official release offers no stunning revelations, it may spark more debate about frustrations within the intelligence
10:32community.
10:32It wasn't until 2007 when a series of documents known as the Family Jewels revealed secret CIA operations such as
10:39Project Mockingbird to the public.
10:40This was a wiretapping operation ordered by then-president John F. Kennedy.
10:44It targeted American journalists such as Hanson Baldwin of the New York Times, whose coverage of national security topics contained
10:51information that was considered classified.
10:53The purpose of Project Mockingbird was essentially to uncover the source of these leaks to Baldwin, as well as other
10:57reporters whose work was considered detrimental to the administration.
11:00The CIA also put journalists under surveillance, like columnist Jack Anderson and his then-assistant Britt Hume.
11:07Former Washington Post reporter Michael Gettler was monitored by a team of agents round the clock.
11:13Number 19, The Business Plot.
11:15The idea of a shadow government of wealthy elites plotting to overthrow the president is the holy grail of conspiracy
11:20theories.
11:21But in 1933, it actually happened.
11:23Well, almost.
11:24Major General Smedley Butler, a decorated Marine hero, came forward to Congress testifying that he had been approached by a
11:31group of wealthy Wall Street bankers and industrialists.
11:34Their plan was to stage a fascist military coup to oust President Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with a
11:40dictator friendly to big business.
11:42While ridiculed at first, a congressional committee confirmed that credible evidence of the plot did exist, though no bankers were
11:48ever prosecuted.
11:49Number 18, Dalai Lama and the CIA.
11:52We had this group and we trained them and the people who did the training, of course, fell in love
11:56with him.
11:58From an emotional point of view, quite apart from national interest and pragmatic situation and all that, we felt so
12:04strongly about the Tibetans themselves and the Tibetan cause.
12:07Yes, it's true that the 14th Dalai Lama actually collaborated with the American Central Intelligence Agency.
12:13Although it should be said that this spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism wasn't initially aware of the operation.
12:18It was actually siblings of the Dalai Lama that initiated contact with the CIA, working together in support of Tibetan
12:24resistance to China.
12:25I admire them so.
12:27They face a modern, equipped army and still they fight.
12:31This collaboration also worked in the United States' favor since it actively targeted communist activity during the Cold War.
12:37The CIA-Tibetan program didn't endure, however, effectively falling by the wayside in the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon's
12:44diplomatic visit to China in 1972.
12:47I think nobody say Dalai Lama of China.
12:51Or everywhere say Dalai Lama of Tibet.
12:54Number 17, bad facts.
12:56No one knew whether it was safe, whether it would be effective, but people were so both afraid and believers
13:02that they'd volunteer their school kids to be guinea pigs for this new vaccine.
13:07Political controversies over a vaccine weren't solely the product of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
13:12Early versions of an oral vaccine intended to combat polio were actually found to have contained trace amounts of SV40.
13:18This was a virus commonly found in monkeys that was known in some cases to cause cancer in certain animals.
13:23Scientists worried about the potential spread to humans, although no actual cases of cancer infection were found as a result
13:29of exposure to SV40.
13:31Still, bad polio vaccinations containing the virus were distributed to Americans for six years, between 1955 and 1961.
13:38In 1952, Jonas Salk developed an effective vaccine, and by 1954, children were lined up everywhere to get it.
13:47Number 16, the Nayira Testimony.
13:49It was the first time, I think, when the American people were focused on what was happening to the Kuwaiti
13:57citizens at the hands of the Iraqi soldiers.
13:59It seems beyond the pale that organizations such as Amnesty International would at least initially corroborate the false testimony Nayira
14:06El Sabah delivered to a human rights caucus back in 1990.
14:09The truth is that El Sabah's claims against Iraqi soldiers, stories of wartime atrocities against children, were lies.
14:15If an Iraqi soldier was found dead in a neighborhood, they burned to the ground all the houses in the
14:20general vicinity, and would not let firefighters come until only Ash and Rebel was left.
14:26The young girl was revealed to have been working with the exiled Kuwaiti government in a propaganda scheme, one that
14:31was intended to drum up international support for American military action in the region.
14:36Amnesty International did eventually discover the truth and publicly criticized the administration of George H.W. Bush for their involvement
14:42in the scandal.
14:43That funding had one purpose, to get a lethargic American public to support intervention and a war against Iraq.
14:50Number 15, Madam President.
14:53And they prop up Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office.
14:57So he's like sitting there, and they like move his arm, and then they just release that to the press,
15:04and that's how dumb people were back then.
15:07A serious decline in the health of a sitting president can potentially prove disastrous for any country.
15:12The United States largely attempted to keep the health of its 28th Commander-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson, a closely guarded
15:17secret.
15:18The president suffered a severe stroke on October 2, 1919, a medical emergency from which he would never really recover.
15:24Wilson relied upon multiple members of his inner circle during this time, including the First Lady, Edith Wilson.
15:29Today, the president's wife is seen by many historians as a de facto leader, the nation's first female president in
15:34everything but name only.
15:35I can't do it. It's too great a responsibility.
15:39Even though his life may depend upon it?
15:46In that case, there's only one answer.
15:50I'll try.
15:51Number 14, Operation Paperclip.
15:54Today, I'm proud to be heading up the American program that will one day take us to the moon.
16:01In the aftermath of World War II, there were a lot of moving political parts, but it seems beyond comprehension
16:07that the United States would welcome their former Nazi enemies into their scientific community.
16:11Yet, that was essentially the purpose of Operation Paperclip, a lifting of elite scientific minds from Germany, some who were
16:17former members of the Nazi Party.
16:18It was actually initialized while World War II was still technically going on.
16:22The purpose was ostensibly for the U.S. to learn from their enemies, while at the same time getting a
16:26leg up for the emerging Cold War.
16:28And the prevailing motion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity
16:37for the adventure ahead.
16:42Number 13, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
16:45None of those 399 men were told they had syphilis.
16:50None of them were treated with effective panaceas.
16:53None of their families were ever warned and none consented to take part in what is now known as the
17:01Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
17:03It's unclear exactly how long the Tuskegee Syphilis Study would have gone on had not news of the scandal leaked
17:09in 1972.
17:10This was a medical study that lasted long after funding ran out.
17:13For an astonishing 40 years, it was an observation of how syphilis manifested itself in an untreated body.
17:18Information and treatments were intentionally withheld from the volunteers of the study,
17:22who were black men who were promised free health care.
17:34Organizers from the United States Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
17:38and the historically black Tuskegee Institute behaved unethically until they were caught.
17:49Number 12, Surveillance State.
17:51Generally, there is consensus that mass surveillance is a bad thing,
17:55while targeted surveillance is tolerable because they go after very specific individuals or very specific groups.
18:02Who decides what's private?
18:03Obviously not us, since we all travel around on a daily basis with eyes of the surveillance state lurking within
18:08our pockets.
18:09The whistleblowing of Edward Snowden back in 2013 essentially said out loud what many of us were already thinking in
18:15our heads.
18:15And it's become an expectation that we're being launched.
18:20Many people I've talked to have mentioned that they're careful about what they type into search engines.
18:25They're watching us.
18:26Governments, telecommunications companies, and yes, our cell phones.
18:29The United States National Security Agency sees and stores all of our private data,
18:33information that's now probably the most valuable currency in the world.
18:36Those proverbial eyes in the skies aren't the subject of scientific fiction novels anymore.
18:41They're very much real.
18:42The amount of data PRISM and other monitoring programs pick up,
18:45trillions of communications each year,
18:48is so vast, NSA is building this sprawling $2 billion facility in Utah just to store it all.
18:55Number 11, Watergate.
18:57In my day, it was simply known as the double cross.
19:01In our present context,
19:05it means infiltration of the Democrats.
19:08The members of Southern Rock icons, Lynyrd Skynyrd, may not have been bothered by Watergate,
19:12but a lot of other folks were certainly up in arms about this scandal.
19:15Now Watergate does not bother me.
19:19Uh-uh.
19:20Does your conscience bother you?
19:22It seems almost cute, given our current political climate,
19:25how a botched burglary and wiretapping affair led to the resignation of a sitting American president.
19:30The daily news cycle of an average Wednesday could potentially see stories of WTF political corruption
19:35that make Watergate seem like tiddlywinks in comparison.
19:38The staff itself was not doing very much as a matter of individual initiative.
19:45They were carrying out Richard Nixon's instructions day to day.
19:48Yet it's important to recall the shock of Watergate,
19:50of how it made even the average citizen stand up
19:53and take notice of what those in the highest offices of power were doing on the down-low.
19:57The president stayed up until 1.30 a.m.,
20:00wandering the halls of the White House,
20:01and reflecting on the third-rate burglary that ended his career.
20:06Number 10, CIA Mind Control.
20:08It was known as Project MKUltra,
20:10a secret U.S. government program that conducted drug experiments on Americans,
20:15often without their knowledge or consent.
20:16Prostitutes would lure men to these apartments,
20:19and then once the men were in the apartments,
20:22they were dosed with LSD,
20:24and then they were basically studied by CIA scientists,
20:28usually behind a two-way mirror.
20:30Specifically, MKUltra was part of a larger umbrella of projects
20:34that sought whether or not LSD could be used as a means of torture
20:37or assist in interrogation or foreign defections.
20:40These drug experiments started in the late 50s and continued into the 1970s.
20:44Subjects were chosen from a pool that could not fight back,
20:47such as prisoners, sex workers, or patients dwelling in mental hospitals.
20:51Under the direction of infamous Scottish-American psychiatrist Dr. Ewan Cameron,
20:55unsuspecting patients, many of whom had common ailments such as postpartum depression,
21:00were experimented on with aggressive drug cocktails and extreme techniques.
21:03The CIA had many files associated with MKUltra destroyed in 1973,
21:08although some evidence was declassified in 2001.
21:11He never came out the same. He had a blank, blank look in his eye.
21:15He didn't know who we were.
21:18He didn't know we were his daughters.
21:20Number 9. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
21:23How do you start a war? Simple. Blame it on the other guy.
21:26Did the United States falsify an attack in the South China Sea
21:28in order to justify a more intense presence in the Vietnam War?
21:32Yes and no.
21:33The truth is that the USS Maddox was attacked by three Vietnam People's Navy boats
21:38on August 2nd, 1964.
21:40The attack was a sound victory for the Maddox
21:42with no American casualties and a scattered Vietnamese fleet.
21:45However, the second attack on August 4th was a non-event,
21:48based on faulty information and a desire to drum up more support for the war at home.
21:52At daybreak, reconnaissance planes scanned the ocean for a slick of oil,
21:56a stick of wood, anything that would be evidence of a North Vietnamese attack.
22:01Nothing could be found.
22:02The declassified truth was that the USS Turner Joy fired upon nothing,
22:06while the report at the time was that more Vietnamese boats
22:09were on the Gulf of Tonkin on that day.
22:11The attacks were deliberate.
22:15The attacks were unprovoked.
22:19That too was a lie.
22:21Number 8. Spiked Punch.
22:22The United States government was very intent on dissuading bootleggers
22:26and upholding prohibition laws during the 1920s and 30s.
22:29By 1929, American law enforcement is proclaiming prohibition a success.
22:36But most Americans don't buy it.
22:38They were so intent, in fact, that they even took to poisoning their own people.
22:43The process was known as denaturation of industrial alcohols,
22:46and it basically means adding dangerous chemicals to ethyl alcohol
22:49so that it couldn't be used to produce booze.
22:51Can we do something to this alcohol that makes it much riskier to drink
22:56and use that essentially as a chemical enforcement of prohibition?
23:00The Department of the Treasury actively pressured this process
23:03to the point where it's alleged that over 10,000 people died from ingesting denatured alcohol.
23:08It's incredible to think that a country would actively poison its populace in this way,
23:12but here, truth is stranger than fiction.
23:15The federal government itself was a willing party in the poisoning of people
23:19because they were adding this to alcohol that they knew was going to be repurposed
23:24and sold as beverage alcohol.
23:26Number seven, Operation Northwoods.
23:29You may have heard the term false flag operation in recent years,
23:32but do you know what it actually means?
23:34It's an old naval technique commonly used by pirates
23:36with the intent of disguising one's true intentions by committing to an act of misdirection.
23:41This document outlines the methods in which they would do just that.
23:45Specifically, one crazy idea after another.
23:48Operation Northwoods was one such event that almost came to fruition.
23:52Acts of homegrown terrorism designed to drum up support for military action
23:55against Cuba during the Cold War.
23:57The plan was for the CIA to engage in terrorism upon American targets
24:01before then blaming the actions on the Cuban government.
24:04Thankfully, President John F. Kennedy shot this plan down before it could come to pass.
24:08I am talking about genuine peace.
24:11The kind of peace that makes life on Earth worth living.
24:15Number six, the Iran-Contra Affair.
24:17It was a scandal that rocked the Reagan administration during the 1980s.
24:21Secret backdoor dealings of military arms that led to finger-pointing excuses and depositions.
24:26What I hope is, not in doubt, however, is my commitment to the investigations themselves.
24:31The Iran-Contra Affair dealt with the United States illegally funneling weapons to the government of Iran,
24:37despite an embargo being placed on the country during this time.
24:40$30 million had been allocated for the weapons.
24:43The CIA funneled a portion of that money to the Contras in Nicaragua,
24:47the group Reagan supported in their guerrilla fight against the Sandinista government.
24:52The money from those arms was then intended to fight communism in Nicaragua,
24:56funding the right-wing Contra groups that were accused of numerous assaults to human rights,
25:00as well as acts of terrorism.
25:02Reagan called the Contras the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.
25:06There were other elements to the affair as well,
25:08including how much Reagan knew about the Contra money,
25:11as well as the proposed arms-for-hostages trades with Iran.
25:15Number 5. Prescott Bush and the Coup
25:17The Bush family has a long political history,
25:20both with Governor Jeb Bush as well as former presidents George W. and George Herbert Walker.
25:25The latter's father, Prescott Bush, was a particularly interesting figure in American political history,
25:31although perhaps not for what you might think.
25:33The former senator of Connecticut was allegedly involved in something called the Business Plot,
25:37a conspiracy to overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt via a coup d'etat,
25:41and install a dictator in his place.
25:43Wanted to establish a government modeled on Italian-style fascism.
25:47Although newspapers of the time ridiculed the allegations,
25:51Congress moved forward with a formal investigation.
25:53It should be said that opinions differ as to how far discussions of this plot went,
25:57and the level of involvement Prescott Bush possessed,
26:00but one thing's for sure, this was almost a very dark day in American history.
26:04Never before since Jamestown and Klemeth Rock
26:08has our American civilization been in such danger as now.
26:15Number 4. Project Sunshine
26:17It only took three years for the purpose of Project Sunshine to be revealed to the public,
26:22but by then, the damage had already been done.
26:24The research performed by Project Sunshine was intended to measure the effects of radioactivity upon society at large,
26:31specifically in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
26:43Unfortunately, the way in which this research was conducted is nothing short of disgraceful.
26:47So, human samples are of prime importance,
26:49and if anyone knows how to do a good job of body snatching,
26:53they will really be serving their country.
26:55Basic body snatching was the name of the game here,
26:57as remains were quite literally swept up from under the noses of unwitting victims.
27:02It's the sort of crime done in the name of science that sounds better suited to a horror movie.
27:19One of the biggest suspicions of the 1960s was that the president was lying about the Vietnam War in order
27:24to save face.
27:25It sounded cynical, like most conspiracy theories.
27:28Until 1971, when military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers.
27:33This massive trove of documents proved that four consecutive administrations had systematically lied to both Congress and the public.
27:40The papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly expanded the war with coastal attacks and bombing raids in Laos,
27:46all while President Johnson promised that he sought no wider war.
27:49It was a bombshell revelation.
27:51Officials knew early on that the war was unwinnable, but continued fighting to avoid humiliation,
27:56permanently shattering public trust in the American government.
27:59Concerned that the public was being lied to, he began photocopying their report.
28:04He leaked some documents to members of Congress, but none of them went public.
28:07So in 1970, Ellsberg leaked portions to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
28:12Number 2. COINTELPRO
28:14The projects gathered under the umbrella of COINTELPRO went far beyond mere smear campaigns.
28:20No, these were intentional and relentless attacks by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation
28:25against groups they considered undesirable.
28:28These included, but weren't limited to, the Black Panther Party, anti-Vietnam protesters, and even movie stars,
28:33such as Breathless star Gene Seberg.
28:35I can't pass you.
28:37Oh la la, that's the ideas of girls.
28:40Media manipulation, psychological warfare, and even political assassinations were all fair game under COINTELPRO,
28:47and all committed under the direction of former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover.
28:51Secret FBI memos made public today show that the late J. Edgar Hoover ordered a nationwide campaign
28:58to disrupt the activities of the new left without telling any of his superiors about it.
29:04Legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. even had his phone tapped by agents
29:08who sought to use King's marital infidelity as a means to discredit his work.
29:12The FBI at one time sought to blackmail the late Martin Luther King.
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29:33Number 1. Targeted Assassinations
29:35Some of the conspiracies discussed on this list were actually exposed to the public back in 1975
29:41by an investigation known as the Church Committee.
29:43This committee put the plans of MKUltra, COINTELPRO, and more on the books,
29:47while also revealing some even more troubling news,
29:50that the CIA had been carrying out targeted assassinations.
29:54Today's open hearing did focus major attention on the way the CIA has gone about its business in the United
30:01States.
30:01What's even wilder is the reveal that the organization held in their possession
30:05something colloquially known as a heart attack gun.
30:07The weapon was battery-powered and was said to inject an ice bullet that contained a poisonous shellfish toxin.
30:12In terms of its lethality,
30:17that quantity was sufficient to kill at least 14,000 people.
30:22This resulted in death by what appeared to be a heart attack,
30:25and it's been conspiratorially linked with the mysterious deaths of everyone
30:28from Marilyn Monroe, JFK, and J. Edgar Hoover himself.
30:33What do you make of these revelations?
30:35Let us know in the comments below.
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