00:01El Hotel de Los Ángeles, California, 5 de julio de 1968.
00:06Robert F. Kennedy anunció su victoria en la presidential primaria de California a un grupo de supporters.
00:14Pero la esperanza va a ser una tragedia.
00:17As Kennedy hace su camino a través de la cocina de hotel en su camino a una conferencia de presa,
00:24se ha embrujado por un asesino.
00:26A gunman appeared, later identified as Sirhan Sirhan, wielding a .22 caliber pistol,
00:37and by all accounts began firing at Kennedy, and rather wildly in this case.
00:46You seem to have a mad gunman, a lone nut, with unclear motivations,
00:52who had gotten into this situation.
00:55Kennedy was hit, fell to the floor.
00:58He had been shot three times.
01:01Sirhan fired all eight shots in the chamber of his revolver.
01:06There was screaming, there was panic, there was fear.
01:10There were bodies on the floor, and one of them was Senator Robert Kennedy.
01:17Twenty-four hours later, Kennedy died from those wounds.
01:25Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant,
01:29was quickly apprehended for the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
01:34Yet, remarkably, after his arrest, the gunman claimed to have no memory of his murder's rampage.
01:43Sirhan was glassy-eyed and essentially unresponsive.
01:48After he was arrested, he was completely placid.
01:52He didn't seem to have any idea what had happened, had no idea why he was arrested.
01:57It was definitely strange.
02:00The last thing he can remember, earlier that evening, Sirhan was having a cup of coffee
02:08with an attractive girl who was wearing a polka dot dress in another part of the Ambassador Hotel.
02:17After that, it's a blank, until he woke up with people jumping on his head
02:23and trying to wrestle the gun from his hands.
02:27A succession of psychiatrists and psychologists,
02:32both for the defense and for the prosecution, examined Sirhan.
02:38They all accepted that his amnesia was absolutely genuine.
02:46And many of them said, at the time of the shooting,
02:51Sirhan was acting under post-hypnotic suggestion.
02:56In other words, he had been hypnotized and was shooting as a result.
03:04Sirhan was convicted of first-degree murder.
03:07And is currently serving a life sentence.
03:10But is it really possible to hypnotize someone into becoming an unknowing assassin?
03:19Well, from 1953 to 1973, there was a shocking top-secret CIA program
03:26that seemed to have explored that very question.
03:30Its code name was MKUltra.
03:35The MKUltra program is a very weird moment in American history.
03:40And the aim of MKUltra was to find out how far you can manipulate the psychology of individuals
03:46and get them to do what you want them to do.
03:48How deep it went is very uncertain.
03:51But that there were people in the CIA who had this aim is a matter of historical record.
03:57In the early 1950s, the CIA was deeply interested in combating what they perceived as mind-control research
04:05by the Chinese and the Russians in particular.
04:08And they embarked on their own program to explore the mind.
04:12But in the course of this research, the U.S. government made efforts to experiment with so-called brainwashing of
04:21individuals
04:21through a variety of means.
04:24One was hypnosis and the other was the use of psychoactive drugs.
04:29LSD in particular was proven to be highly effective at putting people in a state of mind
04:35where they could be post-hypnotically or otherwise suggested to take violent action.
04:41Somebody who, without fully knowing what they're doing or even knowing at all what they're doing,
04:46can go out and kill.
04:47In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra documents to be destroyed.
04:57But just four years later, a Freedom of Information Act request led to the discovery of around 20,000 secret
05:05files
05:06that managed to survive the purge.
05:09And while the true extent of the CIA's mind-control program will never be known,
05:14is it possible they actually created a brainwashed assassin?
05:22Now, among the MKUltra documents that survive, we have a report, an internal report,
05:29in which a woman under hypnotic control, who had previously expressed a morbid fear of firearms,
05:37took a gun, held to the head of another woman, and pulled the trigger.
05:42And then subsequently had no memory of what it was that she had done.
05:46Now, this was all just a test and clinical circumstances,
05:50but it was, by their accounts, done.
05:53Which sounds, just for the sake of argument,
05:57eerily like what Sir Hans Sirhan claimed,
06:00that he had no memory of what had been done.
06:10Oh my God.
06:11The only way that I thought the guy who was considered смог��uto,
06:14I didn't think he ,
06:15That was so special to the tough days,
06:15Because a massive hadn't been decided,
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