Legacy of the Montreal Experiments

It's nineteen fifty nine in Montreal, Canada. along the slope of Mount Royal pososing mansion Already, nearly a century old loooms over the city Its dark gray stone facade envelops over fifty thousand square feet reaches to the top of a seventy five foot tower forormly a private home called Raven's Craig It's now the site of the Allen Memorial Institute A beautiful, but ominous psychiatric hospital One of its grand doors creaks open and a woman stumbles out Normally she's well dressed Everybody tells her she looks like a movie star, Elizabeth, Taylor, to be exact. Only right now the woman is disoriented and severely underdressed in an oversized hospital gown Even as she trips over the hem, the slight woman manages to slip away from the isolated mansion She's making a run for it Unable to follow a straight line, the woman claws her way farther up the mountain, doing whatever she can to just keep moving forward whatever she can to escape this hospital and the debilitating treatments she's been subjected to. body. Soon, she hears the nurses gaining on her. the next thing she knows backack inside the Allen Memorial Institute back under the care of its director Dr. Ywan Cameron at his direction The woman is sedated and given electroshock therapy Again until she can no longer remember why she was even there in the first place And she's just one of the many patients unwittingly subjected to Dr. Cameron's twisted brainwashing experiments. funded. in part the sea This is the story Cameron. and the Montreal experperiments Also known as Subproject sixty eight MK Ultra Welcome to conspiracy theories. the Spotify podcast I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday We'd love to hear from you. so if you're listening on the Spotify apppp swipe up and give us your thoughts Or check us out on Instagram at the Conspiracy Pod This episode includes discussions of drug use and torture Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Stay with us. 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Tonight We feast An offer you can feast on. seell your car today on Carmana Pick up these manailifly When the doors of the Allen Memorial Institute open in Montreal in nineteen forty three Its founders envision it as a bastion of state of the art psychiatric care No longer will asylums be synonymous with prisons No longer will patients live in squalor while doctors practice barbaric stone aged treatments Their facility will not be seen as some kind of dumping ground for family members who don't fall in line at the Allen Patients will come and go as they please. treatments will be in accordance with the latest scientific breakthroughs This institute will lead with care passassion That's the hope least And in many ways, the island achieves the goals of its founders which includes the Rockefeller family Less than a decade after the hospital is established It is considered a world leader in mental health care That's because the world doesn't really know. what's going on there? don't know that in the nineteen fifties and early sixties disturbing experiments are being carried out at the Allen, often in secret. These treatments will ruin patients' lives for months, years, sometimes forever So where does everything go wrong? Let me introduce you to the very first director of the Allen Memorial Institute. will oversee its operations for more than twenty years H name is Dr. Ewen right Born in Scotland Cameron eventually settles in Montreal. That's where he's hired as a professor of psychiatry at McGill University. when the Rockefellers team up with McGill to open the Allen Memorial Institute, Cameron is selected as the man in charge They must think, well, who better to run the place than the university's own pioneering expert in mental health? Cameron has already studied all manner of mood and brain disorders But his research focuses primarily on schizophrenia at a time when the condition is greatly misunderstood and demonized. Cameron wants to find a cure At face value, his ambitions do seem genuinely altruistic. early in his career but his methods are highly questionable In one experiment, Dr. Cameron subjects patients to extreme temperatures This high as one hundred and seven degrees Fahrenheit for a whole hour his conclusion People with schizophrenia respond to high heat the same as people who do not have schizophrenia. exactly groundbreaking. in a different trial Cameron tests how dehydration affects epilepsy His patients are given just twenty ounces of water to last an entire day And Cameron finds that water intake It does not reduce the number of seizures a person experiences It does cause a whole host of unrelated health problems, acidosis, which messes with pH levels in the blood, severe weight loss Once again, the results are pretty much what you'd expect The ends don't justify the means especially when you take into account that one of his epileptic patients dies during this experiment By the way, this all happens before he's hired to run the Allen Memorial Institute And before the United States CIA decides to give Dr. Cameron bunch of m. There are different stories about how Cameron comes up with the experiments he'll carry out at the Allen in the nineteen fifties and sixties And they're probably all true to some degree Here's one In nineteen fifty one, he reads a theory about brainwashing accccording to influential British psychiatrist, Dr. William Sargent, Communists have supposedly unlocked the secret to manipulating the mind The key, says Sergeant is to put the patients through intense Stress And that's how you make someone more susceptible to persuasion which leads Dr. Cameron to an epiphany He asks himself trraditional therapy isn't enough Could the mind simply be Wiped clean He thinks maybe he could put his own patience through extreme stress and create a blank slate of sorts And then he can rebuild the person from the ground up without the symptoms of mental illness Uh, what? Okaykay I'm sorry Tim out, how exactly does Dr. Cameron propose to Ke his patients's minds clean. What kind of extreme stress is he talking about That brings us to his next influence. Only this one isn't found in a peer reviewed journal It's more likely that Cameron heard about this invention from a friend or even saw an ad for it, imploring him to fork over part of his paycheck It's called the cerebra phone and later the dormaphone And it's meant to help its users Learn new languages while they sleep the idea is pretty simple A tiny record player, tucked under your pillow at night, repeats phrases over and over until they stick while you're unconscious All you have to do is drift off to Dreamland and if the cerebra phone works, you wake up and voila, suddenly you know how to ask for directions to the nearest bathroom in French. J Yeah I guess I didn't sleep long enough to learn that The story goes that Cameron takes these two separate ideas, wiping the mind clean and playing tapes on a continuous loop and he merges them into one unholy union He calls his new technique Psychic driving Here's how it's supposed to work For each of his patients, Cameron starts with traditional therapy sessions. That's when he assesses what he believes to be the root of their problems. Side note Even though he specializes in researching schizophrenia The majority of Cameron's patients at the Allen have more common diagnoses. Most of them are women with anxiety or depression Next Cameron writes a script It's a message directed at his patient that is intentionally neegative. He calls out all of their fears, weaknesses, asocial behaviors, you name it And then He records this message onto a tape he usually makes the patient dictate the message Sometimes he asks one of their family members to drop by the Allen and lend their voice And then he takes the audio tape he's made plays it for his patience on repeat. Here is an actual example of one of those messages Gertre You don't get along with people You have never gotten along with your mother. She made you do what she wanted and you could never win out against her. You have always felt inadequate. and have been jealous of other people who felt that they had it better than you You are always trying to make other people do what you want But even when you succeed, you don't feel good You are forever trying to make your husband do what you want him to do because you think that he is not strong and you try to turn the children against him It's ruthless. H enough to listen to one time through. And Cameron isn't just playing these messages a dozen times. He doesn't stop at one hundred or even a thousand doctor Cameron subjects his patients to these recordings on repeat for ten, twelve, sometimes twenty hours per day for days on end. In one study, Cameron writes that participants spent ten to fifteen days listening to these tapes That means his patients are hearing the same message played tens of thousands of times back. while he starts off by making the patients listen to their own voices Cameron modifies the recordings too The tapes are seted up Slow down. Distorted, giving it an echo patient has to hear increasingly unsettling versions of the message too goes Like this. Gertrude, you don't got along on meg. You have never got along on your mother. She made me do what she wanted, and you could never win out against her. You have always ft out in adadequate can't even that is crazy. In response to these tapes, the patients get angry agitated, some feel like screaming, others say it's like hearing voices in your head How does he get them to stay in one place and keep listening? Usually He drugs them or uses hypnosis In one instance patient rips headphones off her head to make the messages stop Cameron has his assistant secure the headphones underneath a helmet So she can't remove them again Many patients beg Cameron to stop like Val or Laco She came to the Allen to treat her postpartum depression because she believed Cameron knew what he was doing In fact, When she begins the unorthodox treatments, she idolizes him and Cameron in turn doses her with LSD before subjecting her to his psychic driving tapes She has no idea what LSD is. And he leaves this woman, this new mother alone to navigate an acid trip while playing messages that insinuate she's done something wrong can't script a worse trip Val likens her experience to the story of Alice in Wonderland. She takes some unknown substance And then she feels like she shrinks down in sighize and falls into an impossibly deep hole Only Val doesn't wind up in a fantasy world She says it's more like descending Reportedly, Cameron does feel bad about what he's doing. At first He realizes this all looks Ver, very wrong He'll later say, quote One simply didn't do this sort of thing to people But his reservations don't stop him from pressing onwards. Cameron's theory about all this psychic driving stuff goes back to what he read about, brainwashing He believes his treatments will induce so much stress that it will tear a person down As he puts it the existing personality set could be temporarily broken up During the treatments, Cameron looks for signals. So he knows when this breaking up has supposedly been accomplished When a patient grows distraught, When they began to fight against hearing the tapes He takes that as a positive sign likeike he's moving in the right direction. Cameron believes this physical struggle proof that a more desirable trait is pushing its way to the surface calls these Contra traits. posositive characteristics that are lying dormant, waiting to replace the negative traits It's an idea that doesn't seem to have any scientific basis. When Cameron thinks those contra traits are bubbling up He stops playing the negative tapes And he switches over to a new tape with a new message positive message. Here's another example. can get along with people by now You are not afraid of others. And you are very pleased to be with them and your relationship with people is good And who does Cameron tap to record the nice messages Not his patience For these, he lends His own voice Cameron's experiments with psychic driving are already underway in the mid nineteen fifties when he catches the attention of an academic group They call themselves the Society for the Investigation of Human ecology And they want to offer Cameron funding to advance his studies Now if you are a longt time listener of this show orr you happen to know your CIA history already That group's name might be setting off some alarms Because the Society for the Investigation of Human ecology is a front. through them The CIA covertly channels money to fund sub projects MK Ultra. And Dr. Cameron's experiments are about to get a lot More ist This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of Doom scrolling? Smart move An anotherother smart move Getting help from one of State Farm's nineteen thousand local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto Bundling Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stalock your fridge now. How about a creamy moochca frppucina drink? or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe Or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Fappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Before the name of Dr. Ewan Cameron crosses the lips of anybody at the CIA The agency grows interested in one of his colleagues at McGill University It's the early nineteen fifties when Dr. Donald Heb performs his experiments with sensory deprivation. First ct Hab recruits student volunteers He offers them twenty dollars a day, Sious money for a college kid at this time But the cash is hard earned Volunteers have to enter a plywood box where they lie down on a stiff hospital bed Their eyes are covered with goggles to obscure their vision Once the box is shut around them, the only noise they can hear is a muted Buzz It's Basically a cubicle from hell, which is somewhat intentional Dr. Hebb is studying the effects of cutting out sensory inputs No sight, sound or touch all day. except for food, and bathroom breaks. What he learns is that about three days in partarticipants start to report Hllucinations Thankfully his experiment is completely voluntary, and the college students can tap out at any time, which they usually do as soon as the hallucinations begin. Nobody lasts more than six days. actually That's incredible to me. I can't believe somebody stayed in there six days. Initially, the agency is interested in funding Dr. Heb as part of NK Ultra but looking into his work leads them to someone else. Cameron who is clearly more open to pushing the envelope Cameron has also been keeping tabs on what his colleague has been up to and apparently He thinks it's a good start taken even further. Cameron starts moving some of his patients into darkened rooms at the Allen He uses earplugs and blindfolds to impair their senses and keeps them confined for much longer than six days Cameron sensory deprivation treatments can last over a month Sometimes he combines his treatments. He pairs sensory deprivation with his psychic driving messages on loop that way. patients have almost no sensory input other than their own distorted voices At this time John Gitttinger is the head psychologist over at the CIA when they launch NK Ultra their illegal program to research mind control techniques Gittinger oversees some of the sub projects He sends an undercover agent to speak with Cameron. to convince him to apply for funds through the Society for the Investigation of humuman ecology. the CIA's Front for funding external MK Ultra experperiments What researcher is going to say no to funding especially to someone with a genuine interest in your work and who won't be interfering. Cameron sends in his application right away And that's how his experiments at the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, in Canada become known as NK Ultra's sububproject sixty eight One of the largest It's very possible that Cameron doesn't know who's really behind the money Many researchers who run these sub projects never find out they've played a role in MK Ultra or they only learn the truth years later, along with the rest of the world And by the time it's widely known, Dr. Cameron will be dead Nevertheless, in nineteen fifty seven Cameron signs a contract with the Society. In exchange for funding, he proposes to continue his work on psychic driving, along with yet another unconventional treatment something that makes Dr. Hebb's sensory deprivation studies look like child's play somethingomething that Cameron refers to as patterning There's a place in the Allen Memorial Institute that strikes fear in the heart of every patient. If you must walk by this particular spot It's common practice to slide passasted with your back against the opposite wall That's the best way to keep as much distance as possible between you and those doors. beyond them is The sleep This is where the de patterning takes place and the sleep room got its name because here patients are kept drugged and unconscious. Basically they're in an induced coma. And they're forced to stay this way for extended periods of time. We're talking twenty one to twenty two hours per day. waking briefly every few hours so the patient can eat, use the bathroom take more drugs and so they can receive another type of treatment. ros shock therapy. now known as electroconvulsive Thraapy or ECT Modern day ECT is performed using anesthesia Electrodes affixed to the skin transmit a low dosage of electricity to a patient's brain as with Dr. Cameron's other treatments, He practices a more severe form of ECT He uses a special technique called Page Russell inststead of administering one shock at a time Cameron shocks his patience multiple times. using a higher voltage Even the doctors who pioneered this method would only use it once per day Cameron's patients receive page Rusll ECT twice or even three times daily. then to sleep. Often Cameron combines de patterning with psychic driving. person is asleep, he plays those negative messages for them on repeat. And sometimes this particular treatment can last to Cameron's goal with de patterning is to essentially give his patients amnesia He wants them to forget their past whoo they are, why they're even at the Allen In fact, he writes that he wants his patients to lose, quote all recollection of the fact that he formally possessed a space timee image In many cases, Cameron is successful T successful Yes, his patients appear to lose their unwanted symptoms, but only because now They can barely think at all. They can't dress themselves feed themselves According to one of his patients peopleeople in the sleep room act like babies after someone comes out of the sleep room It can take months or even years to regain normal functions and memories Families report that their loved ones come out of the Allen forever changed doctor Harvey M. Weinstein Yes, happens to have an unfortunate name, no relation is now a psychiatrist and a human rights scholar, but before all of his impressive work Harvey is just a kid whose father is sent to the Allen as a patient of Dror Cameron's When his father finally comes home, he spends most of his time on the couch sleeping He can barely talk anymore Harvey's dad As he knew him is gone Looking back as an adult and a mental health professional Harvey concedes that there may have been a part of Dr. Cameron that truly wanted to cure people is Cameron is carrying out experimental treatments without his patient's consent. He kind of sounds like a quintessential mad scientist But get this There's something about Dr. Cameron's credentials that I haven't mentioned yet. You already know that he's got this lofty position at one of the most prestigious psychiatric hospitals in the world from nineteen fifty two to nineteen fifty three while working at the Allen. He also serves as President of the American Psychiatric Association That's not all. He also becomes president of the Quebec Psychiatric Association, the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and the World Psychiatric Association This guy isn't exactly flying under the radar Now That's not to say that the people giving him these titles know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors at the Allens. Cameron does publish papers on some of his work there There's one from april, nineteen fifty eight titled of repeated verbal stimulation upon a flexor extensor relationship When he writes verbal stimulation, he's referring to psychic driving playing those tapes on repeat. In this paper, Cameron studies four women who are already patients of his, who are already receiving a combination of ECT and psychic driving treatments And he decides, Well, let's spend half the day on their normal tapes And half the day on new tapes These new tapes play the following message Your right arm is straightening out. right arm It feeleels as if you are reaching out for something Your right arm feels stiff at the elbow as it does when you are stretching For six hours a day patients listen to this tape while electrodes measure the movement in their biceps and triceps He's testing whether the repeated message can induce a physical response. whether he can make his patients move their arms Almost like He concludes that three out of the four patients did show slight movement in both the biceps and triceps after listening to the tapes. in another setting, under the right circumstances This kind of experiment wouldn't seem so malevolent Cameron is being funded indirectly by MK Ultra program attempting to harness the powers of brainwashing and mind control Why would they be interested in creating human puppets we can only guess probably isn't for benevolent reasons Not to mention, MK Ultra notoriously did not always get its subject's consent before going through with experiments anecdotally Dr. Cameron didn't either His patients wanted to be cured They had no idea what type of treatments they'd be forced to endure Informed consent has been codified since nineteen forty seven as a result of the Nurenberg trials That's when an international court tried Nazi war criminals in the aftermath of World War two panel of judges then worked together to create the Nurenberg code a setad of ten guiding principles meant to ensure we wouldn't repeat the illegal and unethical medical studies carried out by the Nazis. Code would be broken time and again, as any listener of this show is aware. But that fact is especially surprising coming from Dr. Ewan Cameron After all He was called upon as an expert psychiatrist The Nuremberg trials He was one of ten doctors from around the world asked to evaluate Rudolph Hess has had been one of Hitler's aides and served as the deputy leader of the Nazi partarty But when he got to Nuremberg, He claimed He had amnesia Dr. Cameron examined Hess and found him mentally fit to stand trial. You might think Cameron of all people, should be deeply familiar with the Nurenberg code that he would understand experperimentation requires a patient's full consent And if they're not capable of giving that consent their family should be consulted. But it doesn't sound like that's what happens here. In nineteen sixty four, Cameron abruptly leaves his post at the Allen Memorial Institute noobody knows why. that same year. MK Ultra comes to an end By then, the CIA has paid Cameron over sixty thousand US dollars to run his experimental procedures. on unwitting patients And then just three years later at the age of sixty five Cameron is on a mountain climbing trip when he has a heart attack He doesn't make it So he's no longer around to see What happens next In december nineteen seventy four eporter Semour Hirch releases an article in the New York Times unveiling some of the CIA's illegal domestic operations That leads to congressional hearings and to the public unmasking of MK Ultra take a little longer for Dr. Cameron's work in Montreal to be connected to all of this in the summer of nineteen seventy seven. A Canadian man named David Orlico is reading the paper That's how he learns the United States CIA was funding mind control research in Montreal. at The Allen where his wife Vow went for postpartum treatment and was never the same and now David and Val realize it's because she was used as a human guinea pig without her knowledge. Val isn't Cameron's only former patient who has suffered Remember the woman I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the one who tried to escape the Allen She speaks about her experiences with reporter John Marks under the condition of anonymity We know her only as Lauren G the years, more and more patients come out of the woodwork. as for Val or Lo She has something the others don't spouse who's a member of the Canadian Parliament. So when the Orlicos learned the truth Val turns to David and tells him She wants to sue The sea. 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Visit your nearest croc store today Before Val Orico was admitted to the Allen Memorial Institute She was a book lover She also loved to pnd long letters to her friends and family Then, at the Allen, she was subjected to hours and hours of Dr. Ewan Cameron's psychic driving tapes Days on end The nightmare, as she calls it almost made her lose her grip on reality She had begged them to stop told them it was killing her hadn't listen in the years that pass Bell reckons with the fact that she can no longer concentrate enough to read books or write letters Her favorite hobbies just aren't in the cards anymore She and her entire family can see she is no longer the same what happened to her under Dr. Cameron's care changed her all this time Val has clung to the belief that at least Dr. Cameron wanted her to get better Maybe it didn't work out perfectly, but he had tried So when she realizes All of those experiments had been funded as part of MK Ultra tapes. A shock the sleep room She feels as though Cameron saw her as nothing more than Jly Now She's mad as hell, and she wants her parliamentarian husband David to sue the CIA's pants off David is game, but at first he can't help but think it's futile. How are they going to sue another government's agency and win then they get in touch with Joseph Rau a famed civil rights attorney in the U. S. He's willing to go up against the CIA and thinks he knows how they can pull this off first, though, he and his team reach out to some of Cameron's other former patients Eventually, they gather eight more plaintiffs, including Dr. Harvey Weinstein, who we mentioned earlier And they file suit at the end of nineteen eighty Rao hopes to establish negligence He believes they might have a shot if they can prove the CIA knew those MK Ultra experiments were dangerous and funded them anyway without any real oversight part of the lawsuit Ro and his junior attorney, Jim Turner. depose several key figures from MKLltra That includes Sydney Gotlib, the so called poisoner in chief. John Gittinger, the original program Officer for Subproject sixty eight Dr Cameron's work and Robert Lashbrook, who oayed the funding att one point Rao presses them on the death of Frank Asome. We've covered the man who knew too much on this show before Olson was a biochemist doing top secret military research when he was dosed with LSD during a CIA meeting. He later fell to his death from a hotel window Officially, he jumped But his family and many others have never bought that story However, Olson died, Joseph Rau wants to prove that the CIA should have learned their lesson They should know by now that LSD can be harmful if misused And yet they funded Dr. Cameron's work anyway, even though he force fed his patient's LSD in order to induce stress Not only that, But Gotlib and Lashbrook had personally been tangled up in the Frank Olson fair And they still involve themselves in funding Subproject sixty eight Rouse's team, already off to a good start, finds two more smoking guns, or what they hope will be smoking guns One is a speech delivered by Dr. Cameron We'rein He calls his own experiments brainwashing The second occurs when Rao catches them in a lie The CIA has been trying to claim that it was Cameron who sought them out, not the other way around But Gittinger reveals nope They went to Cameron and suggested he apply for funding The case seems to be going well This is the CIA we're talking about And he seemingly used every motion in the book to try to delay the lawsuit So Rao decides he needs to lay on the pressure He goes to the Canadian government who so far have been open and helpful. He's hoping they can assert their diplomatic powers to move things along That's when the case hits a snag Around this time Another journalist reveals that dor. Cameron had another benefactor Rao and his clients didn't know about other source of funding actually paid out even more than the CIA did was Canadian goovernment The news is a devastating blow to the families involved It's almost like they expected it of the CIA. own government to make matters worse Canada is no longer helping Ro with a lawsuit The CIA threatens to bring up their involvement in court Canada doesn't want to be sued too It's a huge mess In the end, the lawsuit takes eight long years It may have dragged out even longer had a new CIA director not stepped in and forced a settlement The agency agrees to a payout of about seventy thousand US dollars per person. Later, the Canadian government also pays a settlement to seventy seven people. Though they do not admit fault After Cameron left the Allen Memorial Institute thingsings changed His successor actually ordered an impartial review to be carried out on Cameron's experiments team concluded that Cameron's methods were no more effective than any other treatments. And because some of his patients had ongoing problems with memory, even a decade later Cameron's methods, they say should never be used again It turns out, doctor Cameron himself might have even agreed where he's still around, He eventually admitted that his treatments neverever worked During a keynote speech in nineteen sixty three He said that none of the shock treatments or psychic driving or induced comas None of it rid his patience of their unwanted symptoms for good. I should also point out that his work did not prove successful at brainwashing or mind control, either other than making three women's arm muscles a little twitchy Officially, MK Ultra never finds any effective way to control people's minds doesn't mean Dr. Cameron's work isn't useful to the CIA People will tell you there's some disturbing overlap in the techniques Cameron used on his patients and the techniques used by various governments In nineteen sixty three, six years after Cameron signed his contract to accept federal funding The CIA and the U.S. Army distribute a training manual It's titled Kubark counter intelligence interrogation Kubark being a CIA cod nameame for itself. The document is a top secret guide to extracting information from quote resistant sources The introduction calls it an aid for interrogators and others immediately concerned and claims It is based largely upon published results of extensive research, including scientific inquiries conducted by specialists in closely related subjects and it suggests using methods such as sensory deprivation It even mentions experiments performed at McGuill University ostensibly by Dr. Cameron. I do want to point out that the Kubark manual says the conditions of his experiments were so different that they may not apply to interrogations Not everyone is so sure about that Over the next few years, Techniques similar to Camerons are allegedly used to torture people in Argentina, in Chile, and in Northern Ireland in nineteen seventy one during the troubles The British Army carries out Operation Demetrius to target those suspected of being in the Irish Republican Army, the IRA Over three hundred and forty people are poulled from their homes, rounded up and interred Fteen men are then transferred to a secret location where they are tortured. Torment includes forms of sensory deprivation, like being forced to wear hoods Hence they are now known as Cooded men All fourteen of them are eventually released without ever being convicted of a crime. And many of them suffer for years afterwards when their story comes out peopleeople can't help but notice these sensory deprivation methods Sound familiar They're like a sickening echo of Dr. Cameron's work in Montreal Whether he'd anticipated it or not, some say Cameron laid the blueprint. So Why did you and Cameron do this in the first place If he got to the point where he was willing to admit to his peers that his treatments didn't work, Why keep doing them Why inflict unnecessary pain, both immediate and lasting on the very people he was supposed to be helping There is one theory to explain his motive ter may have been highly decorated He may have headed up every major psychiatric organization at one point or another There was one more honor he wanted Noobel Turns out that not all of Cameron's colleagues thought so highly of him Dr. Donald Hebb, whose work in sensory deprivation unintentionally inspired Cameron said Cameron only got all of his credentials due to office politics Head goes so far as to say Cameron wasn't even a good researcher Honestly, the paper he published where he tried to mind control four women into moving their arm muscles is suspect and not just because of what he's doing or who's funding him. For participants is an incredibly small sample size evenven if he had gotten amazing results That study would have been scrutinized Its conclusions wouldn't stand on their own merit without a much larger follow up study So why even put his patience through the agony? Some say the torment he inflicted still reverberates through the halls of the old Allen Memorial Institute Though the building was repurposed, it is still in use by McGill University And it's reportedly One of the most haunted places Quebe. There are even claims of unmarked graves on site The university outright denies those claims offfficially There are no more skeletons, real or metaphorical to be found The truth of what Dr. Cameron did subsidized by MK Ultra. is out in the open now And that truth is more terrifying than the thought of any poor lost soul who might still be wandering the halls of the Allen. In the end Cameron never got his Nobel prize But he did achieve the fame he was after. past of human dignity and destroying Dozens of lives Thank you for listening Conspiracy theories We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at the Conspiracy Pod If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts Our sources for today's episode include Project Mind Control by John Lyle CBC's podcast series brainwashed and eminent monsters BBC Until next time, remember. The truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always This episode was written and researched by Mickei Taylor Eedited by Justin Sales Fact checked by Sophie Kent Engineered, video edited and sound designed by Alex Button I'm your host, Carter Roy Have no fear, Chosen Foods is here too defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients. 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