Did you wake up today thinking you’d learn about a slew of declassified CIA documents? Probably not. If you did, good for you for keeping the fires of your imagination well and alive. For the rest of us though, these declassified CIA documents are a trip and a half. Here’s a look inside some of the craziest declassified CIA documents that we could find.
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1. The Gateway Experience
Buckle up. These declassified documents from 1983 provide a detailed account of the CIA using “harmonic resonance” to gain swift access to the astral plane. It describes how the CIA would use astral projection to attempt to create force fields around military bases, time travel to the future, and then talk to what they identified as the one literal God. They actually referred to the God as the “Absolute.” The Absolute was apparently the entirety of the universe consolidated into a single point for one single moment in time, after which the universe would continually re-expand. Just let that stew for a second, and enjoy the rest of what those crazy documents have to say.
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2. The Acoustic Kitty
Someone needs to hole themselves up in a writer’s room and bust out a script based on this failed CIA mission as soon as possible. It’s only a matter of time until the Netflix factory handles it. Here’s the gist: Over an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in a cat’s ear canal to allow the cat to secretly record and transmit sounds from its surroundings. However, the cat got hungry before the mission could even really get moving, so they delayed things for a bit. This poor cat. They already went too far.
Fast forward to the first Acoustic Kitty mission. The goal was to spy on two men that were in a park just outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. To say the mission failed would be a vast understatement. The cat was released nearby, and then hit and allegedly killed almost immediately by a taxi. Apparently Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, contests these claims, but who really knows? What we do know is that the whole project of trying to unleash spy kitties onto the world was abandoned, and around $20 million went down the drain in the process.
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3. The Pentagon Papers
While the Pentagon Papers were leaked and haven’t been outright declassified, they did give way to the Church Committee report. The report made public the CIA’s intentions to overthrow governments and incite or aid coups all over the world for decades into the ’70s. This all gave rise to the often-held belief that the CIA aims to manipulate various sectors of the public opinion.
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4. MKUltra
MKUltra is truly mortifying. If you have the time to skim through the declassified documents that have been uploaded online by the CIA, you’ll see that much of it centers on the insane decision by the CIA to experiment with testing intense psychedelic drugs on unwitting volunteers, soldiers, and prisoners that were willing to volunteer in exchange for lessened prison time. The whole idea behind the “mission” was to learn if human beings could be easily interrogated and manipulated if administered the right combination of chemicals and intense psychedelics. A true nightmare.
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5. Project Azorian
Project Azorian was a CIA mission to retrieve what was left of the Soviet Golf-class ballistic missile submarine K-129. The missile submarine had sunk deep into the North Pacific while it was out on patrol. So the CIA and Department of Defense decided that retrieving nuclear submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMS), nuclear torpedoes, code books, and cryptographic gear from the wreckage was absolutely worth it. Henry Kissinger ordered the CIA to work with Howard Hughes to put together a need to undertake a deep sea mining operation, and to build a massive ship called the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer. The ship would have the exterior of a deep-sea mining ship, but inside would be a hidden moon pool. The moon pool had an enormous claw capable of being lowered down to grab the wreckage and pull it back up to the surface. Is this real life? Yes, yes it is.
The ship was allegedly able to retrieve the wreckage, but the big claw malfunctioned during the mission and, as a result, a part of the ship’s hull sank back down to the ocean floor. Details from the part of the hull that was recovered haven’t been declassified.
Kissinger then went on to authorize a second attempt, but the Los Angeles Times broke the story about the operation. With news of the prior operation making its way to the Soviet Navy, they stationed destroyers at the exact spot that the U.S. had previously targeted their monster claw to prevent any more attempts. All pretty dang wild.
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6. Mars Exploration
This is where things begin to veer down more of a sci-fi lane. The CIA brought in a psychic and placed an envelope on a table containing coordinates and a timeframe. They then asked the psychic to describe what they saw after astral projecting themself to the coordinates and time period. The psychic described seeing a dying planet where aliens are desperately trying to find a new place to live. It was then revealed that the coordinates were for Mars and the time was for a very much so distant past.
If you skim the papers, you’ll be able to enjoy more details of the psychic’s experience, like how there were huge structures. The alleged goal behind the mission was that the CIA was trying to see if remote viewing via astral projection was possible. If they were able to determine that it was and could be carried out consistently, they foresaw a world where they could use remote viewing to spy on enemies and gain access to coveted secrets that’d otherwise remain deeply protected behind enemy lines.
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7. The CIA Operative Who Wanted To Rain Down Condoms on the USSR
We couldn’t find a document for this absolutely ludicrous idea to come out of the CIA woodwork, but we did find a book that confirms the details.
The story goes that back in the early 1950s, a man named Frank Wisner was declared Director of the Office of Policy Coordination, which fell under the umbrella of the CIA. Now, you see Frank was extremely invested in psychological warfare. Frank was invested to such an extent that he drew up a plan to let oversized condoms that were relabelled as “medium” rain down from the skies over the USSR to kill their morale. Suffice to say, Frank’s plan was never carried out.
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