On this day in 1953, the CIA's Project MKUltra began. MKUltra is the code name given to a secret CIA program of mind control experiments, sometimes involuntary and involving the unethical use of hallucinogens, on test subjects.

These experiments were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control, and often ran without the test subject's consent or knowledge.

Under MKUltra, the CIA created secret detention camps in international areas under American control so experiments could be done on prisoners without being prosecuted, hired British psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron to conduct experiments on patient, including dosing them with LSD and putting them in drug induced comas for weeks at a time, and secretly dosed Dr. Frank Olson with LSD after he asked to resign from the CIA, resulting in his suicide.

In 1973, amid a government-wide panic caused by Watergate, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Most CIA documentation of the project was destroyed, however 20,000 documents survived because they had been incorrectly stored in a financial records building.

We only know about MKUltra today because of this misplaced cache and a Freedom of Information Request filed in 1977.