1Norwegian rocket incident
In 1995, a team of American and Norwegian scientists fired a four-stage rocket into the sky to study the effects of the Aurora Borealis. At its peak height, the rocket resembled a U.S Navy Trident missile. Fearing that the U.S had just launched a surprise nuclear attack on them, Russia had nukes ready to fire, but one single man in the Russian security department decided that it wouldn't make sense for the U.S to do a surprise nuke attack, and ordered to not go through with the retaliation.
2British Undercover Scandal
In the late 2000s, it was uncovered that a number of British undercover police officers as part of National Public Order Intelligence Unit entered into intimate relationships with members of different activist groups to infiltrate them. In some cases, some of them got into relationships and had kids with the activists.
3Stargate Project
As part of the Stargate Project, CIA and US military spent $20 million to use “remote viewers” as psychic spies for the US government. In one particularly interesting case from 1984, CIA gave a self-proclaimed psychic a sealed envelope and tried to trick him to supposedly project to Mars to approximately 1 million years B.C. The psychic just got confused by the landscape and described planetary catastrophe, strange structures (including pyramids), and the strange inhabitants on the Red Planet.
4Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine
In 2017, a group of data scientists after digging the internet extensitvely, came to a conclusion that a company called Cambridge Analytica was using a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine to target people individually to recruit them to an idea. It was leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks to prey on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion. In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica's shady business practices.
5Project MKUltra
Project MKUltra, which ran from 1953-1973 was a CIA mind control program. Experiments were done on humans to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control. Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, who was a child prodigy, became a victim of the project during his stint as a math professor at UC Berkley at the age of 25 and may have led to his future behavior.
6Hacking Vehicle Systems
One of the internal CIA documents leaked by WikiLeaks in early 2017 revealed that agency had been exploring methods to hack into vehicle systems. This program might explain the death of journalist Michael Hastings who was investigating the government’s military and intelligence apparatus especially CIA. He died after losing control of his car and crashing into a tree while traveling at about 100 mph. Before his death, he informed his colleagues that he was under government surveillance and also suspected that his vehicle had been tampered with.
7Operation Sea Spray
In 1950 the U.S. NAVY sprayed a cloud of bacteria over San Francisco in a biological warfare experiment under “Operation Sea-Spray”, just to see what happened. 11 patients at a local hospital developed very rare, serious infections and it led to the death of 1 patient. Cases of pneumonia also increased in San Francisco after the experiment.
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8Gay bomb
The Gay Bomb is an informal name for a theoretical non-lethal chemical weapon that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging female sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other.
9The Luntz Memo
Pollster and media strategist Frank Luntz wrote a paper on how to effectively wage war on environmental science. After big gains by environmentalists in the 1970s, corporate interests colluded to fight back using propaganda techniques (front groups, public relations, think tanks, etc). Into the 90s their big battle was against the science of global warming, and Luntz basically wrote the playbook for how to deny, obfuscate, spin, and reframe the debate.
10Poison laboratory
Laboratory 12 was a Soviet assassination laboratory that used poisons to kill its victims. People were poisoned in broad daylight and they were indefensible even if they knew it was coming. One of the more interesting cases involved a man who knew he was being targeted. He holed himself up in a hotel with guards. The assassins sprayed a poisonous substance on the lamp shade and when the lamp was turned on hours later, the substance evaporated due to heat and killed everyone in the room.