1Heart Attack Gun
In the late 1960s, the CIA developed an untraceable gun with a bullet made of ice and brushed with a shellfish toxin causing an almost immediate heart attack. Upon penetration of skin, just a tiny red dot was left. The poison itself worked rapidly and denatured quickly afterward. It was revealed in 1975 in a Congressional testimony.
2Vietnam Civilian Killings
After the My Lai massacre (killing of around 400-500 innocent civilians in Vietnam by U.S. army troops), the U.S. government established a group to investigate other war crimes like this occurring in Vietnam under the Vietnam War Crimes Working group. They found 28 massacres of equal or greater magnitude than My Lai that the public was unaware of, so literally thousands of innocent people were killed by the U.S soldiers. The information has since been reclassified, but there were several journal articles on it when it was first released.
3Operation Mockingbird
Operation Mockingbird was a classified CIA program spanning from the '50s through to the late '70s that intended to influence the media and create ‘a propaganda network’ of leading American journalists. The operation was exposed after a 1967 Ramparts magazine article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA. In the 1970s, Congressional investigations and reports also revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups.
4Phoenix Program
The Phoenix Program was a program designed and coordinated by CIA during the Vietnam War, which involved cooperation between American, South Vietnamese and Australian militaries to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. Methods of reported torture detailed by author Douglas Valentine that were used at the interrogation centers included: Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.
5Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
During the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the US Public Health Service withheld penicillin treatment from hundreds of impoverished sharecroppers to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men. This led to their life expectancy falling by 1.4 years, which accounted for approximately 35% of the life expectancy gap between black and white men. The study continued until it was leaked to the press in 1972. A doctor was even reprimanded by the US government for treating an elderly black man with syphilis because the doctor ruined their experiment. The elderly black man was unwittingly part of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, and the doctor had unknowingly stumbled upon it.
6Project 1794
Project 1794 was a top-secret program with the U.S. Air Force working with a Canadian aeronautics company to build a supersonic flying saucer-like aircraft that would be able to simultaneously wage psychological war on the Soviet Union as well as physical war (it was also designed to be a bomber). The project was scrapped when they figured out that not only would it be too expensive to build enormous flying discs, but also that crafts of that shape were near impossible to fly at supersonic speeds. A lot of UFO conspiracies started after the test of their smaller flight models.
7Vipeholm Experiments
From 1945 to 1955, Swedish researchers subjected uninformed patients of Vipeholm Mental Hospital to a series of tests to determine how teeth decay worked. The tests began as government-approved vitamin research but quickly deteriorated into experimentation with a diet of candy and chocolate, sponsored in large part by the local confectionery industry. Many of the patients had their teeth irreparably ruined, and it began a large conversation on the ethics of informed consent because these experiments were performed on people who were “uneducable” who had no say in what went on.
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8Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program
The Pentagon commissioned an initiative called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program in 2007 and they just recently released footage of US military aircraft approaching these “advanced aerospace threats.” The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift. Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in 2017 of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.
9Stasi Files
In East Germany, a committed freedom fighter and her husband had dealt with having her home raided while she was away, being arrested on the way to protests and all sorts of state-sponsored harassment. After the wall fell she was able to read the documents the Stasi had kept on her and found out her own husband was an undercover agent and had written many reports on her activities with a bloodless banality. All citizens were allowed to view their own files and many were shocked to find out that their own relatives were informing on them. There was even a case of a mother spying on her son, for which she was awarded East German Service Cross, given to informers who proved particularly reliable.
10NSA ANT Catalog
NSA ANT catalog is a 50-page classified document listing technology available to the NSA and other national security administrations have been in possession of, and use, for the purpose of cyber-surveillance. The document was created in 2008 and was made public in 2013. The technology in this document is incredible, and terrifying for the idea of privacy. These devices are everywhere, could be in any cable, any computer, any phone, any anything.
