HOLY CRAP! The CIA Allegedly Financed Illegal Tests To…

Fresh evidence has surfaced suggesting the Central Intelligence Agency financed a covert program in the 1970s that used American teenagers as test subjects in a bizarre effort to weaponize psychic phenomena for Cold War espionage. The claims, detailed in reporting from journalist Michael Shellenberger’s outlet Public and tied to a forthcoming documentary titled “Mind Traveler,” add another disturbing chapter to the long and murky history of U.S. intelligence agencies experimenting on unwitting or vulnerable citizens.

The documentary centers on Andrija Puharich, a physician turned parapsychologist who spent decades chasing a theory that children possessed uniquely powerful psychic abilities. According to the filmmakers, Puharich accepted backing tied to CIA interest in extrasensory perception and assembled a group of teenagers from around the world, including some described as having had near-death experiences or claims of UFO contact. The group became known informally as the “Space Kids.”

Director Greg Mallozzi, who spent more than a decade researching the story, says he gained access to Puharich’s private archive, including home movies, recordings of remote viewing sessions, personal photographs, and handwritten journal entries. Mallozzi has said his research shows Puharich’s work bridged early CIA mind control efforts with later intelligence-sponsored psychic research programs.

The new reporting places this alongside a congressional hearing held just last week examining the CIA’s decades-long history of behavioral experimentation. That history is not in dispute. The CIA’s MKUltra program, launched in the 1950s, tested LSD and other mind-altering substances on prisoners, hospital patients, and others, often without their knowledge or consent. Declassified records show the agency spent years searching for ways to control human behavior, allegedly even drawing on techniques associated with Nazi-era experimentation carried out by doctors the U.S. brought into its orbit after World War II.

What sets the new allegations apart is the claim that some of the test subjects were teenagers and that the program reportedly took the “Space Kids” to the Middle East during the 1970s to allegedly engage in what researchers described as paranormal or remote viewing activities under intelligence supervision. If accurate, that would mean minors were used as instruments of Cold War intelligence gathering without the kind of oversight or consent standards that would be expected of any government program today.

The CIA’s public acknowledgment of psychic research is itself well documented. In 1995, the agency released a report titled “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications,” admitting that U.S. government agencies had used a form of extrasensory perception known as remote viewing for more than two decades to help collect military and intelligence secrets. That program, often referred to as the Stargate Project, reportedly cost around 20 million dollars over its lifetime and involved using psychics to attempt to visualize hidden extremist training camps, describe Soviet submarine designs and locate American hostages held overseas.

Newly surfaced CIA reading room documents further confirm that by the early 1980s, defense officials were fielding questions about psychic espionage programs, even as the Pentagon publicly denied any budget allocation for the research. A retired lieutenant general who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency told reporters at the time that while cost estimates for the programs may have been exaggerated, he would not be surprised if the intelligence community had in fact been involved.

The involvement of minors, however, raises the stakes considerably. Government experimentation on children without full and informed consent would represent a serious ethical breach even by the loose standards that governed Cold War-era intelligence work. It also echoes other MKUltra-era abuses that have resurfaced in recent years, including a since-filed lawsuit from a woman who says she was used as a test subject at age 16 in a CIA-linked mind control experiment conducted at a Montreal psychiatric hospital in the 1950s and 1960s.

That case, which involves the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University, centered on a doctor who combined induced sleep, electroshock, and what he called “psychic driving,” under which drugged patients were subjected to psychological manipulation for weeks or months at a time in an effort to erase and reprogram their minds. Internal CIA records released through a National Security Archive collection show the agency funneled money to that research through front organizations specifically designed to hide the agency’s involvement from the public and from the researchers’ own institutions.

The pattern of laundering funding through ostensibly independent foundations appears repeatedly throughout the MKUltra era. One CIA officer central to those programs told investigators decades later that funding mechanisms were deliberately built so that the agency’s involvement would not be apparent in the projects it was financing. That same officer repeatedly claimed he could not recall key details when pressed under oath about the most extreme experiments conducted on human subjects.

For conservatives who have long distrusted the unaccountable reach of federal intelligence agencies, the new revelations fit a familiar and troubling pattern. Anonymous funding vehicles, vulnerable test subjects, and decades of denial before partial admissions became public are hallmarks of an intelligence bureaucracy that operated with almost no external oversight for much of the twentieth century.

It is important to note that some of what circulates online about CIA mind control has drifted into the realm of unverified conspiracy theory. Individuals who claim to be current victims of “gang stalking” or directed energy weapons often cite MKUltra as evidence for claims that investigators say lack any verified factual basis.

The new “Mind Traveler” allegations are distinct from those claims in that they are backed by archival material, participant interviews, and a paper trail tracing back to documented CIA interest in parapsychology during the same era.

Still, much of what the documentary presents remains, by its own framing, “alleged.” The film relies heavily on personal archives, recollections from now-adult former participants, and inference drawn from Puharich’s own writings rather than a direct CIA admission that teenagers were formally enrolled as intelligence assets.

Readers should treat the claims as serious and credible leads warranting further investigation rather than settled historical fact.

That said, the broader context lends the claims real weight. Congress held hearings on CIA mind control abuses as far back as the 1970s, and those hearings produced admissions that the agency tested drugs on unconsenting subjects, funded psychological torture research, and worked to conceal its role from the public. Against that backdrop, allegations that the agency also turned to psychically gifted teenagers as part of its Cold War toolkit are entirely consistent with an agency culture that repeatedly prioritized operational secrecy over the welfare of the people it experimented on.

Puharich himself remains a controversial figure. He trained as a medical doctor at Northwestern University before drifting into parapsychology research that increasingly overlapped with military and intelligence sponsors. Letters and notebooks referenced in the documentary reportedly show he was simultaneously collecting data for CIA and Army contacts even while conducting research that on its surface appeared to be purely scientific or medical in nature. He died in 1995 under circumstances his associates have described as mysterious, and much of his archive was reportedly left neglected for years afterward before the filmmakers tracked it down.

The timing of the new claims is notable. They arrive as Washington continues to grapple with renewed scrutiny of intelligence community transparency, including ongoing document declassification fights and congressional demands for accountability over decades-old abuses.

Lawmakers on the relevant oversight committees have signaled interest in reviewing any additional documentation that emerges from the “Mind Traveler” archive as the film moves toward release.

For families of the former “Space Kids,” now adults, the film offers what participants describe as a long overdue reckoning with experiences that shaped the rest of their lives.

Interviews included in the project reportedly detail lasting psychological effects among some participants, mirroring accounts from other MKUltra era survivors who say the government’s experiments left permanent scars long after the programs themselves were shut down.