This Secret CIA Program Sounds Like a Conspiracy Theory. Every Wild Detail Is 100% True.

In the late 1950s, the CIA was obsessed with mind control—what it was, how to weaponize it, and how to keep it out of Soviet hands. But instead of toiling in the lab to find the answers, the agency went in a wildly different direction: renting a San Francisco apartment, cloaking it in red velvet curtains, hiring sex workers, and secretly drugging men with LSD to see what secrets they might spill.

What could possibly go wrong besides … well, just about everything?

An explosive Pop Mech feature recently uncovered the disturbing story of how America’s intelligence community tried—and spectacularly failed—to hack the human mind with sex, drugs, and surveillance. They called it, of course, “Operation Midnight Climax.”

We were so obsessed with this stranger-than-fiction chapter from the CIA’s past that we had to dive even deeper into the program. Watch Pop Mech editors Andrew Daniels and John Gilpatrick fully unpack Operation Midnight Climax, wherein agents snooped on unsuspecting “test subjects” from behind two-way mirrors as they wandered into a fake brothel, sipped cocktails laced with acid, and unknowingly became part of one of the most ethically bankrupt experiments in American history.

Yes, this all actually happened.

Andrew and John walk through how this bizarre project spun out of the CIA’s MKUltra program, and how it quickly went from a high-stakes spy op into years-long frat party fueled by taxpayer money, junk science, and virtually zero oversight.

They ask the big questions: How did this program ever get off the ground? Why did it last for nearly a decade? And what does it say about the lengths the government was willing to go in pursuit of mind control?

Watch the full episode above now. And don’t miss the full story of arguably the CIA’s most depraved experiment ever—and the wild lengths the agency went to before finally pulling the plug—in our must-read feature on Operation Midnight Climax. Plus, find more installments of The Astounding Pop Mech Show on PopularMechanics.com.