In August of 1951, villagers in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit began to have strange and horrific hallucinations of snakes, dragons, and fire. Dozens of people were put into asylums and hundreds of others were left with the symptoms of “madness.”
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One of those people was Leon Armunier, who remembers the day well. He was out on his bike when he began to feel terrible, “I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms.”1 After he fell off his bike, he was quickly escorted to a hospital in Avignon where they placed him in a straight jacket and put him into a room with teenagers that were chained down to their beds. He recalls it being so bad that he would have rather been dead.
“Another man attempted to drown himself, due to his beliefs that he was being eaten by snakes. A young adolescent boy tried to murder his grandmother, while another man who believed that he was a plane jumped off a building leading his legs to be broken.”2
For decades, everyone assumed that a local bread maker had poisoned the bread with ergot, a psychedelic mold. However, writer H.P Albarelli Jr. discovered a CIA document entitled, “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. So Span/France Operation file, inclusion Olson. Intel files. Hand carries to Belin-tell him to see to it that these are buried,” explaining what actually happened; as a part of their top-secret mind control experiment, the CIA had contaminated the village’s food with LSD.
According to the BBC, “F. Olson” was none other than CIA scientist, Frank Olson, who had been leading the agency’s LSD research. And David Bellin had worked for the Rockefeller Commission, created by the White House in 1975, to look into the various abusive accounts carried out by the CIA. (We already know that during that time the CIA was conducting a variety of LSD mind control experiments in Britain and Korea.)
More proof that blindly trusting this government (and maybe any government) is not wise…especially if this is how they treat citizens of sovereign nations.
The only thing that Albarelli wasn’t able to explain in his book “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” was whether or not French authorities knew what was going on.
It’s obvious that the people of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France deserve to know what happened, why it happened, whether or not their government knew about it, and quite frankly, be compensated.
You don’t even need to make stuff up when the government behaves like this.
