Secret Government Programs | The Case Files, From MKULTRA to Area 51

In 1973, as he prepared to leave the CIA, Director Richard Helms ordered the files of MKULTRA destroyed. For twenty years the Agency had tested drugs, hypnosis and interrogation methods on volunteers, prisoners and people who never knew they were part of an experiment, and most of the paper trail went into the shredder. Four years later, answering a Freedom of Information request, the CIA found some 20,000 records that had survived because they were filed in the wrong place, at a building that held financial records. The Senate called hearings. The secret had outlived the order to bury it.

That is the pattern of nearly every file on this page. A program runs in the dark, ends or is closed, and years later the paper surfaces, through a congressional committee, a lawsuit, a burglary, a leak or a records request. Around each one grows a second story, larger and stranger, that the paper does not contain. Some of the wildest claims about government secrecy turn out to be fiction. Some of the most disturbing are in the National Archives.

This page gathers the secret program files into one path, in four drawers, from the CIA’s mind research to the bases in the Nevada desert. Each file goes back to the memo, the hearing or the witness, and each ends with a verdict.

What Were the Secret Government Programs?

Secret government programs are classified projects run by intelligence agencies and the armed forces, often hidden from the public and sometimes from Congress. In the United States the best known date from the Cold War: the CIA’s MKULTRA research into drugs and mind control, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations against political groups, the Army and Navy’s open-air germ tests over American cities, and the remote-viewing research later called Stargate. Most came to light in the 1970s, through the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission in 1975, the Senate hearings of 1977 and the Freedom of Information Act. Others, from Area 51 to the Pentagon’s UFO program, were acknowledged only in the twenty-first century.

The Mind Programs

In the early 1950s, frightened by the confessions of American prisoners in Korea and by rumours of Soviet brainwashing, the CIA began to search for ways to control a human mind. The work moved from BLUEBIRD to ARTICHOKE to MKULTRA and on to MKSEARCH, through LSD, hypnosis and sensory isolation. At the same time the Agency and the Army were paying physicists to test people who claimed to see across the world with their minds.

The ARTICHOKE memo. In 1952 a CIA memo considered disguising a covert drug dose as a routine medical shot during an interrogation. In February 2026 it went viral as proof of a mass vaccine mind-control plan, which is not what the memo says.

MKOFTEN and the séance. A 1977 Pentagon memo records CIA-funded drug tests on prisoners at Holmesburg and on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, running into 1973. The séance in which the Agency met an entity called Caxuulikom through the witch Sybil Leek has no source at all.

Project Shadow. A medium named Evans Charlington, a voice called Eil and a 1967 plan to engineer reincarnation appear in no record. The CIA’s interest in parapsychology, with reincarnation and mediumship listed among its research topics, does.

Soldiers as test subjects. From Edgewood to Porton Down, Cold War militaries tested LSD and nerve agents on their own men. The file asks why the same bases and the same years produced some of the most famous military UFO reports, among them Rendlesham Forest in 1980.

Psychic spies of three powers. The CIA tracked Soviet and Chinese research into psychic powers while it funded its own. Its declassified files show three governments investing for decades, and none of them proving the powers they were chasing.

The CIA’s answer to Randi. A nine-page paper in the CIA’s Stargate collection answers James Randi’s 1975 book on Uri Geller in twenty-four numbered sections. Buried in its defence is the admission that Geller’s most famous feats were never tested under strong enough controls.

The Gateway report. In 1983 Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell assessed Robert Monroe’s Gateway Experience, drawing on holographic theories of the brain and the universe. The reptilians said to appear in his report come from somewhere else.

Page 25. For years the Gateway report was missing a page, and when it surfaced around 2021 it held nothing dramatic. The file reads the report beside the Gnostic idea of a world that is not what it seems.

The viewers sent beyond Earth. Stargate’s remote viewers were mostly tasked against Soviet sites, and a few sessions were aimed at the Moon and Mars. The claim that an unopened archive holds their findings about other worlds is a story built on those sessions.

The UFO Files

In the summer of 1947, after a pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported nine shining objects over Mount Rainier, the American military began collecting sightings. It kept collecting them for twenty-two years. The CIA watched over its shoulder, a scientific panel told it how to calm the public, and nearly forty years after the files closed, the Pentagon quietly started looking again.

Project Blue Book. From 1947 to 1969 the Air Force logged 12,618 UFO reports, and 701 of them are still listed as unidentified in the National Archives. The file follows the investigation from Project Sign’s 1948 Estimate of the Situation to the day the Air Force closed it.

The Chadwell memo. In 1952 the CIA’s Assistant Director of Scientific Intelligence wrote that UFOs could have uses in psychological warfare and asked for the National Security Council to be told. Within months the Robertson Panel recommended a public campaign to strip the subject of its mystery.

Washington, 1952. In July 1952 radar at Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base tracked unknown objects over the capital, and jets were scrambled twice. Project SIGMA, an alien survivor and a 1954 treaty were added decades later.

Eisenhower’s missing night. On 20 February 1954 Eisenhower vanished from view in Palm Springs, and a wire service briefly reported him dead. The record shows a visit to a dentist. The meeting with aliens at Muroc came later.

The Condon Report’s lost chapter. The government’s online copy of the 1969 Condon Report was missing 70 pages. Inside the gap was the chapter on sightings by American astronauts, three of which its investigator could not explain.

What the Pentagon investigated. AATIP, the Navy videos and the hearings that followed are on the record. Crashed saucers and reverse-engineered alien technology are not, and the file draws the line between the two.

The Navy videos. FLIR1, GIMBAL and GOFAST leaked in 2017 and were released by the Pentagon in April 2020. What they show is still officially unidentified.

Skinwalker Ranch. The ranch in Utah passed from the Sherman family to Robert Bigelow to Brandon Fugal, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s AAWSAP program studied it with $22 million in federal funding. What happened there is still argued over.

Robert Sarbacher’s letter. In 1983 a physicist who had advised the Pentagon’s Research and Development Board wrote that von Neumann, Vannevar Bush and Oppenheimer had studied crashed saucers. None of the men he named ever said so.

Gary McKinnon. A Scottish systems administrator spent thirteen months inside Pentagon and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002, looking for UFO evidence. He said he found a list of non-terrestrial officers. He could save none of it.

Bases, Machines and Time Travel

Some secrets have an address. A dry lake in Nevada, a radar station on the tip of Long Island, a Navy laboratory in Maryland. Around each one the legend grows in the same direction, toward flying saucers, time machines and doors in space, and each time the place itself turns out to be more ordinary and more secretive than anyone expected.

Area 51 and S4. The CIA acknowledged the base at Groom Lake in 2013, in a declassified history of the U-2 spy plane. S4, at Papoose Lake ten miles to the south, exists only in testimony.

Bob Lazar. In 1989 Lazar told a Las Vegas reporter that he had worked on alien craft at S4, powered by element 115. An element 115 was first made in 2003, but not with the properties he described.

Camp Hero and Montauk. The military base on the tip of Long Island ran from 1942 to 1981 and is now a state park, its great radar tower still standing. The Montauk Project’s time travel and portals belong to a book published in 1992.

Project Looking Glass. Dan Burisch described a device at Area 51 that could see the future, taken apart because of what it showed. The whole story rests on his account alone.

Project Pegasus. Andrew Basiago says DARPA sent him through time as a child, to Gettysburg among other places. The file takes apart how the story was built.

The space-time patent. Navy engineer Salvatore Cezar Pais patented machines that would bend space-time, and the Navy paid for experiments. The experiments did not produce the effect.

The hologram patent. A Navy patent describes laser-made plasma images in the sky for fooling heat-seeking missiles. It does not explain what pilots from the Nimitz saw over the Pacific in 2004.

Secrets Kept at Home

Not every secret was aimed at an enemy. Some of the most troubling programs of the Cold War were turned on American cities, American citizens and American political life, and on a few occasions on writers and inventors whose ideas made governments nervous.

Operation Sea-Spray. In September 1950 a Navy ship sprayed bacteria over San Francisco to measure how a city would take a biological attack. The Army revealed it at Senate hearings in 1977, along with hundreds of other open-air tests.

Operation Northwoods. In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed staged attacks, among them a fake shot-down airliner, to justify invading Cuba. The plan stopped at the Secretary of Defense, and the memo was released in 1997.

COINTELPRO. For fifteen years the FBI ran secret campaigns to disrupt American political groups, from the Communist Party to the Black Panthers. It came to light in 1971, when burglars took about a thousand files from an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.

Tesla’s seized papers. In 1937 Nikola Tesla announced that he had worked out a theory of gravity. When he died in 1943 the government impounded his papers, and the theory has never been found.

The CIA’s copy of Chan Thomas. The CIA classified a copy of The Adam and Eve Story, a book about sudden shifts of the Earth’s crust, and released part of it in 2013. Why it was classified is still unclear. The pole shift is another matter.

Orwell under watch. British intelligence kept watch on George Orwell for two decades. The claims that he was a Freemason and was killed for writing 1984 have no record behind them.

How to Read These Files

Every file here carries one of five stamps. Documented means the core of the story is in the record, a memo, a hearing or a released file. Disputed means the evidence points both ways and serious people disagree. Unresolved means the question is open and the record runs out before the answer. Debunked means the claim fails against the evidence, however true the history around it. Invented marks stories built as fiction, or that began as fiction and were later retold as fact.

A secret program is the hardest kind of mystery to judge, because the absence of a record can mean two things. It can mean that nothing happened, or that the paper was shredded, like the files of MKULTRA. These files try to say which, and to show how far the paper goes. How each stamp is given, and how the verdicts add up across the whole archive, is set out in the Verdict Index.

Quick Answers About Secret Government Programs

Was MKULTRA real? Yes. It was a CIA program of research into drugs, hypnosis and mind control, begun in 1953 on the order of Director Allen Dulles. Most of its files were destroyed in 1973, and about 20,000 records that survived were found in 1977.

Is Area 51 real? Yes. The CIA acknowledged the base at Groom Lake in Nevada in 2013, in a declassified history of the U-2 spy plane, which was first flown there in 1955. S4 appears in no released record.

Did the CIA study psychics? Yes. The US government paid for remote-viewing research from 1972 until 1995, in programs later known as Stargate, at a cost of about $20 million. It was closed after a 1995 review found that its results had never been used to guide an intelligence operation.

Did the government investigate UFOs? Yes. The Air Force ran Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book from 1948 to 1969, and the Pentagon’s AATIP ran from 2007 to 2012. Neither has produced evidence of alien craft.

What was Operation Northwoods? A 1962 proposal by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for staged attacks, including a fake shot-down airliner, to justify an invasion of Cuba. It was rejected and released to the public in 1997.

The other paths through the archive start in our Ancient Egypt case files and our Sumer and Mesopotamia case files.