Charles Manson and his “family” of followers were responsible for the deaths of at least nine people, but a new Netflix documentary speculates he may have been influenced by government agents.
Directed by Errol Morris, Chaos: The Manson Murders covers several conspiracy theories tied to the 1969 killing spree, including how it might relate to secret experiments by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) at the time.
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The documentary is based on the 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, And The Secret History of The Sixties, written by journalist Tom O’Neill who appears in the film.
The film’s title relates to the CIA project Operation Chaos, which was an initiative to spy on anti-war groups and other protest movements within the US between 1967 and 1974 during the Cold War.
What was Project MKUltra?
MKUltra was a human experimentation program conducted by the CIA to find drugs and procedures which could be used as forms of mind control, whether to force confessions akin to a “truth serum” or to make people forget things from their past.
According to NPR, MKUltra was created by CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb in 1953 and ran until the early 1960s. The project began during a period of Cold War “paranoia” at the CIA, when many feared communists had perfected some kind of mind control drug.
The experiments conducted by the CIA involved administering mind-altering substances such as LSD, often on unsuspecting individuals. Some of those who volunteered for the MKUltra tests include poet Allen Ginsburg, author Ken Kesey and Grateful Dead writer Robert Hunter.
Was Charles Manson connected to MKUltra or Operation Chaos?
Charles Manson ahead of his sentencing for the 1969 killings CREDIT: Bettman/Getty
There is no evidence Manson was involved with MKUltra or Operation Chaos. but O’Neill claims he may have been a “product” of these experiments.
“I think there is a good likelihood that Manson is a product of MKUltra, whether he was knowledgeable about it or not,” O’Neill told Jacobin. “But I haven’t been able to definitively prove it. I chased this story for twenty years, hoping to get conclusive information one way or the other, but I could neither disprove it nor prove it to my satisfaction. Finally, I thought, ‘Well, at the very least, I want to get everything that I did find out there’.”
As noted in the documentary, O’Neill claims Manson’s connection to these experiments could have been through Dr. Louis ‘Jolly’ West. While West denied ever being part of the MKUltra tests during his life, O’Neill claims he found evidence to suggest the psychiatrist had been “secretly funded by the CIA” for years and lied about it.
West had an office at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic in 1967 and it’s claimed Manson and his followers frequented the clinic “two or three times a week” for STD screenings and pregnancy tests, while Manson himself was required to go as part of his parole.
There’s no proof to say Manson was part of mind control experiments or learned methods during these visits, which he later could have used on his followers, but O’Neill presents it as a possibility.
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