Behind the Bastards - ICHH: That Time the CIA dosed a French Town with Acid: Spooky Week #1

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

A look at the poisoning of the town Pont Saint Esprit, and how some mysterious bread turned hundreds of residents temporarily mad.Check out It Could Happen Here Daily: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-30717896/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Spooky Week! A week where we are not really any spookier, honestly, than the average things happening, because everything happening is terrifying, and ghosts and ghouls are a lot more fun. Hang up in this podcast. Don't listen. Go watch Herbert West Reanimator. Have some fun. But if you decide to keep listening to podcasts, for some reason, we have a bunch of spooky content for you this week. How was that? How was that introduction, Sophie?

Ooh, bad. Spooky, scary, terrified. Get going. Do your thing. Yeah, my thing. So yeah, we're doing Spooky Week, which we're very excited about. But yeah, everyone I've told about Spooky Week, they're like, oh, so it's just a regular week for the show? Yeah, pretty much. No, no, it's more fun.

But in a few ways, it is actually going to be more fun, because the spooky, spooky, mind-bending tales are... Commit to the goddamn bit. Yeah, spooky, mind-bending tales actually do have some more fun, than just the solely depressing ones. This was the first theme week that we all agreed upon months ago. I was like, can we do something around spookiness near Halloween, and everybody unanimously said yes.

Yes, this is the first theme week. We have been promising Nut Week coming up eventually. We'll have to tease them. We won't talk about things that made us nut, or where we talk about the legumes. Mostly legumes. Okay, that's fair. But anyway, we should start off our first spooky tale. I'm going to tell a very spooky tale of an entire French town going mad

over the course of a single week. Oh, yeah. Probably with the help of psychoactive drugs, and a certain three-letter agency. You know what I think we're going to get to do, Garrison? Uh-huh, ma ressoste franche accent! I did get a few messages for that. You can't be racist against the French. They're like the British or Americans.

I did get a few messages saying that your French accent was very racist to the French. It's like the Germans. There's a certain number of genocides after which people get to make fun of your country, and it's not racist. And that number is, let's say three. Honestly, the worst part of this story is that we're probably doing critical support for France. I mean, in a way, well, we'll see. Honestly, I'm going to be kind of more critical support to the CIA by the end of this one.

Yeah, that is the most critical support can be. So anyway, our very spooky tale begins in 1951 in a small, charming French village called Pont Saint Esprit, which is how I'm going to say it. Pont Saint Esprit! Yeah, there you go. So not much happened in this little picturesque little town on the south side of France. You know, on the day that we start, it's just like a regular summer day. People are going about their routine, going to their jobs, kids are playing in the street,

enjoying some delicious, freshly baked bread. But suddenly strange things begin happening. And I'm going to start off with some of the more mild, mild, mild effects here. So on August 15th, first dozens, then hundreds of people began first just complaining of nausea. You know, and some people with some stomach and abdominal pain. Oh, yeah, they're coming up. Yeah. Less often noted, there was a few instances of vomiting and diarrhea.

I'm only about 30% of people had diarrhea. That is a weirder, weirder thing. That's a lot of diarrhea. Yeah, that is on like a town-wide basis. 30, sorry. Yeah, that's a significant strain on the sewage system. 30% of the people affected. It's just going to be like a few hundred versus...

If I was taking drugs with a group of friends and a third of them had diarrhea, I would say we might need to go to a hospital. This is a sign that we have taken someone that perhaps what we got was tainted. We'll be talking about what the actual drugs being used here are going to be. Unless we were taking aminidas or something where that's not an uncommon side effect. First, nausea, a little bit of vomiting, stomach pains, cramping. Hospitals began reporting people experiencing alternating warm and cold waves over their entire body. The British Medical Journal recalls abundant sweating and a disagreeable odor.

I'm guessing the odor is just because there's all those sweating people in the same cramped hospital room. Sweating people, shitting themselves in a cramped hospital. In the summer heat. Anyway. And they're French, so... A lot of escargot sweats, that's all I'm saying. I don't want to get more messages saying that I have to stop the racism. By saying that, he's going to do it more.

By the way, do we know that the diarrhea was the result of whatever substance or maybe it's just the wine shits? Again, French. There's no way to tell. There's no way to know. Patients began complaining about weird pains and pressure around their neck. One of the most reported symptoms was insomnia. In some cases lasting several days.

Quoting the British Medical Journal. The first symptoms appeared after a latent period of six to 48 hours. The digestive disorders quickly became worse with burning sensations throughout the entire digestive tract. Some experienced sensations of burning at the anus. A state of giddiness persisted. I mean, who's not giddy when your anus is burning, am I right? I do. This is like the clear side of it.

There's some psychoactive drug going on. Because your anus is burning and you're very giddy. And you're psyched. You are on board. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that sign from that. What is that from a rejected? What was that cartoonist like?

My anus is bleeding, but like you're down. You're down for it. Yeah. You're 110%. Was that a John Mulaney impression? No, no, no. Who did rejected? Because that was bad.

It wasn't a John Mulaney impression, Sophie. That's just your poisoned millennial brain. Don Hertzfeld. Yeah. Great artist. Yeah. Great artist. So these pale and limp patients, still quoting the British Medical Journal,

these pale and limp patients showed inconspicuous trembling of the extremities. And they complained of disorders of the visual accommodation, and especially being unable to read. So this, this is, this is the more mild French. So this is. Oh, this could be a long one there. So this is for, for, for many people affected. This is where the symptoms stopped after suffering for insomnia for a while,

with, you know, mild disorders of the visual accommodation. And, you know, and stomach pains and like weird, like neck things. After they were able to sleep. That was the sign of their recovery is like the ability to sleep again after the insomnia wore off. But in a, in around 50 of the cases reported, the effects were much more intense. I'm going to continue from, from the medical journal first and then get into some of the more colorful reporting around the incident, quoting the medical

journal again, vivid visual hallucinations appeared in particular themes of visions of animals and of flames. All of these visions were fleeting and variable in many of the patients they were followed by dreamy delirium. Yeah, that's, that's about right. That's actually pretty good description of like LSA, LSD, those kind of like that movies always get it wrong. Cause you're not usually not like, you're not seeing some sort of like visual

like cartoon world. It's, it's these kind of like fleeting impressions of visions and things in the corner of your eyes. Yeah, that's a pretty good description. Especially on lower, like it is unclear what exactly they were on cause there definitely can be the more cartoon elements. Oh, I mean, you can get full open-eyed hallucinations, especially the shogun chemicals will do that, but I don't get it so much with like LSD, LSA.

And LSA, if you want to shit yourself. That is, that is right. Eat some Hawaiian baby Woodrow seeds, get them from Home Depot and have yourself a horrible night. So the delirium seemed to be systematized with animal hallucinations and self-accusation was weird, weird terms from the medical journal. Self accusations. Yeah, it's, I think, I think they're trying to get at ego death, but they

don't have terms for it yet. Either that or that. Like sometimes you're hallucinating, you get like overcome like guilt, like, oh, I did this terrible thing or everybody's angry at me or whatever. Like continuing from the medical journal. Self-accusation. And it was sometimes mystical or macabre. In some cases, terrifying visions were followed by fugus, which is an old term

for like fugues. It says fugues. Yeah, fugues. It's pronounced fugue. It's like extreme disassociation. Yeah, you're kind of zombified a little bit. Yeah. And two patients threw themselves out the window.

Oh boy. Yeah. The delirium was of a confusal kind, which could be interpreted for some moments by a strong stimulation. Every attempt at restraint increased the agitation. Well, yeah, that's, that is restraining. I've had to restrain a number of people and it does not calm anyone down. People don't like to be restrained.

Especially when you're tripping hard. Yeah. Yeah, this sounds like a real, real bad time. Not the thing to do. In severe cases, muscular spasms appeared. The duration of these periods of delirium was varied. They lasted several hours in some patients and in others they persisted overnight. So that, and then we're going to get a little bit darker and then we're going to have more

fun. We observed four fatal cases, three men and one woman. Three of these people were old and in bad health. One of the men was only 25 years old and had been in good health previously. They died in a muscular spasm in a state of cardiovascular collapse. I think this was probably mostly due to how the doctors were handling these patients. Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, obviously your blood pressure and whatnot can elevate when you're hallucinating,

but I think it also has a lot to do with the way they were being handled. Yeah, you're right. The disorder is developed more quickly in children, but also left them more quickly. An interesting feature of some of the cases was that the delirium was the first sign to be noted. So it depends. People come up, came up on different ways. Some of them first had weird body feelings, some of them first started just seeing stuff.

One other interesting tidbit that we're not going to spend much time talking about, but like around two weeks after this initial incident, some symptoms started to reappear either through like a secondary poisoning or it was like some kind of like acid flashback. Yeah, it must. It must because I've done a fuckload of acid. I've never had a flashback. I did at one point. I mean, I have like done some damage and so I have permanent tracers, but it's not like,

my guess is they got, I think the idea that there are like acid flashbacks that are vivid hallucinations has been pretty heavily debunked. My guess is they got re-dosed. Yeah, I don't know. I might fight you. It could be PTSD. It could be that it was traumatic enough that like they're dealing with PTSD and kind of ask what's happening, but.

I don't know. And I think I definitely have seen enough reports that would see acid flashbacks definitely actually being a thing in some cases, especially in like the early days of studying these types of drugs and like the 60s. Like the CIA reported a lot of stuff around acid flashbacks around the people that they tortured. But I guess if it's tied to torture, that could just be PTSD stuff. It could be PTSD.

It's also, I mean, one thing you have to know, and I don't know what kind of dose these people were getting with the CIA would dose people. They were sometimes giving people doses. Tons, yeah. People do not take, like you do not take that much acid. No, yeah, like hundreds or thousands or millions of hits. Like ridiculous, irresponsible doses. Yeah.

So now we're going to get to some of the, some of the more fun descriptions here, which we can actually kind of like based on our experiences can actually kind of see like what was actually going on in these people's heads. So basically we had at least dozens and dozens of people tripping very, very hard. The local postman was doing his rounds on his bicycle when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations, quoting him, it was terrible. I had the sense, I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms.

Yeah. That guy had some other stuff going on. Yeah. Cause the very first acid trip was on a bicycle when Heinrich Hoffman like made it and dosed himself. He started coming up. I believe it was in Amsterdam, like riding his bicycle, which is like, well, this is lovely. I've made something cool.

Why was the postman riding a bicycle to deliver packages? Because they're in France. Because it's your France. We do not have the vehicles. It's the 1950s. The wheel only came to France in 1924. I mean, that's, I'm sorry. So yeah, the mailman fell off his bike and was taken to the, taken to a hospital in a

nearby town. He was put in a straight jacket and he shared a room with three teenagers who were also tripping. Jesus Christ. And the teenagers were changed to their beds to keep them under control. Yeah. That's, that's how it sounds horrible. The worst way to trip flashbacks to this, to being chained to a bed while tripping.

Yeah. That's a bad thing to do. Some of my friends is trying to get out the window. They were thrashing wildly screaming in the sound of the metal beds and jumping up and down. The noise was terrible. I would prefer to die. Then go through that again.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally terrible. This sounds like the worst acid trip. That sounds like about the worst way you could have a trip go. It sounds awful. Yeah. So back in the French town, a little girl screamed as she was being chased by man eating

tigers. Oh my goodness. A woman sobbed about how her children had been ground into sausages. Oh, great. Oh no. So graphic and specific. Yeah. A large man fended off a terrific beast by smashing his furniture and using the wood as

weapons. Good for you, buddy. Good for you. A husband and wife right around chasing each other with knives. Again, probably something else going on there. Yeah. My guess is we're not just talking the acid in that because I have, again, been on acid a lot around knives and other weapons.

I've never chased anybody with knives. I've never chased anyone around with knives on acid. No. That's a couple who was on the verge of a knife chase before the acid. I think the important part here is that in 1951 in this French town, acid wasn't a thing yet. Like hallucinogenic drugs weren't a thing, right? Even like mushrooms weren't popular around this time.

No one knew what the hell was going on. They just think that they're just basically losing their minds. There's no other explanation for what's happening to them. Can we just say that the most shocking thing that has come out so far is that when Robert was on acid, he wasn't chasing people with knives. That seems like... It's honest. Depending on your acid trip, you wouldn't want to chase someone with a knife.

It's not the kind of headspace you're in. We would like during the winter solstice, we would take a bunch of drugs and grab my AK-47 and hike out into the woods and we would shoot down a fir tree and we would drag it back to a clearing and we would bury it standing up and we would drape it in pig intestines and put a pig's heart on it and then we'd cover it in gasoline and light it with fire crackers and dance around it like the pagans of old, but there was nothing aggressive about that. No.

You very rarely would want to hurt somebody on acid in my experience. You generally are way more compassionate in a lot of ways. But if you have no idea what acid is and you're in the 1950s and you're losing your mind and you're seeing weird things, then yeah, I can see how this would maybe cause some other type of behavior to happen. Yeah. You just think that God is angry at you. Yeah, because they're not dosing themselves either.

They're being dosed. It's very different where you're deciding to go on a trip versus this is happening to you and you have no decision. I think for basically anyone in this position, the logical assumption would be, oh, the devil has taken over our town and our minds have, we have been infested with demons. What else are you going to assume? You're not going to be like, oh, this drug that's just barely been invented and nobody really knows about yet, except for weird nerds.

It must be some version of that that I've taken accidentally. No, you're going to assume like demons are in your blood. One interesting tidbit before we go on break, even some of the local animals who had been affected by whatever poisoned the town, there was one dog in particular that kept chewing on rocks until its teeth chipped away. I don't like this. And ducks were behaving very odd. It's described that they were walking around erect and upright like penguins in a line.

They're just like weird behavior from ducks. That's the scariest thing I've heard so far. That kind of makes me wonder. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To dose our ducks, Garrison. We're not wasting acid on the ducks. No. I mean, there's a lot of things you could give ducks.

We're not giving ducks acid. That's not happening. The nice thing about giving ducks drugs is they're all monsters. That is true. They are monsters and rapists. Every one of them. Yeah. All of the male ducks.

So anyway, a reoccurring theme was that people were running around wildly and being very fearful of like, monster-y animals and encroaching flames. Sounds like the ducks were having a good time though. The ducks were having a great time. The history of silly walk shit, like, I don't know what all these people are bummed about. This is rad. Okay. So when you first said that, I heard dogs and I was like, that is the most terrifying

thing I've ever heard. Ducks. Ducks is much funnier. It's like duck standing, like, very upright, like penguins walking around in the line. I think ducks might enjoy it. I think dogs are a little too aware of what's going on. Well, Garrison did say the stone thing was about the dog. Yeah.

The penguin, scary, penguins. Yeah. I just don't know that the dogs enjoy it. It's like, I've seen dogs accidentally eat large amounts of pot and whatnot and they are not happy. They get weird. Yeah. They're pretty scared.

They're having a good time. They're pretty scared. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what is also very spooky? Capitalism. Yeah. Capitalism and all of these spooky advertisements to sell you things.

Advertisements are also a form of mind control, speaking of the CIA in the fifties. Anyway. They're profoundly damaging. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal. And I am Troy Millings. And we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure podcast where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance.

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We just discuss the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after all, if you play games to the games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. iHeart Radio is number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it. Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts.

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He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back from the spooky advertiser a little bit.

Another reoccurring factor for why a lot of these people have very similar types of experiences around snakes, which we'll talk about later, and flames, is with this many people tripping and no one knows what tripping is, I think it's really easy for an idea or a fear to spread from one person to another while they're tripping. It's like this many people, I think if someone says something, it's going to start happening to someone else and it's kind of this cascading effect where they're all developing this very similar fear is because it's almost like being spread like an infection. So there was one man convinced that red snakes were devouring his brain and he jumped out

a window. Oh no, wait, did he live through this? He did live. Yeah, I'm guessing a lot of these, it's like France in the 50s, so I'm guessing most of these buildings are not super high up. They're not super high up. No, no. They're like falling off foot or two.

Although here, we have another one. Another man reportedly leapt from a window yelling, look everyone, I'm a dragonfly. The men broke both legs. But he stood up and continued running. Fucking rad. Wow. King, sigma, sigma behavior. Yeah, absolute, absolute sigma behavior, that was Chad.

This is a new kind of man. New kind of man. Dragonfly man. The rarest kind of man. Look everyone, I'm a dragonfly, breaks both legs, keeps running. Yeah. Look, based on the information you've provided us, I can't say he's not a dragonfly. No, he is an absolute, absolute king.

Oh, good for him. I hope he had a great life. Yeah. Another one saw his heart escape through his feet and besieged a doctor to try to put it back into place. Yeah. You don't want to have that happen. That doesn't sound fun.

You want to keep that somewhere around the middle of your body. Someone sprinted down the lane claiming that he was being chased by bandits with donkey ears. Fair enough. A nearby river, a man was convinced that he was a circus tightrope walker and attempted to balance his way across the cables of a suspension bridge. How do you do? Oh, no.

It doesn't say. The report does not tell you. Sounds like he did great. Yeah, like he was right. Yeah, he's not in the death report. And therefore another another person did try to die in the river. He tried to jump into the river only to be saved by his friends and he was screaming, I am dead.

I am dead and my head is made of copper and I have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me. It's just a weird description of like tripping and saying like my head is made of copper. I'm just trying to think like what was going on? But like what what series of events did he spiral down in his brain to have that sentence? I just I'm not quite sure it's it's definitely I can definitely see it happening. I just can I'm trying to think like what exactly what would happen to get to that point. It's real interesting.

I think some of these are hard because again, it's like these people just think literally think they're going insane. Yeah, or that like this stuff is just actually happening to them. Like you were like when you're tripping on acid, you already kind of have the feeling that there is moments where you feel like this is like this is like never going to end even though even though you know you know you're on acid. These people don't know that right? Like these people don't have the reassurance to like, no, I took acid.

I'm on a drug. This is going to be over. Eight hours or so. It's going to be. They think this is going to last forever. Right? Like they think this this is just the world now. Like this is just one of those Robert Anton Wilson, who is a thinker, I enjoy a lot writes

a lot about how to calm people down when they've taken too much and most of his advice is around talking about like, OK, well, how long ago did you take it? Hey, well, that the good news is that this is going to end here. You know, it's only going to last this long. Like you're through this, but oh, this is the this is the second hour freakies. And by the third hour, you'll be fine again and enjoying it. Like it's all about making keeping in people's minds like this is going to pass. So yeah, you're right.

Like this is the fucking worst way to take drugs. All right. So local newspapers and also like in national newspapers described described this as among the stricken delirium rose patients thrashed wildly on their beds screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies. People throwing themselves from rooftops men and women throwing their clothes off and running in the streets naked and children complaining their stomachs were infested with coils and snakes, which means half of that sounds like, yeah, that's like a normal good time just

running around the streets naked on acid. Other labs like, yeah, that doesn't seem pleasant with the coils and snakes near stomach, but also like flowers blossoming from your body. I can I can I can understand that kind of sensation, but like it definitely it definitely wasn't all horrible and not like nightmarish, but we already mentioned the giddy people with burning anuses. But for like the full on tripping folks, according to the New York Times, there was reports of people like hearing heavenly choruses and seeing bright colors, the world looked beautiful

to them. Apparently the head of the farming co-op wrote hundreds of pages of like enlightened tripping poetry. That guy must be sick of shit, because knowing nothing, he starts tripping, not knowing he's tripping is just like time to make some fucking art. You know what this head state is good for, right in some shit. He just went to his cabinet and wrote poetry. That's fucking awesome.

That's a guy, I'll bet he handled just everything that life through it well, like that says a lot about you when you're like, Oh, demons have infiltrated my brain. Yes, I'm going to hang out in my cabin and write some poems hundreds of pages. Wow, like I can hardly I can hardly write shit on acid. I cannot imagine trying to write poetry. I mean, I've done a lot of creative stuff on asset creative stuff. Yeah, I just feel like like specifically like reading and typing can can be hard at certain points.

It's not like coming down, it can be easier, but it's not really good for like writing. It's good for ideas that you later can flesh out into writing. Yeah. Yeah. So, unfortunately, you know, because this was, you know, no one was going on, many people are taken to local asylums in straight jackets and tied onto beds, making things undoubtedly worse for people tripping. It's one of those things I can't even be angry at them because like they don't know what's

going on. I know. Like you have no idea what's going on. I know the whole like every attempt at restraint increase the agitation line is like horrifying from the concept of like you're tripping, you don't know what's going on and people are tying you down to beds, making you feel like you're even more stuck in this permanent state of delirium. It's just it is the worst nightmare.

Yeah. All of this is horrible. Yeah. The mayor of the town said like, I've seen healthy men and women suddenly become terrorized, ripping their bedsheets, hiding themselves beneath their blankets to escape the hallucinations. So yeah, it's if you if you don't know what's going on, pretty, pretty, pretty scary except for the poetry guy. Good for him.

Yeah. Good for him. Yeah. Making the best of it. So by the time the effects had subsided for everyone affected, which was around like a few days after the initial reported like nausea, like, you know, not it didn't affect everyone at the same time. You know, some people got dosed later on.

It's unclear what exactly because this is the 50s, we didn't have a great idea of the exact timeline of events of like when the first effects were felt and like how all the stuff was spaced out. But this whole incident aroused lasted around like a few days for like everyone, everyone totaled. It was reported that anywhere between like 300 to 500 people had felt the effects, you know, around 50 feeling very, very extreme, like open eye, like hallucinations of objects that aren't even there, like very extreme hallucinations.

And four people did die in connection to the poisoning, at least where people died. And again, it's unclear for exact numbers for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. An investigation into the sudden outbreak of the madness was promptly underway. Town officials wanted to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. You would want to figure out what was happening here.

And the blame fell onto a single batch of bread. What? So among the common denominator among those affected, that they all allegedly consumed bread from one specific baker. Yeah, that's how it works. He was accused of using ergot-contaminated rye flour, and he was arrested and temporarily imprisoned. Also a nearby miller that he got the flour from was also arrested and given some of

the blame. The funny part is that around this time, the French government had a very top-down grain distribution system that rigidly controlled everything about where the grains were milled, where they were sent, and what bakers could use to watch flour. So bakers had no choice in what type of flour to use or what type of grain they could use in baking. It was all decided by other people. Yeah, because bread is a real big deal in France.

It's pretty important, yeah. For the record, just like ergot poisoning, there are a lot of cases of different dancing manias and whatnot in medieval Europe, where whole towns will be, everyone will start dancing or hallucinating, and they always came down as like these people assumed apocryphal stories about demon possessions or whatnot, and now a lot of the suspicion is like, oh yeah, some ergot got into that. No, yeah. Everybody was just kind of tripping.

Ergot poisoning seems like one of the rougher trips to go on, that's not super clean. Yeah. No, I mean, I've done LSA, which I think is similar. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus?

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And that is- Similar to Urgot and Furiazia. Yeah, they're tryptomines that are like really rough and it's, I would not, don't do LSA. No Hawaiian baby woodrow seeds for the pod. If you're going to take LSA, then actually like synthesize it at a Hawaiian baby woodrow

seed, which is a felony. It is a felony. But you can just buy a Hawaiian baby woodrow seeds and eat them and you will have maybe the worst trip of your life. Great advice from the pod. So yeah, on the rye and Urgot topic, the past growing season was especially wet and Urgot fungi did grow across the country's rye fields. But the amount of Urgot on the rye and the amount of rye used in baking was thought to

not be enough to induce any type of poisoning. In fact, the last time Urgot poisoning had struck France was back in 1816. So almost like a century and a half before this incident. Not about a century if it's the 50s, right? A little less than a century. No. So the last incident was 1816. This was 1950.

I thought you said 1860. No, no. 1816. Got you, got you, got you. So a century and a half ago and no other towns and no other part of France was affected by anything similar to this. So the Urgot thing is kind of iffy. But the Urgot explanation was the only thing that doctors and investigators could come

to due to their limited knowledge around brain altering substances and just pressure from town officials to get to the bottom of this so that they had something to blame and people could like move on. But as a result, not much evidence really backs up the Urgot claim and a lot of experts today kind of deem it bunk. And there's a bunch of like, there's this thing kaikion that the Greeks would take that was like this Greek hallucinatory thing that they think it was because they were putting grain and wine and it might have been air got poisoned, but also like people enjoyed

it. And so there's a lot of debate over whether or not it could have been Urgot, but I don't know. I don't know. What else? Is there other other theories about what it might have been if it was an air got? Oh Rob. Oh yes there is.

Oh boy. Is it the CIA? Is it the CIA Garrison? We're going to get to it. So yeah, it doesn't really make much sense that the high amounts of Urgot rye would only be in one batch of grain used in a single batch of bread from just one bakery in one small town doesn't doesn't really make sense. Other explanations that people have come to includes like mercury poisoning and overuse

of other fungicides. These have been mostly disproven. Yeah, that doesn't seem like mercury poisoning. No, but there's a guy who likes to drink some mercury, you know, boy, um, Mark on. So yeah, so there's a lot of other theories around like fungicides being used, but those have been kind of disproven by some people, but others still point to them as possible explanations. But but there is one other theory that we will focus on that features two of my favorite

things. Okay. And the 1950s CIA, because if you're going to pick a CIA, the 1950s, they had the most fun. They had the most fun. Right. Like, you know, who else has a lot of fun, Garrison? Who?

And is also the 1950s CIA. Whomst? Our sponsors. Oh, really? It could happen here is sponsored only by the fifties CIA, only the one from the fifties. Yeah, when you order any of our prod products, they will come to your house and inject you with 7000 hits of LSD. Hey, free.

Hey, that is, that sounds like a great deal. Honestly, you're saving a lot of money. You are saying that is a lot of free acid, a lot of acid for the amount of money you're spending. Look, that's a license. You won't do more acid. That's for sure. No, you're that that's acid for life.

You won't do it again. Yeah, you might you probably won't have to do it. You won't have to do any expenses ever again. Yeah. You'll survive. You'll just be a very different person by the end of the year. Yeah. You won't survive.

Your body will. Yeah. Someone else will be in happening it at the end of that trip. Someone else will wake up. So speaking of waking up, here's all the products. Conquer your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast. In each bite-sized daily episode, Time Management and Productivity Expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home.

These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day. Just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age, learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Lethal listeners, Tig here. This season on Lethalit, you might remember I came to Hollow Falls on a mission, clearing my Aunt Beth's name, and making sure justice was finally served, but I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town.

My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm gonna be real if you take. I like you. But now, all signs point to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win. I'm Tig Torres, and this is Lethalit. Catch up on Season 1 of the Hit Murder Mystery podcast Lethalit, a Tig Torres mystery, out now.

And then tune in for all new thrills in Season 2, dropping weekly starting February 9th. Subscribe now to never miss an episode. Come to Lethalit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When P.T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating.

For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American Sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who are at the center of it all. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com slash presents. So 1950s CIA, wild time, great time. In 2009, Hank P. Albarelli is an American writer and journalist released a book called A Terrible Mistake, which focuses on the suspicious death of a CIA scientist named Frank Olson, who worked on the CIA mind control experiments during the late 40s and early 50s. While researching the book, Albarelli claims to have come across a number of old CIA and White House documents referencing the Ponce de Sprite incident, and he claims that the

village was the target of a CIA experiment on the mass effects of LSD, and that around the time that Frank Olson wanted to sever his ties with the army and CIA, Frank started talking about his participation in the experiment, which may have led to the government offing Olson. So I know that is a lot, and it is slightly more than just a speculation. We're going to get into the evidence here shortly. But by now, it's pretty well known that throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, both the U.S. Army and the CIA tried to use hallucinogenic hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD as both an offensive weapon

and as a way to make like psychic super soldiers. The program is like MK Ultra, MK Naomi, Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, lots of these things were trying to find different ways of using LSD for offensive and defensive means. Some of the interest was promoted, was prompted by reports of the Soviet Union doing experiments with drugs around the same time, also stuff around psychic powers and hypnosis. This was very popular around this time for lots of different intelligence agencies. But so Albrelly uncovered a report from 1949 by the director of the Edward Arsenal, which was where many U.S. government LSD experiments were carried out.

And this report stated that the Army should do everything possible to launch so-called field experiments using this drug. And later in his 2009 book, Albrelly claims that he found references to a government document with the label Rie, Pont Saint-Esprit, and F. Olsen Files, SO, SPAN, SLASH, FRANCE, OPERATION FILE, INCLUSIVE, OLSEN, ENTEL FILES, HANDCARE TO BELLEN, tell him to see to it that these are buried. This document does exist, like we do have this label on this document. But like the actual contents of the document are gone, this is just a label that is being

referenced as- You just know there was a thing with this title, great. So the document label references Frank Olsen and David Bellen. So Bellen was the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission created by the White House in the mid-70s to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the Central Intelligence Agency. So Albrelly believes that the French town LSD incident, which is like the Pont Saint-Esprit, which is the name of the town, and the F. Olsen files mentioned in the document would

definitely show that if the document hadn't been buried, as it was said in the label, the CIA- It would show that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople by dosing them with what he thinks was LSD. Now there is also a bit more to it than that. Using Foyas, he got ahold of another CIA document, a two-page report from 1954 detailing a conversation between a CIA agent and a representative of the Sandas chemical company. So the Sandas base was the place where Albert Hoffman invented LSD in 1938.

And it was only a few hundred kilometers away from Pont Saint-Esprit, the town where this happened. So the chemical company was actually pretty close, relatively to Europe. And it was also the only place where LSD was being made at the time. And they were providing both the army and the CIA with a lot of acid. They were also giving it to universities. They gave lots to Timothy Leary initially. They sure did.

They didn't give quite a lot to Tim Leary. They were giving it out to a lot of different universities and research people, including the US government. So the CIA agent wrote in this report that he was detailing a dinner he had with this representative of the chemical company. And he reported that after having several drinks, the scientists started talking about the Pont Saint-Esprit incident. The Sandas official blurted out, the Pont Saint-Esprit secret was that it was not the

bread at all, continued the Sandas official. For weeks, the French tied up our laboratories with analysis of the bread. It was not the grain ergot. It was a diethyl laminate, sorry. It's the last part of the LSD name. Yeah, diethyl acid. Yeah, the diethyl laminate like compound. Yeah, the surgic diethyl acid is what LSD stands for.

So yeah, the scientist said that it was basically an LSD compound. So that was a report detailing a dinner that a CIA agent had with this scientist. And that document was uncovered, it was from the 50s. Now this next part has a little bit less proof to it because there's no documents backing this up. Albrelly also claims that Durg is digging two former CIA researchers reached out to him and revealed that revealed some details, some possible details of the method of the poisoning. They told him that the village was subjected to an air blitz of pulverized LSD.

Holy shit. What? The acid bombed him? I'm sorry, that's fucking based. So to force people to take the substance through the air, according to the researchers, this manner of distribution proved mostly unsuccessful, forcing the CIA to move on to phase two, which was contaminating local food. So apparently if the air blitz was a thing, it didn't work super well.

That's a bummer. Yeah, I know. Although actually- I was about to have Sophie buy us a plane. We'll talk about this later, but the CIA did do more air blitzing of acid in New York City actually. They would ride around in cars in poorer and poorer, more multicultural areas, shooting LSD out of the back of the car to see what would happen to people.

I mean, take out the racism, and that really is a dream job, just driving around cities, pure dosing people with acid at random, smoking cigarettes probably. Oh my god. So with the conclusion drawn that it was one of the town's bakeries being the source of the poisoning, Albralee says it was possible that LSD was put in or onto the bread. So yeah. And also, lots of the scientists dispatched to investigate the poisoning after it took place were actually from the Sandaw's chemical company.

They studied the situation for like two or three weeks and gave the explanation that would later be kind of disproven that it was ergot poisoning, which they told the town officials and the British Medical Journal. No one knew at the time was that, one, the existence of LSD in the first place, and two, that Sandaw's was the company making it and giving these drugs to the US Army and to the CIA. And apparently, Albert Hoffman himself went to the town to investigate this incident. So yeah, one last thing on like the physical evidence side of things.

Albralee also found an undated White House document that appeared to be part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission containing the names of two French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct references to the quote, Pont Saint Esprit incident. Also it was linked, the document linked former CIA biological warfare expert and the chief of the Fort Derrick's Special Operations Division. So those are all places that they were experimenting with a similar kind of thing. We have mentioned the Rockefeller Commission a few times now, if you remember the names,

Frank Olson, the guy, one of the CIA researchers on LSD and David Bellin, they were on the label of that missing document. So but Bellin was the executive director of the White House Commission to investigate the CIA's abuses and crimes, which was called the Rockefeller Commission. It was formed by President Ford in 1975 to investigate abuses and other activities by the CIA and a few other intelligence agencies that were operating within the states. So the Rockefeller Commission revealed not only, the reason why we know about MKUltra was because of the Rockefeller Commission.

This is how we know this was a thing. So it not only revealed stuff about like programs around MKUltra, but it also revealed the details of the CIA dosing their own scientist, Frank Olson, with LSD and possibly killing him. There's also like, there's like a Netflix series about this called Woodward, which I haven't, I haven't actually watched yet. So I don't know how good or accurate it is, but they did, they did make a series a few years ago about the death of Frank Olson and all of the weird sketchy stuff surrounding

both his job and his death. We do love the CIA folks. So the, the, the commission also concluded that the head of the CIA's LSD program, Dr. Sidney Gauchlieb, destroyed all of the drug programs records in 1973 to hide the details of possibly illegal actions. And he was personally involved in the torture of Frank Olson. 20 years after Mr. Olson's death and 10 years after the LSD experiments were halted, Dr. Gauchlieb ordered the destruction of all the records of the program, including a total

of 152 separate files. This came shortly after other reports that, that, that records were being destroyed by Richard Helms, the then director of central intelligence. So it's undoubtedly true that the CIA was up to, up to some shit involving LSD around the, around the exact time period of this French town incident. Yeah. It's certainly not like you're not coming out of nowhere suggesting the CIA may have dosed all these people.

No, but they did it to a bunch of folks. They didn't do it here, they'd done similar shit. It's also, it's also worse mentioning at this point that like, this is like the point where the CIA is also running this like enormous heroin network out of France as like, if it basically, basically they have this whole, they have this deal with the French where they're like, okay, so the French mob can like basically move all the heroin they want in exchange. They'll like stop the communists from taking control of the point of Marseillais.

And so this is, this is all also going on, like at the same time that they're doing the LSD stuff. It's great. So there's some historians that think the LSD theory does not hold enough water. Stephen Kaplan, it's a U.S. historian specializing in the French food history. And the author of the 2008 book, Cursed Bread, which follows this incident. He says that he is, I have numerous objections to this poultry evidence that this, against the CIA.

First of all, it's clinically incoherent. LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhibitors, where the inhibitors showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive elements or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople. So to both those claims, I say they're not necessarily true. It's unclear how soon the deleterious effects took place. For some people, they were the first effect to felt.

So the whole thing about like the effects only taking effect after 36 hours, that's not necessarily true. And also LSD can definitely have nauseating or digestive effects. Oh yeah, absolutely. So that's not, yeah. But there were other types of symptoms that are not common for what we think of as like modern LSD. But again, this is the 1950s and we don't know what they were actually on.

It's maybe not, it may not be what we think of as like LSD now. It could be suddenly, this is a whole class of psychoactive drugs that's unclear what they were all actually being dosed with. Yeah. Who the fuck knows what they were being given? And who the fuck knows what the actual dose amount was? Yeah. We have no idea.

And it's also, you know, I think it's leery was the origin of the phrase that like the things that determine what happens on a trip are set, setting and dose. So your mindset, where you take it and who you take it around and the dose and the fact that these are somewhat unique symptoms could be to the fact that like other people taking acid have never taken it this way. In this context, yeah. Where your whole town is all dosed at once without knowing what acid is. So Kaplan's other objections revolve around like the delivery system.

He says it's absurd. This idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting in, by putting it in the bread as for pulverized to get for ingestion through the air, that technology wasn't even possible at the time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half destroyed by the U.S. Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War.

It makes no sense. And to that I say, that makes it the perfect town for the CAA to fuck with. Yeah. I mean, the CAA, that's how it goes. That's how it goes. Yeah. I really would choose to dose someone with acid because it sounded funny. Yeah.

It didn't give a shit. I think the fact that this town was already kind of like only half inhabited and half destroyed by the Second World War, it makes it the perfect town to fuck with. And also, the CAA and the government very much did have the means to try to distribute stuff via the air because we can see other documents around the time of them doing this two specific areas of New York City. They also tried to poison the entire New York subway with LSD in the 50s, but that was shut down by higher ups in the Central Intelligence Agency.

Unfortunately. God, what a time that would have been. But Kaplan isn't sure or got the responsible either. He says that urban contamination would not have worked because it doesn't make sense that only one sack of grain would have been affected. And he says if it was or got, the effects would have been way more widespread. Yeah, that does sounds. He rules out LSD in the grounds that the symptoms that people suffered, although similar, don't

quite fit what we modernly think of as a drug. Also, I don't think Kaplan's ever taken LSD. So I don't think he knows what you're talking about. I think he's right about it, probably not being air got, but I don't think he knows much. Yeah, he also points out that LSD probably wouldn't have survived the fierce temperatures of the Baker's Oven, although Alborale counters that LSD could have been added after the fact to the surface of the brain.

Sure. Yeah, you could just drop it on. It could have gone with liquid blotters, which would also explain how the effects were so different from person to person, because one person may be having a whole drop of LSD, where somebody may only have a tiny little speck of moist liquid. For sure. So that can explain some things. But this is still pretty much a mystery.

It's very clear. Very well could have been some kind of hidden LSD CIA experiment. Or the CIA could have just been interested in studying what happened in the town since they were also doing studies into psychoactive substances at the time. It could be either or. And that's where it's spooky because you'll never know. So yes, that is that is the spooky incident of a French town basically thinking that they lost their minds.

And then, you know, they you love to see it. Do we? I think it's funny. It is a little funny. It is definitely a little funny. It is a great example of like the worst way to trip. Yeah, that that's that's pretty high up there. Anyway, critical support to the CIA for dosing random people with acid.

Always one of my favorite sets of stories. You love to see it. So yeah, tune tune in tune in tomorrow for more spooky tales and you can follow the spooky social media that poisons your brain on Twitter.com, Happen Here Pod and cool zone media, which yes, Twitter will poison your brain and that is just as spooky. Bye. More spooky, way worse for your brain than surprise CIA acid, to be honest. The acid wears off.

Give us your attention. We need everything you got fast, waiting on reparations to be the endless podcast. Tune in every Thursday, politics and wordplay. We fight for the people because they got us in the worst way from the hill to Brazil Bombay to Kanye from the left on clave to what the neocons say every Thursday cop the heavy compensation and break us off with some break as we're waiting on reparations. Listen to waiting on reparations on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls, you know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. I just walked in and saw this bright red painting presuming to be a Rothko. Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's money to be made, a lot of money. I'm listening to how what they're paying for these things. It was an incredible amount of money.

You knew the painting was fake. Um, listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of West Beverly High and hang out at the peach pit on the podcast 902 one OMG visit Jenny Garth and Tori spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 902 one 0 from the very beginning. We get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories that actually happen. So they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them all the good stuff that

happened off camera. Listen to 902 one OMG on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns, but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.