The Calutron Girls: the Women Who Helped Build the Bomb

They came in their thousands: young women from across rural Tennessee, fresh out of high school, drawn by the promise of good pay, cheap rent, and a chance to do their part for the war effort – women like 19-year-old Gladys Owens and Ruth Huddleston. One by one they  stepped off trains and buses and entered the mysterious town of Oak Ridge, a sprawling complex along the Clinch River which had seemingly sprung up overnight and whose purpose was a closely-guarded secret. Indeed, an oppressive atmosphere of secrecy hung over the entire site, from the tall barbed-wire fences to the giant signs at every gate urging residents to keep quiet. The women who came to Oak Ridge had no idea what they had been hired to do; they knew only was that it was vital work that would help secure victory against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Even in training this point was endlessly hammered home, their instructors reminding them:

“What you learn here and what you do here stays here. Don’t tell your family. Don’t tell your friends. All you need to know is that you’re working to help end the war. We can train you how to do what is needed but cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us!”

The women soon discovered what this war-winning work entailed: sitting for hours in front of massive control panels, carefully monitoring gauges and turning dials:

“If the hand on those meters went too high, we had to get to work and get it back balanced. If it went too low, we had to sit on that stool and watch it. And if it got to the point where we couldn’t control it, we had a person that we could call and they would come help us. And if they couldn’t control it, then they had to shut it down and call for help. I was always afraid to move.”

Though the women were carefully instructed which dials to turn and what settings to maintain, the purpose of the task itself remained a mystery. All they knew was that it somehow involved magnets, for any loose jewelry or bobby pins tended to fly off and stick to the panels. They worked 8-hour days in 7-day rotating shifts, the work carrying on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While off-duty, they slept in dormitories like Fostoria Hall which cost only $10/month (about $150 today), ate at the staff cafeteria, and went out to the local cinema or bowling alley. Yet even here the overbearing culture of secrecy made itself known. Residents avoided gathering in groups for fear someone might be listening, and even at the movies security staff patrolled the aisles with flashlights to make sure nobody chatted idly about their work. Those with loose lips were swiftly dealt with, as Gladys Owens recalls:

“They told us that we could immediately be taken out of our position if we were caught talking about it. A time or two, people disappeared, so we didn’t know whether they’d fired them or what had happened. When one young girl didn’t return to her dormitory for her clothes, they told us she died from drinking some poison moonshine.”

And so their mysterious work carried on in silence, week after week, month after month. Then, on the morning of August 6, 1945, someone ran into the dormitory screaming a word no-one had dared utter in over eight months: Uranium. In the control room, a supervisor broke the astonishing news: the United States had just attacked Japan with a powerful new atomic bomb, and the women of Oak Ridge had played a vital role in producing the Uranium used to build that bomb.

When the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to build an atomic bomb, began in June 1942, there was only one known metal which could sustain a nuclear chain reaction: Uranium-235. This isotope accounts for only 0.72% of natural Uranium, meaning that thousands of tons of Uranium ore would have to be processed to produce the 50 kilograms of enriched U-235 needed to build a single bomb. To carry out this gargantuan task, General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, acquired 59,000 acres of land near the Clinch River in East Tennessee, which soon became known as Oak Ridge. Construction began in February 1943, and within two years the site had grown into a vast complex housing 75,000 people, complete with all the amenities of a large town including dormitories, cafeterias, churches, and cinemas.

Three different Uranium enrichment methods were used at Oak Ridge, all running in parallel in case one method proved unworkable and in order to maximize production. The enrichment facilities were built at breakneck speed and ran 24 hours a day, for the Manhattan Project was in a race against time. So slow was the enrichment process that it was estimated to take three years to produce enough Uranium for a single bomb – long enough, it was feared, for Nazi Germany to complete one of their own.

As U-235 and U-238 are chemically identical, all three enrichment methods worked by exploiting the slight difference in mass between the two isotopes. The first method, known as thermal diffusion, worked on the principle that when a liquid solution is exposed to a thermal gradient, lighter particles tend to collect at the hotter end, and heavier particles at the colder end. In this process, raw Uranium was converted into Uranium Hexafluoride gas and fed into a series of steam-heated steel columns. Gas molecules containing lighter U-235 would rise to the top of the column where they could be tapped off. The thermal diffusion plant, codenamed S50, was built next to the Clinch River to supply water for its steam plant and cooling system.

The second enrichment method used at Oak Ridge was gaseous diffusion. This was carried out in the colossal K-25 complex, which at 152,000 square metres in area was the largest building in the world at the time, surpassing the recently-completed Pentagon. In this process, Uranium Hexafluoride gas was passed through semipermeable nickel-mesh barriers arranged in a series of cascades. As lighter molecules diffuse through membranes faster than heavier ones, as the gas passed through the cascades it became increasingly enriched in U-235. Due to the corrosive nature of Uranium Hexafluoride, gaskets and seals in K-25 had to be made from a newly-discovered material called polytetrafluoroethylene – better known today as Teflon.

The third and final enrichment method at Oak Ridge were the Calutrons, which occupied a complex codenamed Y-12. Named after the University of California Berkeley where they were invented by Nobel laureate Ernest O. Lawrence, Calutrons essentially operated like giant mass spectrometer. Inside a large U-shaped vacuum tank, raw Uranium was vaporized and the resulting hot ions accelerated past a powerful magnetic field. Due to the difference in their mass, U-235 and U-238 atoms would be deflected by different amounts, splitting into two separate beams which were collected at the far end of the tank. To economize on space and energy use, multiple calutron tanks – 1,152 in total – were arranged around a massive ring-shaped electromagnet dubbed a “racetrack.” During construction, technicians at Y-12 ran into a serious problem: due to wartime munitions production, the copper needed to wire the electromagnets was in short supply. Instead, chief engineer Colonel James C. Marshall borrowed 13,3000 tons – or 430 million troy ounces – of silver bullion from the US Treasury, which was extruded into almost a thousand kilometres of wire.

Efficient uranium separation depended on the ion beams remaining tightly focused, a condition that required constant monitoring and adjustments to maintain. At first this task was carried out by technicians from Ernest O. Lawrence’s Berkeley laboratory, but when their skills became urgently needed elsewhere, the job was contracted out to the Tennessee Eastman Company. Due to a shortage of male workers, Eastman was forced to hire thousands of women – mostly high school graduates like Gladys Owens and Ruth Huddleston – reasoning that a job consisting mostly of adjusting dials could be carried out without knowing the exact nature of the work. When Lawrence’s technicians balked, arguing that the delicate work should be carried out by PhDs, a contest was held between the two groups. When the production figures were tallied, the results were indisputable: the “hillbilly girls” – as the technicians disparagingly called them – had beaten the PhDs hands down. According to Ray Smith, historian for the City of Oak Ridge, the reason was simple:

 “[The] young girls were doing what they were told. They were practicing statistical process control, just like they’d been trained. These scientists and engineers, they’d go trying to fix every little thing that was going wrong and the machine never took a set, so it never settled down.”

In the end, the decision to run all three Uranium enrichment processes in parallel proved a wise one, as the S-50 thermal diffusion plant never managed to attain a level of enrichment sufficient to fuel a bomb. But the project could not afford to waste a single gram of Uranium, so the low-enriched product from S-50 was simply used as feedstock for the more efficient K-25 and Y-12 plants. By mid-1944, however, the urgency of the Uranium enrichment program seemed to have faded, as scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico had discovered that another fissile isotope, Plutonium-239, could be bred far more efficiently than Uranium, and the B Reactor at Hanford in Washington state was built to produce it. Nonetheless, Uranium production continued as a backup. This too proved to be a wise decision, as an unfortunate discovery soon brought the  Plutonium program to a screeching halt. The first atomic bomb design, code-named Little Boy, was a gun-type device, wherein a propellant charge launches one subcritical mass of Uranium down a gun barrel into another, creating a supercritical mass that then detonates. When Plutonium was discovered, it was assumed that the same basic design could be used, albeit in a slightly modified form known as Thin Man. But when the first samples of reactor-bred Plutonium from Hanford arrived at Los Alamos, it was discovered that they contained unacceptably high levels of the isotope Plutonium-238. This isotope exhibits a high rate of spontaneous fission, meaning that when the bomb was triggered, the two subcritical masses would start inducing fissions in each other long before they came together, blowing the bomb apart prematurely in what was dubbed a “fizzle.” This discovery sent the whole project into a tailspin, and it seemed once again like the Uranium bomb was the only viable option. Eventually the scientists at Los Alamos would come up with the concept of implosion, where a spherical Plutonium core is compressed to criticality using a system of high-explosive lenses. But this was a radical concept with many unknowns, one which unlike Little Boy – which was almost guaranteed to work – would have to be thoroughly tested. This culminated in the July 16, 1945 Trinity test at Alamagordo, New Mexico – the world’s first nuclear detonation.

By July 1945, the S-50, K-25, and Y-12 enrichment plants had succeeded in producing 64kg of U-235, which was shipped to Los Alamos for integration into the Little Boy weapon. The empty bomb casing was delivered to the Pacific island of Tinian by the USS Indianapolis on July 26, with the Uranium arriving by air four days later. Then at 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing 66,000 people. This was followed three days later by the bombing of Nagasaki, using a plutonium-implosion device code-named Fat Man. Incredibly, due to the inefficient nature of the Little Boy design, of the 64kg of Uranium used only seven tenths of gram – about the mass of a paperclip – was actually converted into energy.

On learning of the role they had played in building the bomb, feelings among the Calutron Girls of Oak Ridge were mixed, as Ruth Huddleston recalled in a 2020 interview:

“They told about all the people that had been killed. It was horrible, but we knew that that would end the war. And my husband-to-be would have been over there soon if the war hadn’t ended. I was happy and then I was sad and then I was happy, and then I got to thinking about it,” she says. “I got to thinking that I had a part in killing all of those people and it really bothered me. It bothered me for a long time after that, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. There would have been a lot more killed if we hadn’t dropped the bomb. You just have to face reality, so that’s what I did. But I still don’t like to think about that part of it.”

After the war, most of the Calutron Girls were dismissed from Tennessee Eastman to make way for the servicemen returning home. Their patriotic duty done, they scattered back across America and moved on to a variety of careers, Gladys Owens becoming an accountant and Ruth Huddleston a schoolteacher. The strict secrecy of Oak Ridge having been drilled into their heads, neither spoke a word about their wartime experiences – not even to their children or grandchildren – until long after they had retired. In 2004 Gladys Owens visited Oak Ridge for the first time in 59 years, sitting down at the same control panel where she’d worked for 8 months in 1945 and identifying herself in a famous photograph of the Calutron control room taken by Manhattan Project photographer Ed Westcott. On the subject of her wartime service, like Ruth Huddleston Owens’ feelings are conflicted:

“Sometimes I’m proud of what I was involved in, and sometimes I cry about it. We changed the world”.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• STUXNET and the Rise of the Digital Weapon
• The Exploding Anti-Tank Dogs of World War II
• Why are Women Called Sluts, Dames, and Broads?
• Did the Warrior Women Known as the Amazons Ever Actually Exist?

Expand for References

 

Kiernan, Denise, The Girls of Atomic City, Simon & Schuster, NY, 2013

 

Preston, Diana, Before the Fallout, Walker & Company, NY, 2005

 

Gladys Owens: ‘Calutron’ Technician Who Changed the World, Technicians Make it Happen, July 18, 2019, https://ift.tt/nBDsLtA

 

“The Calutron Girls,” https://ift.tt/YDCilXV

 

Who Were the Calutron Girls of Oak Ridge? Explore Oak Ridge, https://exploreoakridge.com/who-were-the-calutron-girls-of-oak-ridge/

 

Henderson, Nancy, Girl Power, Circa 1940: Building The Bomb (and Not Knowing It) in East Tennessee, BlueRidge County, https://ift.tt/ITDVNb5

The post The Calutron Girls: the Women Who Helped Build the Bomb appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - June 24, 2022 at 12:11AM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
-

That Time Over 1000 People Were Crammed Onto One Plane in a Desperate Rescue Attempt

The Boeing 747 is among the most iconic and celebrated aircraft in history. Since first taking to the skies in 1969, the world’s first “Jumbo Jet” has become synonymous with luxury and reliability in air travel, the more than 1,500 aircraft produced having carried over 4 billion passengers over the last 50 years. But sadly the reign of the venerable “Queen of the Skies” is slowly coming to an end as more and more airlines trade in their ageing fleets for newer, more fuel-efficient designs. In July 2016, Boeing announced that it would no longer produce passenger versions of the 747, but would continue manufacturing cargo variants until 2022, whereupon the production line would finally be shut down. But while newer airliners such as the Airbus A380 and Boeing’s own 787 Dreamliner have surpassed the 747 in range, fuel efficiency, and passenger capacity, the old Jumbo Jet holds one aviation record that is unlikely to be broken anytime soon. On May 24, 1991, an El Al 747 took off with an astounding 1,088 people on board – the largest number of passengers ever carried by a single aircraft. This incredible feat was carried out as part of Operation Solomon, a daring Israeli mission to rescue the Jews of Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, known as Beta Israel or the Falashas. According to Ethiopian tradition the Falashas are the descendants of Israelite tribes who came to the region around 1000 B.C. with Menelik I, the first emperor of Ethiopia and the supposed son of the Biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Modern anthropologists, however, place the arrival of the Ethiopian Jews closer to 600 B.C. Occupying what are now the northern Ethiopian states of Amhara and Tigray, over the following 3,000 years the Falashas were subjected to numerous periods of religious persecution, with many Jews being forcibly converted to Christianity during the Axumite period of 80 BC to 825 AD and by the emperors of the Solomonic dynasty. Despite this, due to the Falashas’ isolation from other Jewish communities, it was not until the mid-19th Century that Zionism began to take root in Ethiopia. In 1849, the Jewish leadership in Ethiopia sent a delegation to Jerusalem to make contact with the Jewish authorities there and discuss the Aliyah – or return – of Beta Israel to the Holy Land. Twenty years later in 1969, monk Abba Mehari attempted the first mass Aliyah of Ethiopians to Jerusalem, but most of his followers died of disease along the way.

But the greatest danger to Beta Israel came in 1974, when the government of Emperor Haile Selassie I was deposed by the Derg, a Marxist-Leninist military junta lead by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. Soon after taking power, Mengistu unleashed the Qey Shabir or Red Terror, a regime of violent political repression aimed at eliminating rival revolutionary groups such as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party and Tigray People’s Liberation Front and consolidating the Derg’s control over the country. Between 1976 and 1977, an estimated 750,000 Ethiopians were tortured and murdered as part of the purge. At the same time, the Derg imposed disastrous economic and agricultural reforms, including land collectivization, the resettlement of over 600,000 rural Ethiopians from the northern highlands, confiscating grain from areas with high rebel activity, and redistributing it in cities to keep urban populations loyal. These policies, coupled with severe droughts, led to a series of  devastating famines between 1983 and 1985 which killed over 1.2 million people and displaced 2.5 million more. Among the worst affected by the nearly two-decade-long civil war were the Falashas. Politically, Mengitsu and the Derg aligned themselves with the Soviet Union against the Western powers – and, by extension, the state of Israel. This, along with the Derg’s general anti-religious sentiment, led to Beta Israel being specifically targeted for political repression, with open religious practice, the teaching of Hebrew, and emigration from Ethiopia being banned. The plight of the Falashas soon came to the attention of the Israeli government, who began evaluating a possible rescue mission.

The 1950 Israeli Law of Return grants every Jewish person in the world the right to make Aliyah and become an Israeli citizen. In the 1970s, however, there was considerable debate among Israeli authorities whether the Falashas even counted as part of the Jewish diaspora. Having lived in isolation from other Jewish traditions for at least 2,000 years, the Falashas practiced a form of Judaism known as Haymanot, considered so different from Rabbinic Judaism that in 1973 the Israeli Ministry of Absorption issued a report declaring the Ethiopian Jews to be entirely foreign to Israeli Jews and thus not eligible for Aliyah. Shortly thereafter, however, Ovadia Yosef and Schlomo Goren, chief Rabbis of the Sephardi and Ashkenazi sects, issued proclamations declaring the Falashas to be legitimate descendants of the Israelites. These proclamations became official government policy when Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to power in 1977, and plans to evacuate Beta Israel from Ethiopia finally began in earnest.

As Israel had no formal diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, the Israeli Intelligence Service, Mossad, instead contacted the government of neighbouring Sudan. While the President of Sudan, Gaafar al-Numeiry, was no friend of Israel, he nonetheless agreed to establish a series of refugee camps along the border from which Ethiopian Jews could be evacuated to Israel. Between 1977 and 1984 over 8000 Falashas made the treacherous journey on foot from northern Ethiopia to the Sudanese border, with nearly 4,000 dying on the way due to disease, starvation, and banditry. At first the refugees were evacuated by the Israeli Navy, which ferried them to the remote Red Sea village of Arous, which Mossad had converted into a fake holiday resort as cover for the operation. But as more and more people arrived at the border it became clear that this method would be too slow to evacuate everyone before they died of disease in the camps. A massive airlift was thus proposed. However, there was a problem: as a member of the Arab League, Gaafar al-Numeiry could not be seen as aiding Israel, and while the initial evacuations had been easy to keep quiet, a large-scale airlift would require the full cooperation of the Sudanese military and intelligence services. Israel thus turned to the United States, which had a close relationship with al-Numeiry’s government. In June 1984 a representative from Sudan met with Richard Krieger and Ambassador Eugene Douglas of the U.S. State Department to ask for aid to prop up Sudan’s faltering economy. Sensing an opportunity, Krieger decided to exploit the representative’s anti-semitism in order to make the aid contingent upon Sudan’s cooperation with Israel. Claiming that congressional approval for aid was subject to approval by the omnipotent “Jewish Lobby,” Krieger suggested to his guest that evacuating the Ethiopian Jews would go a long way towards swaying public opinion, adding:

“Besides, these people are nothing but a burden on the Sudan.”

 The ploy worked, and the airlift, codenamed Operation Moses, began on November 21, 1984. The evacuation was carried out using Boeing 707s belonging to Belgian carrier Trans European Airlines. As TEA had been widely used for years by Muslim pilgrims travelling to Mecca, their presence in Sudan would not arouse suspicion. Every night for 36 days, groups of 220 refugees were driven by bus to Khartoum, from where they were flown to Brussels and then on to Tel Aviv.

Inevitably, news of the operation leaked out, and on January 5, 1985, under pressure from other Arab League members, al-Numeiry was forced to put an end to the airlift. In total, Operation Moses evacuated 7,800 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. But hundreds more remained in the Sudanese camps living in squalid conditions. This time around, it was the Americans who would take the leading role in evacuating them. While US diplomats managed to convince al-Numeiry to resume the airlift, to avoid further controversy he insisted upon a one-shot military operation rather than the protracted approach of Operation Moses. The US Government agreed, and after releasing $15 million in aid to Sudan, preparations for a second airlift, codenamed Operation Joshua, began. At midnight on March 28, 1985, six US Air Force C-130 Hercules transports, flying from Eilat Air Force Base in Israel, landed at a secret airstrip eight miles outside the Sudanese town of Gedaref. While the Air Force had prepared to evacuate up to 2,000 refugees, only 494 remained in the camps, so three of the transports returned from Sudan empty. By 9 AM all the refugees had been safely evacuated back to Eilat, where they were personally greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Simon Peres.

While Operation Moses and Joshua had been stunning successes, tens of thousands of Jews still remained in Ethiopia, and as Tigrean rebels pushed closer to the capital of Addis Ababa and the Mengistu Government faced imminent collapse, their situation grew increasingly precarious. After nearly a decade of barring the Ethiopian Jews from emigrating, in November 1990 Mengistu finally relented in exchange for $35 million in cash and arms from Israel. When in early 1991 the rebels finally took the capital and forced Mengitsu to flee, the Israeli government of Yitzhak Shamir launched Operation Solomon, the last and largest of the Aliya airlifts.

35 aircraft took part in Operation Solomon, consisting of Military C-130 Hercules transports and Boeing 707 and 747 airliners from Israeli carrier El Al. While the evacuation was originally intended to take place over 10-15 days, this was shortened to 48 hours when it became clear that any delay would allow the rebels to hold the Falashas as bargaining chips in international negotiations. In the end, however, the entire operation took less than 36 hours. Between May 24 and 25, 1991, the 35 aircraft made 40 non-stop flights between Addis Ababa and Tel Aviv, evacuating 14,325 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. One aircraft, a Boeing 747-25C registration number 4X-AXD, made history by making the 2,575 km flight with over 1,000 people aboard – the largest number of passengers ever carried by a single aircraft. Sources vary on the exact number, with reported figures ranging from 1,078 to 1,122 – including two babies born during the flight. But even the lowest reported figure is more than twice the 747’s maximum capacity of 524 – and greater even than the Airbus A380’s maximum capacity of 853. This was made possible by removing all of the aircraft’s seats, and by the fact that the starving refugees were considerably lighter than the average airline passenger and carried no luggage other than cooking utensils and the clothes on their backs.

While the evacuation gave the refugees a chance at a brand-new start, for many life in Israel has failed to live up to its promise. Many evacuees, coming from poor agricultural villages without electricity or running water, found adapting to modern Israeli society difficult, and with little education and low literacy rates, large numbers of Falashas were forced to spend years in Government-run Absorption Centres learning Hebrew and being retrained for the technological economy – only to face stiff competition from native Israelis for jobs. Today, the nearly 135,000 Ethiopians living in Israel are among the poorest in the country, earning 30-40% less than the average Israeli citizen and suffering from unemployment rates as high as 65%. Racism and discrimination against Falashas are also widespread. Up until the mid 1990s, Israeli blood banks threw out blood donated by Ethiopians for fear of AIDS contamination, while a 2013 report by Israeli news agency Haaretz claims that for years the Israeli Government carried out a program of forced sterilization on Falasha women. In July 2019 these tensions reached a boiling point when the shooting of 19-year old Solomon Teka by an off-duty Israeli police officer sparked mass protests across the country. Thus while after nearly 3000 years Beta Israel has finally been reunited with its ancestral land, its future remains as uncertain as ever.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• Scamming Pan Am
• Has Any Passenger Ever Landed a Commercial Airliner Like You See in Movies?
• What is the Best Way to Survive Falling Out of a Plane with No Parachute?
• Can You Really Avoid a Baggage Fee by Wearing All Your Clothes?

Expand for References

 

Palmer, Mark, Last Blast of the Jumbo, The Daily Mail, July 8, 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8503979/For-50-years-Boeing-747-carried-4billion-passengers-Space-Shuttles.html

 

Calder, Simon, Boeing 747 at 50: Everything You Need to Know About the Jumbo Jet, The Independent, February 10, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/boeing-747-50-aniversary-50-years-old-jumbo-jet-ba-british-airways-virgin-atlantic-first-flight-crash-a8771026.html

 

Bednarek, Janet, 50 Years Ago, the Boeing 747 Created Air Travel as we Know It, Quartz, October 4, 2018, https://qz.com/quartzy/1413331/50-years-ago-the-boeing-747-created-air-travel-as-we-know-it/

 

Operation Solomon: from Ethiopian Jews to Ethiopian Israelis, https://jewishmuseum.org.uk/2018/10/24/operation-solomon-from-ethiopian-jews-to-ethiopian-israelis/

 

On This Day: Operation Moses Suspended, The JC, https://www.thejc.com/on-this-day-operation-moses-suspended-1.20353

 

Bard, Mitchell & Lenhoff, Howard, Ethiopian Jewry: America’s Role in the Rescue of the Ethiopian Jews, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/america-s-role-in-the-rescue-of-ethiopian-jewry

 

Loh, Chris, Operation Solomon – El Al’s Record-Breaking 747 Max Capacity Flight, SimpleFlying.com, September 11, 2020, https://simpleflying.com/el-al-operation-solomon/

 

Rozen-Wheeler, Adam, Operations Moses, Joshua, and Solomon (1984-1991), Black past, July 22, 2017, https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/operations-moses-joshua-and-solomon-1984-1991/

 

Ethiopian Virtual Jewish Tour, Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ethiopia-virtual-jewish-tour#operation1

 

Liebermann, Oren,  An off-duty police officer shot dead an unarmed black teen, sparking riots. But it didn’t happen where you think, CNN, July 4, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/04/middleeast/ethiopia-israel-protests-analysis-oren-intl/index.html

 

Knutsen, Elise, Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control, Report Claims, Forbes, January 28, 2013, https://ift.tt/InYCKNc

The post That Time Over 1000 People Were Crammed Onto One Plane in a Desperate Rescue Attempt appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - June 24, 2022 at 12:08AM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
-

That Time a Scientist Stopped a Charging Bullfighting Bull Using Mind Control FOR SCIENCE!!!!

One day in the summer of 1963, Spanish neurologist José Delgado stepped into a bullring outside Córdoba and prepared to perform an audacious experiment. Armed only with an experimental radio transmitter, he prepared to face off with an angry Spanish fighting bull, bred specifically for strength and aggression. Delgado waved a flag to set the bull charging, but before the ton of galloping muscle and sharp horns could reach him he pressed a button on his remote control. Immediately the bull stopped in its tracks, shook its head in confusion, then calmly trotted away. Eyewitnesses to the event were stunned, for Delgado had apparently defeated the bull’s innate aggression using only a set of tiny electrodes implanted in its brain. It was the most dramatic – and disturbing – demonstration in a pioneering but controversial career that would earn Delgado the title “the father of mind control.”

José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was born August 8, 1915 in the town of Ronda, Spain and received his doctorate of medicine from the University of Madrid in 1936, just as the Spanish Civil War broke out. During the war he served as a stretcher-bearer and medic for the Republican forces, being captured and held in a Nationalist concentration camp for 5 months. Under the regime of General Fransisco Franco Delgado was forced to redo his doctorate, receiving a Ph.D in physiology in 1940. Initially Delgado wanted to be an ophthalmologist like his father, but upon reading the works of Nobel Prize-winning Spanish neurologist Ramon y Cajal (“ee-cay-ahl”):

“I became fascinated by the many mysteries of the brain. How little was known then. How little is known now!”

In 1948 Delgado won a fellowship at Yale University working under legendary American neurologist John Fulton, whose experiments with severing the frontal lobes of chimpanzees had led to the development of the lobotomy for the treatment of mental illness. Delgado was horrified by such extreme methods, and instead gravitated towards the work of Walter Hess and Wilder Penfield, who had shown that by applying a mild electrical current to different regions of the brain they could elicit all sorts of responses, from involuntary limb movements to tastes, smells, and sounds, to emotions such as fear, aggression, and euphoria.

“I thought Fulton’s idea of destroying the brain was absolutely horrendous. My idea was to avoid lobotomy with the help of electrodes implanted in the brain.”

Starting with cats, Delgado gradually moved up to monkeys and then human psychiatric patients. Early results were promising:

“If you insert electrodes directly into the brains of cats and apes, they will behave like electronic toys. A whole series of motor functions can be triggered based on which button the experimenter pushes. This applies to all body parts: front and back paws, the tail, the hind parts, the head, and the ears.”

One test subject, being made to move his arm involuntarily using implanted electrodes, memorably declared:

“I guess, doctor, that your electricity is stronger than my will”.

But the equipment used in these early experiments, which involved wires snaking out of subjects’ scalps into bulky external monitors, was cumbersome, restrictive, and increased the chances of infection. Delgado, a technical as well as a medical genius, thus invented what he called a “stimoreceiver,” a miniaturized radio transmitter the size of a quarter which could be completely implanted beneath the scalp, power being supplied through an electromagnetic coil transmitting through the skin. Delgado also invented a “chemitrode” which delivered controlled amounts of drugs into the brain via radio command.

Delgado’s main interest lay in using implanted electrodes to help regulate strong emotions, especially aggression. In one dramatic experiment, performed in Bermuda in 1966, Delgado implanted a stimoreceiver in a gibbon ape who had been terrorizing his cagemates. The electrodes were implanted in the ape’s caudate nucleus, a region of the brain associated with aggression, and a lever connected to the transmitter was installed in the cage. One of the female apes quickly realized the significance of the lever and began enthusiastically pulling it to pacify the aggressive male. Within days, the entire social order of the cage had been turned upside-down. As Delgado later wrote:

“The old dream of an individual overpowering the strength of a dictator by remote control has been fulfilled, at least in our monkey colonies.”

Delgado next turned his attention to the treatment of epilepsy and schizophrenia, setting up shop in a psychiatric hospital in Rhode Island. Here the results of deep-brain stimulation were varied and often alarming, with Delgado reporting:

“A 36-year-old female epileptic, whose behaviour was normally “quite proper,” responded to stimulation by “giggling and making funny comments” and flirting with researchers. A sullen 11-year-old epileptic boy became chatty and friendly when stimulated. “Hey! You can keep me here longer when you give me these,” he exclaimed. He also announced, “I’d like to be a girl.””

In her book The Brain Changers: Scientists and the New Mind Control, author Maya Pine describes a film taken of another of Delgado’s patients:

As the film opens, the patient, a rather attractive young woman, is seen playing the guitar and singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” A psychiatrist sits a few feet away. She seems undisturbed by the bandages that cover her head like a tight hood, from her forehead to the back of her neck. Then a mild electric current is sent from another room, stimulating one of the electrodes in her right amygdala. Immediately, she stops singing, the brainwave tracings from her amygdala begin to show spikes, a sign of seizure activity. She stares blankly ahead. Suddenly she grabs her guitar and smashes it against the wall, narrowly missing the psychiatrist’s head.”

Unfortunately, the therapeutic benefits of these experiments were mixed at best, and Delgado turned away more patients than he treated, declaring:

“We knew too little about the brain. It is much too complicated to be controlled. We never knew which parts of the brain we were stimulating with the stimoceiver. We didn’t even manage to prevent epileptic attacks, which we thought would be the simplest of things. We never found the area where epilepsy attacks originate.”

Delgado did, however, achieve some success in the treatment of chronic pain, particularly in one patient who had been injured in a car accident and whose pain had resisted drug treatment. Deep-brain stimulation is still sometimes used for this purpose – as well as the treatment of Parkinson’s – to this day.

The experiment which most excited Delgado, however, involved a female chimpanzee named Paddy, who was wired with a stimoreceiver programmed to detect a brain signal called a spindle, produced by the amygdala. Whenever the receiver detected a signal, it stimulated the Paddy’s brain to produce an unpleasant ‘aversive’ reaction. The result was a negative feedback loop in which Paddy’s brain produced fewer and fewer spindles and Paddy became progressively quieter and less motivated. Delgado predicted that such “neural pacemakers” could be used to help stop epileptic seizures or anxiety attacks in their tracks. In 1972, these experiments would also inspire Michael Crichton – author of Jurassic Park –  to pen a science fiction novel called The Terminal Man, in which a man fitted with a stimoreceiver to cure his epilepsy is instead driven to become progressively more aggressive.

But the experiment that truly put Delgado’s name on the map was the famous charging bull experiment of 1963. The experiment originated in a conversation with a Córdoba bull breeder, who argued that while Delgado’s electrodes might work in cats, monkeys, or even humans, they could not stop a fighting bull, which was specifically bred for aggression. Delgado accepted the challenge and with the breeder’s permission he and his team anesthetized a bull and fitted it with stimoreceiver equipment. The next day the bull was back to normal and ready for the experiment. As Delgado climbed into the ring, the breeder asked him if he had taken bull-fighting lessons in preparation. Delgado, who had grown up in the heart of bullfighting country, responded with mock outrage that of course he knew how to fight a bull!

A story on the bull experiments appeared two years later in the New York Times, finally bringing Delgado and his work to the public’s attention. Delgado was swamped with media inquiries, his experiments hailed as:

“…the most spectacular demonstration ever performed of the deliberate modification of animal behaviour through external control of the brain.”

In 1969, Delgado published a book titled Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, in which he declared that humanity was on the verge of “conquering the mind” and should use neutrotechnology to overcome its cruel, violent, and destructive tendencies and create “a less cruel, happier, and better man.” It could not have come at a worse time. In the late 1960s, the American public was just beginning to learn of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA mind-control experiments on unwitting citizens, and despite his benevolent and pacifistic intentions Delgado was branded as a fascist who wanted to use brain implants to erase free will and control the population. Adding to the suspicion was the fact that some of Delgado’s research had been sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Aeromedical Research Laboratory. A paper expressing his views was also presented at the 1972 Congressional hearings on MKULTRA, which stated:

“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically manipulated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Some day armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.”

 Other researchers added fuel to the fire. In 1970 Harvard researchers Frank Ervin and Vernon Mark suggested that brain implants might be used to quell violence in black civil-rights protestors, while in 1972 Robert Heath from Tulane University claimed to have changed the sexual orientation of a homosexual man by electrical stimulating the septal region of his brain while he had sex with a female prostitute. As paranoia about mind control grew, strangers began accusing Delgado of having implanted electrodes in their brains and demanding that he take them out. One woman even sued Delgado for $1 million even though the two had never met. In 1974, Delgado was asked by the Spanish Minister of Education to establish a new medical school at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He jumped at the opportunity and moved back to Spain with his wife and children. Though Delgado switched his focus to non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, developing an early version of transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, this did little to rehabilitate his reputation. As his work was published only in Spanish journals, his later research was all but unknown in the United States and he continued to be remembered for his stimoreceiver experiments and controversial opinions on mind control. Jose Delgado moved back to the United States in 2004, dying in San Diego on September 15, 2011 at the age of 96.

Yet despite the storms of controversy surrounding his work, the neurostimulation technology Delgado pioneered never yielded the results he had hoped – and his critics feared. The brain, it turns out, is far more complicated than Delgado and his contemporaries assumed, and scientists have yet to fully crack its complicated neural code. Nonetheless, researchers have had some success in using deep-brain stimulation to treat conditions such as Parkinson’s, epilepsy, and paralysis, and chronic pain, and promising studies are underway to use it in the treatment of depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. For now, however, mind control remains firmly in the domain of science fiction.

…or is it? Perhaps Delgado and the CIA were actually successful after all. Perhaps I myself was implanted with a stimoreceiver and am being forced against my will to record hundreds of YouTube videos per week. If you are watching this, please send help; I am located at – *stunned pause* – *sigh of contentment * – ahhh, that’s better. Now, where was I?

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• A Parasitic Wasp that Injects Its Venom Into a Cockroach’s Brain in Order to Control It
• Who Started the Lizard People Conspiracy Theory?
• One of the Greatest Scientists of the 20th Century You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
• Do Scientists Ever Name Creatures After People They Dislike Out of Spite?

Expand for References

Horgan, John, Tribute to Jose Delgado, Legendary and Slightly Scary Pioneer of Mind Control, Scientific American, September 25, 2017, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/tribute-to-jose-delgado-legendary-and-slightly-scary-pioneer-of-mind-control/

 

Horgan, John, Return of ElectroCures: Symptom of Psychriatry’s Crisis? Scientific American, June 24, 2015, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/return-of-electro-cures-symptom-of-psychiatry-s-crisis/

 

Horgan, John, Much-Hyped Brain-Implant Treatment for Depression Suffers Setback, Scientific American, March 11, 2014, https://ift.tt/EypbT7D

 

Jose Delgado’s “Physical Control of the Mind,” https://ift.tt/Ec6CTU0

 

Bartas, Magnus & Ekman, Fredrik, Psychocivilization and its Discontents: an Interview with Jose Delgado, Cabinet Magazine, Spring 2001, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/bartas_ekman_delgado.php

 

 

Horgan, John, The Myth of Mind Control, Discover Magazine, October 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20061020235522/https://discover.com/issues/oct-04/cover/

The post That Time a Scientist Stopped a Charging Bullfighting Bull Using Mind Control FOR SCIENCE!!!! appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - June 24, 2022 at 12:04AM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
-

Creme Savers are back! (Should we care though?)

Swirly nostalgia, anyone?

from Candy Gurus
by Jonny June 21, 2022 at 08:00AM

That Time an Entire French Town Went Insane

The town of Pont-Saint-Esprit lies 30 kilometres northwest of Avignon, in the Gard department of Southern France. Founded in the fifth century, the town, site of a famous famous bridge over the Rhône river built in 1309, has had a long and eventful history. In the 9th Century legendary Frankish ruler Charles Martel defeated an army of Moors nearby, while in 13th Century the town was sacked by Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse. During the Nazi occupation of 1940-1945, the German SS established an interrogation centre in the town citadel where they tortured and executed thousands of members of the French Resistance, dumping their bodies in the river. The town was bombed by Allied aircraft in August 1944 and partially destroyed as American troops fought their way through Southern France. By the early 1950s, however, peace had returned to Pont-Saint-Esprit, and life in the sleepy medieval town of 4,500 carried on much as it had for centuries, the townsfolk working in the nearby vineyards or enjoying a game of boules or a glass of pastis liqueur in their time off. But one August day in 1951, this idyllic calm was shattered as the town was struck by one of the strangest and most disturbing medical incidents in modern history, a near-apocalyptic event that continues to baffle experts to this day and spawn endless conspiracy theories. This is the story of how an entire French town suddenly went mad.

Thursday, August 15, 1951 was a day like any other in Pont-Saint-Esprit, with the townsfolk enjoying the warm summer weather and looking forward to the upcoming September holiday. The only major disturbance that morning was a strike by the workers of the local bottle factory, which produced bottles for the famous Perrier brand of mineral water. But then, around 10AM, a farmer staggered into the office of local physician Dr. Hadar Gabbai, frantically waving his arms and screaming that he was being attacked by a swarm of bees. Soon more people burst through the door, complaining of equally bizarre afflictions like being covered in venomous snakes. By nightfall the office had been inundated by no fewer than 75 frantic patients, whom Dr. Gabbai and his staff rushed off to the local hospital. When this quickly filled up, Gabbai and his staff were forced to lock up 22 patients in a nearby barn. But the worst was yet to come.

The next morning the streets of Pont-Saint-Esprit were like a scene out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Postman Leon Armunier was doing his daily rounds when he was suddenly struck by violent nausea and hallucinations:

“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms.”

 Elsewhere, a man sprinted down the street, screaming that he was being chased by bandits with donkey ears. Another man, convinced he was a circus tightrope walker, proceeded to walk along the cables of a nearby suspension bridge. Another jumped into the Rhône river to escape the snakes he believed were gnawing his brain and guts, while yet another, convinced he was a dragonfly, leaped from a window, broke both legs, and kept running. The madness seemed to affect everyone – young and old, men and women, adults and children, rich and poor – alike. As the New York Times later reported:

“The villagers went into convulsions aggravated in many cases by hallucinations. A little girl thought she was being eaten by tigers. A powerful vineyard worker had the same delusion! He fought wildly, flinging crockery at the imaginary beast, smashing chairs against the wall…One woman believed that her children had been slaughtered by the butcher to be made into sausage. Another saw the repeated vision of a doctor whose head was a grinning skull…”

Not even animals were spared, with one dog chewing stones until all its teeth were broken. But not everyone’s experience was so frightening. Some townsfolk reported hearing heavenly choruses or brilliant colours, while the head of the local farmers’ co-op began composing hundreds of pages of poetry. Many others suffered milder but equally puzzling symptoms including nausea, vomiting, extreme insomnia, hot and cold flashes, tetanus-like spasms, coldness in the hands and feet, widened pupils, and a strange musty odour likened to the smell of dead mice.

Meanwhile, local doctors scrambled to deal with the deluge of psychotic patients literally breaking down their doors. Postman Leon Armunier was thrown in a straitjacket, while other patients were lashed to beds with ropes, bedsheets, and – when these ran out – horse bridles. However, any attempt at restraint simply worsened the patients’ agitation, and many managed to break loose and escape, as Leon Armunier later recalled:

“Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly… screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down… the noise was terrible. I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again.”

For many of the afflicted these symptoms persisted for over a week. By the time the dust had settled, nearly 300 villagers had been struck down by this mysterious plague, with 30 being committed to asylums long-term and at least 5 dying. Leon Armunier spent ten days in a coma, then another four months recovering in a hospice. But even then he was unable to continue working and suffered violent panic attacks in confined spaces.

The events of August 15, 1951 left a lasting impression on the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, and few who witnessed the frightening scenes that day ever forgot them. Dr Gabbai later stated it was as if the apocalypse had struck the town. But what on earth could have caused a sleepy French town to suddenly go stark-raving mad? A government inquiry was launched soon after the outbreak, and the investigators quickly determined the culprit to be an old enemy which had not been seen in France for more than a century: Saint Anthony’s Fire.

Better known as ergotism, Saint Anthony’s Fire is caused by Claviceps purpurea or ergot fungus, a black mould that grows on the head of cereals like wheat, barley, and rye. Ergot contains a variety of potent alkaloids including ergotamine, a close relative of the drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide or LSD. Indeed, it was from ergot fungus that Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman first purified LSD in 1938. In addition to being powerful hallucinogens, ergotamine and similar compounds found in ergot can induce violent convulsions and constrict blood flow to the extremities, leading to coldness and numbness in the hands and feet and – in extreme cases – gangrene. Known since biblical times, periodic outbreaks of ergotism have plagued agrarian communities throughout recorded history – especially following wet summers – and are believed to be at least partially responsible for many of the witchcraft panics of the early modern period. During the Middle Ages the condition was given the name Saint Anthony’s Fire after the Monks of Saint Anthony, who proved especially successful at treating the affliction. In France, however, the phenomenon is more commonly known as pain maudit or “cursed bread.”

But while the summer of 1951 had been unusually wet and the symptoms witnessed in Pont-Saint-Esprit seemed to line up with those of ergotism, the government investigators were still perplexed. Ergotism belonged to a more primitive age of subsistence farming, the last outbreak in France having struck all the way back in 1816. How could such an old disease have returned in an industrialized 20th Century nation? Ironically, it was soon discovered that France’s supposedly modern grain distribution system was largely responsible for allowing the outbreak to occur. During the Second World War, the collaborationist Vichy Government which administered the South of France created the Union Meuniere, a socialist-style central grain board that controlled the production and distribution of flour throughout the country. While intended to ensure that all regions of the country received a guaranteed supply of flour, the Union was widely disliked by bakers, who now no longer had any control over the source and quality of the flour they received. The distribution system also meant that bad wheat crops which would previously have triggered localized outbreaks could now cause trouble much further afield.

Tracing the path of the contaminated flour from the distribution centre in Nimes to Pont-Saint-Esprit, investigators discovered that a smaller outbreak had struck the nearby town of Conneaux a week before. On August 9, several bakeries in Conneaux and surrounding villages received their allotted shipment of flour from the Union Meuniere. While this flour was often of poor quality, consisting largely of surplus from more grain-rich regions, this particular batch was worse than most, forming a grey, slimy dough that smelled vaguely of fuel oil. Worse still, customers who ate the bread began falling violently ill, suffering from nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, cold and numbness in the extremities, and insomnia. The bakers immediately complained to distribution centre in Nimes, while the mayor of the village of Saint-Génies-de-Comolas forbade all bakeries from using the tainted flour and filed his own complaint with the Union. The local Union distributor, Jean Bousquet [“Zhah Boo-skay”], explained that the batch had come from the bottom of farmers’ silos and that better flour would be coming once the summer crops had been collected. But no further action was forthcoming, and both Bousquet and the Union ultimately proved powerless to prevent the events of August 15. Bags from the same tainted batch reached Pont-Saint-Esprit the next week, with most cases of poisoning being traced to the high street bakery owned by one Monsieur Roche Briand.

But while the case for ergotism seemed cut-and-dry and the Government quickly wrapped up its investigation, not all were convinced by this explanation. The Union Meuniere, for example, vehemently denied that ergot fungus was to blame, arguing that French flour always contained some ergot and that this problem had never cropped up before. Union president Pierre Jacob even volunteered to eat ergot-tainted flour in front of a panel of experts – though it is not known whether he ever followed through on this promise. However, an American laboratory did feed a group of volunteers ergot-tainted bread and found that their symptoms did not match those seen in Pont-Saint-Esprit. Indeed, according to American Professor Steven Kaplan, an expert on French food history, the Pont-Saint-Esprit outbreak does not fit the profile of ergotism. A batch of contaminated flour, he argues, would have affected far more than just a handful of local bakeries.

Such doubts regarding the official government explanation led to widespread speculation as to the real cause of the outbreak. The townsfolk variously theorized the police had poisoned their food and drink to put down the bottle factory strike or curb political unrest, or that a local priest had placed a curse on the town. More serious theories pointed to contamination by a mercury-based pesticide called Panogen used on rye crops or by solvents used to clean rail cars. While these latter theories were later disproven, the French Government nonetheless used them to divert blame away from the Union Meunieure and onto the privately-owned rail transport system. According to Kaplan, the most likely culprit is bleaching agents used to whiten the flour. At the time American-style white bread was just starting to become popular in France, and the bleaching process was relatively new and unregulated. In the end, subsequent government investigations failed to turn up any conclusive evidence, and in 1978 all inquiries into the incident were dropped. While Kaplan criticizes the French government for botching its investigation, former Post-Saint-Esprit mayor Roger Castillon points out the very different conditions in 1950s France:

“Anyone who says that the investigation was not serious is unable to imagine what things were like in 1951. The procedures weren’t orderly, and what today seems to be negligence was then accepted practice. It’s true that today we don’t have the possibility to check the findings, but I want to think that no malice was involved. It’s also true that if something like that were to happen today, at least one cabinet minister would come here. The mayor didn’t get any help at the time; I think that even the governor of the province didn’t show up. There was a feeling of isolation and avoidance. There was no Facebook or Twitter then, so it was easier to ignore certain topics, if not to silence them altogether.”

 Unfortunately, the air of uncertainty surrounding Pont-Saint-Esprit has made the mass poisoning a magnet for conspiracy theories, and some now believe that the incident was not, in fact, a natural phenomenon but rather the result of a top-secret CIA experiment.

In 2009, American investigative journalist Hank Albarelli was researching the mysterious death of Frank Olson, a bacteriological warfare expert at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who was involved in the CIA’s top-secret Project Artichoke – later known as MKULTRA. MKULTRA was an effort to develop advanced methods for mind control and interrogation using techniques such as electroshock therapy and drugs like heroin, mescaline, and LSD. Suspected of being a security risk, on November 17, 1953 Olson was secretly drugged by his colleagues at an MKULTRA retreat at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. In the wake of the drugging, Olson became agitated and paranoid, attempting to resign from his post at Fort Detrick and confessing to his family “I’ve made a terrible mistake.” 10 days later, Olson plummeted to his death from his 10th-storey room at the Statler Hotel in New York City. Whether he committed suicide or was murdered remains a mystery to this day.

In the course of his research, Hank Albarelli claimed to have stumbled upon a CIA document bearing the following heading:

“Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

Here, “Belin” refers to David Belin, head of the Rockefeller Commission formed by the White House in 1975 to investigate alleged abuses carried out by the CIA. Albarelli also claimed to have uncovered a 1949 Army report from Edgewood Arsenal revealing that field experiments on LSD as a potential chemical weapon were being actively planned, as well as a classified CIA report from 1954. In this document, an unnamed CIA agent recounts a conversation with a representative from the Swiss chemical company Sandoz, one of the only firms at the time synthesizing LSD. According to the agent, after a few drinks the representative suddenly blurted:

“The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all… It was not grain ergot.” 

 More disturbing still, most of the scientists who carried out the investigation of the Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning were from Sandoz, and it was they who eventually fingered ergotism as the culprit. Based on this evidence, Alberelli concluded that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was the result of a CIA field experiment on the effectiveness of LSD as a chemical warfare agent. According to Albarelli, the test was code-named “Operation Span” – a reference to the bridge which gives the town its name – and began with an attempt to dust the town from the air with LSD powder. When this proved ineffective, the CIA moved on to slipping the drug into local foodstuffs – including bread. Similar experiments, Albarelli claims, were conducted on unsuspecting civilians around the world, including in Canada, the UK, Morocco, Iraq, Vietnam, the Belgian Congo, Haiti, and British Guiana. In his bestselling 2009 A Terrible Mistake, Albarelli further makes the connection between the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident and the mysterious death of Frank Olson:

“Olson wanted out, he wanted to sever his employment with the army and the CIA. And he started to open his mouth a bit too much. One of the experiments he talked about was Pont-Saint-Esprit and the fact that he had participated in the experiment.”

But not everyone is convinced by Albarelli’s arguments. Steve Kaplan, for instance, has called the CIA experiment theory “harebrained” and entirely lacking in credible evidence. For one thing, the symptoms experienced by the Pont-Saint-Esprit residents do not match those of LSD poisoning. Whereas refined LSD takes effect within minutes, for most of the afflicted there was a 6-48 hour delay between the consumption of the contaminated bread and the onset of symptoms. Nor does LSD produce the digestive disturbances so characteristic of the outbreak. Furthermore, the technology to produce vast quantities of aerosolized LSD did not exist at the time, nor could LSD have survived the extreme temperatures of a baker’s oven – though Albarelli counters that the drug could have been added after the bread was baked. Kaplan’s most compelling counter-argument, however, is:

“…why would they choose the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the US Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense.”

 Albarelli’s claims notwithstanding, the most likely explanation for Pont-Saint-Esprit being mentioned in MKULTRA documents is as a natural example of a mass hallucinogenic poisoning that could serve as a model for a deliberate chemical warfare attack.

Today Pont-Saint-Esprit is at peace once again, the town of 10,000 people little changed save for the nearby nuclear power station which now employs most of its residents. But deep scars run beneath its idyllic facade, and while we may never know just what caused the 1951 outbreak, so long as there are those living who remember it, the townsfolk will continue to be haunted by the day the apocalypse came to Pont-Saint-Esprit.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• The First Person to Use the Temporary Insanity Defense was a Congressman Who Murdered the Son of the Composer of “The Star Spangled Banner”
• Why We Call Someone Who is Insane a “Basket Case”
• The Badassary of Dorothy Lawrence
• The City of Fright

Expand for References

Thomson, Mike, Pont-Saint-Esprit Poisoning: Did the CIA Spread LSD? BBC News, August 23, 2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-10996838

 

Gabbai, Lisbonne, Pourquier, Ergot Poisoning at Pont St. Esprit, British Medical Journal, September 15, 1951, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2069953/?page=2

 

CIA Spiked Baguettes With LSD, New Evidence Suggests, Radio France Internationale, March 13, 2010, https://www.rfi.fr/en/americas/20100312-cia-spiked-baguettes-lsd-new-evidence-suggests

 

Jacobson, Jonathan, What Drove an Entire French Town Was on a Summer Day in 1951, Harretz, March 9, 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-what-drove-an-entire-french-town-mad-on-a-summer-day-in-1951-1.7001662

 

Reilly, Lucas, When the Village of Pont-Saint-Esprit Went Temporarily Mad, Mental Floss, September 24, 2018, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/558020/pont-saint-esprit-france-1951-bread-poisoning-mass-hallucinations

 

Josset, Christophe, Did the CIA Poison a French Town With LSD? France 24, March 12, 2012, https://ift.tt/S8zTCiW

 

Fuller, John, The Day of St. Anthony’s Fire, Signet, 1968, https://www.samorini.it/doc1/alt_aut/ek/fuller.pdf

 

Blume, Mary, France’s Unsolved Mystery of the Poisoned Bread, The New York Times, July 23, 2008, https://ift.tt/qKA4nMt

The post That Time an Entire French Town Went Insane appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - June 20, 2022 at 10:05PM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
-

That Time a Group of Psychiatrists Pretended to be Mentally Ill to Prove a Point

In 1972, eight people presented themselves to 12 psychiatric hospitals across the United States. They had seemingly nothing in common save for a very specific set of symptoms, with all eight reporting hearing voices saying a single word: “thud,” “empty,” or “hollow.” They were all immediately admitted, seven being diagnosed with schizophrenia and one with manic depression. Following admission, all eight patients suddenly stopped hearing the voices and reported feeling entirely normal. Nonetheless, they remained hospitalized for between 7 and 52 days, being treated with a variety of antipsychotic drugs before finally being released with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission.” It was, at its face, little more than a curious coincidence. But in January 1973 an article appeared in the journal Science revealing that the eight patients were not who they appeared to be. In fact, they weren’t patients at all, but members of a secret study organized psychiatrist David Rosenhan of Stanford University. The results of that study, now known as the Rosenhan Experiment, would shake the psychiatric establishment to its very core.

The Rosenhan Experiment was inspired by the work of R.D. Liang, Thomas Szasz, Erving Goffman, and other leading figures of the anti-psychiatry movement. These men were concerned by the dehumanizing effects of psychiatric diagnosis and institutionalization, and the use of psychiatry as a tool of social and political repression. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, East Germany, and other communist states, forcible commitment to psychiatric hospitals was commonly used to silence political dissidents. Thomas Szasz in particular focused on the use of psychiatric labels in Western countries as a means of enforcing societal norms, citing such examples as “drapetomania”, the supposed “mental illness” that caused slaves to flee captivity; “hysteria,” the catchall diagnosis for misbehaving women; and the fact that homosexuality was officially categorized as a mental illness until 1974.

David Rosenhan believed that mistaken or overzealous diagnoses – indeed, the very act of labelling psychiatric disorders – could have serious detrimental effects at the personal and community level, due to the persistent stigma associated with mental illness. As he wrote in his famous 1973 article, On Being Sane in Insane Places: 

 “The term “mental illness” is of recent origin.  It was coined by people who were humane [and] wanted very much to raise the station [of] the psychologically disturbed from that of witches and “crazies” to one that was akin to the physically ill…but while treatment has improved, it is doubtful that people really regard the mentally ill in the same way that they view the physically ill.  A broken leg is something one recovers from, but mental illness allegedly endures forever.  A broken leg does not threaten the observer, but a crazy schizophrenic?  [Attitudes] toward the mentally ill are characterized by fear, hostility, aloofness, suspicion, and dread.  The mentally ill are society’s lepers.”

“A psychiatric label has a life and an influence of its own.  Once the impression has been formed that the patient is schizophrenic, the expectation is that he will continue to be schizophrenic…such labels, conferred by mental health professionals, are as influential on the patient as they are on his relatives and friends, and it should not surprise anyone that the diagnosis acts on all of them as a self-fulfilling prophecy. A diagnosis of cancer that has been found to be in error is cause for celebration.  But psychiatric diagnoses are rarely found to be in error.  The label sticks, a mark of inadequacy forever.”

Due to these potentially harmful effects, Rosenhan became concerned about the objective reliability of psychiatric diagnoses – that is, the ability of psychiatrists to tell the sane from the insane. The seed of the idea that would become the Rosenhan Experiment was planted in 1969 when Rosenhan was teaching psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. When his students complained that the course was too abstract, Rosenhan suggested that they check themselves into the nearby Haverford State Hospital and interact with real people suffering from schizophrenia. Just to be safe, however, Rosenhan decided to check himself in first. He emerged nine days later utterly traumatized by the experience, and refused to subject his students to the same ordeal. However, he soon began thinking of an experiment to expose the deficiencies of the mental health system – an experiment he would finally carry out three years later.

Rosenhan’s  team of eight test subjects, whom he called “pseudopatients,” consisted of five men and three women and included a graduate student, a paediatrician, a painter, a housewife, three psychologists, and Rosenhan himself. The 12 hospitals they were to infiltrate were similarly diverse, ranging from underfunded, understaffed state institutions to exclusive private hospitals. So their commitment would not result in social or professional embarrassment, the pseudopatients were given false names and professions, but were otherwise not to change or conceal any other details of their lives or personalities. They were instructed to present themselves to their assigned hospitals with a single symptom: hearing a voice saying “thud,” “empty,” or “hollow.” These words were selected due to their evocation of an “existential psychosis,” a hypothetical disorder in which a patient’s hallucinations reveal an inner feeling of hollowness and meaninglessness. As not a single case of existential psychosis had ever been reported, Rosenhan believed this might serve as a clue to hospital psychiatrists that the pseudopatients were feigning their illnesses.

Upon being admitted, the pseudopatients were to cease reporting any symptoms and act normally as they would outside the hospital. Their goal would then be to secure their release by convincing the staff of their sanity – but without revealing their involvement in the experiment.

As expected, Rosenhan and the other pseudopatients were immediately admitted to their respective hospitals and given diagnoses of schizophrenia and manic depression. But to their surprise, the immediate cessation of symptoms and resumption of “normal” behaviour did nothing to alter these diagnoses – or arouse the staff’s suspicion. On the contrary, the pseudopatients found their every behaviour on the ward framed by the staff as a manifestation of their supposed mental illness. For example, many pseudopatients took extensive notes on their fellow patients and the hospital staff, an activity which the doctors clinically described as “patient engaged in writing behaviour.”  Not once, however, did a staff member enquire as to the actual nature of the patient’s writing. On another occasion:

“One psychiatrist pointed to a group of patients who were sitting outside the cafeteria entrance half an hour before lunchtime.  To a group of young residents he indicated that such behaviour was characteristic of the oral-acquisitive nature of the syndrome.  It seemed not to occur to him that there were very few things to anticipate in a psychiatric hospital besides eating.”

Normal displays of anger were likewise interpreted as symptoms of mental illness, while one pseudopatient’s fluctuating – though entirely normal – relationship with his parents was interpreted in his case file as being intrinsically tied to his psychosis. Yet while all patient reports indicate that the pseudo patients were “friendly,” “cooperative,” and “exhibited no abnormal indications,” at no point did any of the staff suspect that they were not, in fact, mentally ill. But one group very often did see through the charade: the other patients. Many pseudopatients described other patients accusing them of being journalists reporting on the hospital, and where records were available a full 35 of 118 patients on the ward reported similar suspicions. Rosenhan attributed the doctors’ inability to detect the pseudopatients’ deception to:

“… the fact that physicians operate with a strong bias toward what statisticians call the Type 2 error.  This is to say that physicians are more inclined to call a healthy person sick (a false positive, Type 2) than a sick person healthy (a false negative, Type 1).  The reasons for this are not hard to find:  it is clearly more dangerous to misdiagnose illness than health.  Better to err on the side of caution, to suspect illness even among the healthy.”

Thus, despite acting as “normally” as possible, the patients continued to receive regular psychiatric treatment, being collectively administered over 2100 pills which they pocketed and flushed down the toilet.

In addition to over-analysis and extreme boredom, Rosenhan and the others experienced first-hand the extreme dehumanization and abuse common to life inside a psychiatric hospital:

“The patient is deprived of many of his legal rights by dint of his psychiatric commitment.  He is shorn of credibility by virtue of his psychiatric label.  His freedom of movement is restricted.  He cannot initiate contact with the staff, but may only respond to such overtures as they make.  Personal privacy is minimal.  Patient quarters and possessions can be entered and examined by any staff member, for whatever reason.  His personal hygiene and waste evacuation are often monitored.  The water closets have no doors.”

 “At times, depersonalization reached such proportions that pseudopatients had the sense that they were invisible, or at least unworthy of account. On the ward, attendants delivered verbal and occasionally serious physical abuse to patients in the presence of others (the pseudopatients) who were writing it all down.  Abusive behaviour, on the other hand, terminated quite abruptly when other staff members were known to be coming.  Staff are credible witnesses.  Patients are not.”

 “During my own experience, one patient was beaten in the presence of other patients for having approached an attendant and told him, “I like you.”  Occasionally, punishment meted out to patients for misdemeanors seemed so excessive that it could not be justified by the most rational interpretations of  psychiatric cannon.  Tempers were often short.  A patient who had not heard a call for medication would be roundly excoriated, and the morning attendants would often wake patients with things like, “Come on, you m_ _ _ _ _ f _ _ _ _ _ s, out of bed!””

 While Rosenhan acknowledged the role of inadequate funds and understaffing in precipitating such abuses, this was not the whole story. After all, similar behaviour occurred even in well-funded private hospitals. Instead, Rosenhan attributed the extreme depersonalization of psychiatric patients to the severe lack of interaction between patients and staff. According to the pseudopatients’ notes, much of the staff’s time was spent inside a glass-walled enclosure known as “the cage,” with attendants spending only 11% of their shifts interacting with patients. Nurses were even less available, briefly emerging only 11 times per shift, and physicians scarcer still, emerging 9 times per shift.

“That [these attitudes] affect the professionals…who treat and deal with the mentally ill is more disconcerting, both because such attitudes are self-evidently pernicious and because they are unwitting.  Most mental health professionals would insist that they are sympathetic toward the mentally ill, that they are neither avoidant nor hostile.  But it is more likely that an exquisite ambivalence characterizes their relations with psychiatric patients, such that their avowed impulses are only part of their entire attitude.  Negative attitudes are there too and can easily be detected.  Such attitudes should not surprise us.  They are the natural offspring of the labels patients wear and the places in which they are found.”  

When Rosenhan and the others were finally released, they had spent an average of 19 days in hospital. The diagnostic Catch-22 behind their release was later described by Rosenhan in an interview with the BBC:

“I told friends, I told my family: “I can get out when I can get out. That’s all. I’ll be there for a couple of days and I’ll get out.” Nobody knew I’d be there for two months … The only way out was to point out that the psychiatrists are correct. They had said I was insane, “I am insane; but I am getting better.” That was an affirmation of their view of me.  If I was to be discharged, I must naturally be “in remission”; but I was not sane, nor, in the institution’s view, had I ever been sane.”

 On learning of Rosenhan’s deception, the infiltrated hospitals challenged Rosenhan to send more pseudopatients, confident in the ability of their doctors to spot them. Rosenhan agreed, even sending a score sheet with a 10-point scale on which doctors could grade their suspicion of a particular patient. Over the next several months the hospitals scrutinized a total of 193 newly-admitted patients, confidently pronouncing 41 of them to be impostors. But then, to their utter embarrassment, Rosenhan dropped a bombshell: he hadn’t sent any.

When in Rosenhan’s article appeared in Science in January 1973, it sent shockwaves through the psychiatric community. His results appeared to undermine the last great revolution in psychiatric diagnosis: the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. Created in 1952, the DSM was intended to replace the often arbitrary and esoteric diagnoses of the psychoanalytic tradition with diagnostic criteria based on real-world statistics and clear, observable symptoms. No longer would a patient be diagnosed on the basis of a single symptom or their family history; in order to be diagnosed with a given disorder, a patient had to simultaneously display a certain number of symptoms statistically associated with that disorder. While this system was meant to drastically improve the reliability and usefulness of psychiatric diagnoses, the Rosenhan Experiment revealed that in practice, psychiatric labels were just as arbitrary – and harmful – as ever. As Rosenhan explained in his article:

Whenever the ratio of what is known to what needs to be known approaches zero, we tend to invent “knowledge” and assume that we understand more than we actually do.  We seem unable to acknowledge that we simply don’t know.  The needs for diagnosis and remediation of behavioural and emotional problems are enormous.  But rather than acknowledge that we are just embarking on understanding, we continue to label patients “schizophrenic,” “manic-depressive,” and “insane,” as if in those words we captured the essence of understanding.  The facts of the matter are that we have known for a long time that diagnoses are often not useful or reliable, but we have nevertheless continued to use them.  We now know that we cannot distinguish sanity from insanity.  It is depressing to consider how that information will be used.”  

 As a remedy, Rosenhan advocated a move away from the traditional institutional model of psychiatric care and towards:

“…[the] proliferation of community mental health facilities, of crisis intervention centers, of the human potential movement, and of behaviour therapies that, for all of their own problems, tend to avoid psychiatric labels, to focus on specific problems and behaviours, and to retain the individual in a relatively non-pejorative environment.” 

 The Rosenhan Experiment was highly influential, and helped to further speed  the de-institutionalization movement started by the introduction of antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s. By the end of the 1980s most of the large State Hospitals had been emptied and shuttered, with the majority of patients being treated in community health centres or psychiatric wards in regular hospitals.

Yet despite its fame and influence, the Rosenhan Experiment soon drew vehement criticism for its allegedly manipulative and unscientific methodology. In the most damning of these critiques, published in Nature in 1975, Robert Spitzer outright dismisses the Rosenhan Experiment as pseudoscience, arguing that the study was designed in such a manner as to invariably confirm Rosenhan’s own preconceptions. In particular, Spitzer points out that despite Rosenhan’s claims,

“The pseudopatients did not behave normally in the hospital. Had their behaviour been normal, they would have walked to the nurses’ station and said ‘Look, I am a normal person who tried to see if I could get into the hospital by behaving in a crazy way or saying crazy things. It worked and I was admitted to the hospital, but now I would like to be discharged from the hospital.””

In other words, as the pseudopatients’ behaviour was deliberately intended to fool the hospital staff, it is hardly surprising that they succeeded. After all, as Spitzer points out, aside from cases of malingering – wherein a patient pretends to be ill in order to, for example, score narcotic drugs – there is little reason for doctors to doubt the authenticity of a patient’s reported symptoms. Thus, the fact that the hospital staff did not suspect the pseudopatients of feigning their illnesses says little about the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis:

“If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behavior of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labeled and treated me as having a bleeding peptic ulcer, I doubt that I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.”

Spitzer goes on to dismantle nearly all Rosenhan’s interpretations of the staff’s behaviour, pointing out, for example, that nurses’ notes like  the infamous “engages in writing behaviour” are not diagnostic but instead used to update other staff on a patient’s daily activities. He also points out that the term “in remission” is almost never used to classify schizophrenic patients upon discharge, indicating that the hospital staff had in fact acknowledged that the pseudopatients were no longer suffering from any detectable mental illness. Indeed, Spitzer challenges Rosenhan’s foundational assertion that “schizophrenia” is a permanent, lifelong diagnosis, pointing out that the DSM acknowledges that the disorder can – and often does – go away, never to return. And while acknowledging that other symptoms typically present alongside hallucinations, he concludes:

“I would hope that if I had been one of the 12 psychiatrists presented with such a patient, I would have been struck by the lack of other signs of the disorder, but I am rather sure that having no reason to doubt the authenticity of the patients’ claim of auditory hallucinations, I also would have been fooled into noting schizophrenia as the most likely diagnosis.”

 More recently, in her 2019 book The Great Pretender, author Susannah Cahalan claims that the little data Rosenhan presents in his 1973 article conflicts with that in his original notes, with key statistics such as the length of pseudopatients’ stays or the number of patients at each hospital being altered in the final publication. In addition, despite an extensive search, she was unable to track down any of the original pseudopatients, leading her to suspect that they had, in fact, been invented by Rosenhan.

And so it is that the Rosenhan Experiment joins the pantheon of  extremely influential but fundamentally flawed psychological studies, along with the likes of the Milgram Obedience Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Robber’s Cave Experiment. Yet for all its flaws, it cannot be denied that Rosenhan’s stunt was instrumental in bringing about a more humane and personal era of mental healthcare. And the fear of institutionalization and dehumanization, perhaps best expressed by evolutionary biologist T.H. Huxley in 1893, are still with us to this day:

“One of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.”

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

• Is Genuine Multiple Personality Disorder as Depicted in Movies Actually a Thing or a Hollywood Invention?
• Who Invented Shock Therapy, and How Does It Work?
• Russell E. Train Africana Collection, Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
• How Exactly Do You Prove You’re Alive if You’re Accidentally Declared Dead?

Expand for References

 

Rosenhan, David, On Being Sane in Insane Places, https://web.archive.org/web/20041117175255/http://web.cocc.edu/lminorevans/on_being_sane_in_insane_places.htm

 

Myers, David, Psychology, Worth Publishers, NY, 2004

 

Abbott, Alison, On the Troubling Trail of Psychiatry’s Pseudopatients Stunt, Nature, October 29, 2019, https://ift.tt/w587SRg

 

Spitzer, Robert, Pseudoscience in Science, Logic in Remission, and Psychiatric Diagnosis: A Critique of Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places”, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1975, Vol.84, No. 5, 442-452, https://ift.tt/fXuwnmb

The post That Time a Group of Psychiatrists Pretended to be Mentally Ill to Prove a Point appeared first on Today I Found Out.

from Today I Found Out
by Gilles Messier - June 20, 2022 at 10:01PM
Article provided by the producers of one of our Favorite YouTube Channels!
-