I recently finished the Manhunt: Unabomber miniseries, and I mostly liked it a lot. I’m fascinated by the story and there have been other excellent explorations of the infamous investigation so I was ambivalent about how this one would come off. Getting really picky there are moments of writing and acting — mostly with supporting female characters — that are sometimes laughingly awkward and unbelievable. That said, the procedural aspects of the show are fascinating and I was especially excited that they included the actual C.I.A. mind-control experiments that Ted Kaczynski actually endured while a teenage prodigy at Harvard. Here’s a post from the Boing Boing site with the word…
When mass murderer Ted Kaczynski was a 16-year-old undergraduate student at Harvard, he took part in a behavioral engineering project run by the CIA. It was part of the US government’s illegal MKUltra project, which ruined the lives of many innocent and unwitting test subjects around the world.
The study was run by Dr. Henry Murray, who had each of his 22 subjects write an essay detailing their dreams and aspirations. The students were then taken to a room where electrodes were attached to them to monitor their vitals as they were subjected to extremely personal, stressful, and brutal critiques about the essays they had written. Following the psychological attacks, the participants were forced to watch the videos of themselves being verbally and psychologically assaulted multiple times. Kaczynski is claimed to have had the worst physiological reaction to being interrogated. These experiments, paired with his lack of social skills and memories of being bullied as a child, caused Kaczynski to suffer from horrible nightmares that eventually drove him to move into isolation outside Lincoln, Montana.
The June 2000 issue of The Atlantic has a good, very long, article about this terrible experiment.
You can watch Manhunt: Unabomber on Netflix. Here’s a “Dark Matters” segment about how the C.I.A. was responsible for the crimes of The Unabomber…
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