US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

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US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby justdrew » Wed Feb 17, 2010 4:59 pm

Here's an interesting case...
don't know anything about this site, but... well, maybe it's just Russian propaganda, but maybe there's something to it...
links and footnotes at original

French Government Queries USA re 1950’s Secret LSD Experiment
10.02.10

A major diplomatic and political scandal is erupting that could have significant import for French-American relations. It involves new research into the mysterious outbreak of “mass insanity” in a village in southern France that affected some 500 people and resulted in five deaths.

According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security).i According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France.

The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five, two by suicide. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold or to organic mercury poisoning.

Scientists with the highly respected British Medical Journal were quickly drawn in September 1951 to what it dubbed the “outbreak of poisoning.” After initial thoughts that the cause was bread infection, they concluded that mold could not explain the event or the afflictions that struck hundreds of people in the village.ii

Scientists dispatched to the scene from the Sandoz Chemical company in nearby Basle, Switzerland also stated that the mold was the cause, but many other experts disagreed with them.

Over time the mystery of the outbreak only deepened and no answers were found to be satisfactory. A 2008 book about the history of bread published in France by Professor Steven Kaplan emphasizes that the “mystery remains unsolved” and at the time, still continued to perplex scientists.iii

New revelations

A book just released in the United States, detailing exhaustive interviews with now-retired US intelligence personnel who had direct knowledge of the 1951 French events, charges that the until-now unexplained “mass insanity” in the remote village were, rather, a top-secret CIA experiment conducted under the code-name Operation Span. Operation Span was a part of Project MK/NAOMI, itself an adjunct project to the more notorious Project MK/ULTRA, as in “ultra-top secret.”

The book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. documents that the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland.iv

Albarelli notes that the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research.

A French newspaper at the time of the bizarre events wrote, “It is neither Shakespeare nor Edgar Poe. It is, alas, the sad reality all around Pont-St.-Esprit and its environs, where terrifying scenes of hallucinations are taking place. They are scenes straight out of the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows.” The US Time magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce was closely tied to CIA propaganda activities in the 1950’s wrote, “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit’s hospital reported four attempts at suicide.”

As Albarelli notes, a Department of Justice website on the dangers of LSD states that in the early 1950s, “the Sandoz Chemical Company went as far as promoting LSD as a potential secret chemical warfare weapon to the US Government. Their main selling point in this was that a small amount in a main water supply or sprayed in the air could disorient and turn psychotic an entire company of soldiers leaving them harmless and unable to fight.”

He claims that the CIA entertained a number of proposals from American scientists concerning placing a large amount of LSD into the reservoir of a medium-to-large city, but, according to former agency officials, “the experiment was never approved due to the unexpected number of deaths during the operation in France.”

Indeed, Albarelli has discovered once secret FBI documents that reveal that the Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, a year prior to the Pont St. Esprit experiment, had targeted New York City’s subway system for a similar experiment. States an August 1950 bureau memo, “[The] BW [biological warfare] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September, 1950, have been indefinitely postponed.” The memo goes on to cite FBI concerns about “poisoning of food plants” and the “poisoning of the water supply” of large cities in the U.S. v

In an interview with this author, Albarelli described how he developed the shocking details of the CIA secret drug programs: “My first tip-off was a 1954 CIA document that detailed an encounter between an official of the Sandoz chemical company (the producers of LSD) and a CIA official in which ‘the secret of Pont St. Esprit’ was referenced. The Sandoz official went on to say, ‘It was not the ergot at all.’" vi

Albarelli says he then obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a partially redacted 1955 CIA report entitled, A CIA Study of LSD-25. “That seemingly comprehensive report contained detailed information on the manufacture, supply, and use of LSD and LSD-type products worldwide. However, nearly its entire section on France and Pont St. Esprit were blacked out.” vii Albarelli requested an un-redacted copy but CIA officials refused to provide one.

He continued, “Then I came across a letter written by a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who was working secretly for the CIA; this was George Hunter White, who ran the CIAs New York City safe house in 1951-1954. Whites letter referenced the Pont St. Esprit experiment. At that point, 5 years into my investigation, I began interviewing former Army biochemists who became very evasive and refused to talk about their work in France. Finally two former intelligence employees confirmed the experiment took place under the auspices of the Armys Special Operations Division and with CIA funding.” viii

Lastly, Albarelli explained, “I was given an undated White House document that was part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. The document contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the ‘Pont St. Esprit incident,’ linking the former OSS head of secret research projects and the chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division,” Said Albarelli. “This, along with one other document, comprised the smoking gun.” ix

In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Albarelli claims, the Army drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between the years 1953 and 1965, and, with the CIA, experimented widely with LSD and other drugs through secret contracts with over 325 colleges, universities and research institutions in the U.S., Canada and Europe, involving about 2,500 additional subjects, many of them hospital patients and college students.

In 2005, Scott Shane, a reporter with the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote, “The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division.” Asked formally for such records, the Army replied they “could find none.” In 1973 the CIA destroyed all of its records on MKNAOMI and its work with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division. When Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations officer to speak about the division’s projects in general, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr. said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified—if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.” x

Other CIA drug projects

In 1959, American writer, Ken Kesey, while a student at Stanford University volunteered to take part in the CIA-financed Project MK/ULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people. Kesey wrote detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs during the Project MK/ULTRA study. Keseys role as a medical guinea pig reportedly inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest in 1962.xi

From his days as a psychology graduate student, Harvard’s infamous LSD guru, Dr. Timothy Leary, whose motto to the 1968 “Flower Power” generation was “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!,” was associated with the CIA’s Cord Meyer. Leary devised a special personality test, The Leary, used by the CIA to test potential employees and worked with Frank Barron, a CIA employee and former psychology classmate of Leary’s, at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, and later with Barron’s Psychedelic Drug Research Center at Harvard. These are but two of the more known and detailed instances linking the CIA with LSD projects after the alleged French experiments.xii

According to an official with the DGSE, who declined to be identified, “If the details of this book’s revelations prove to be true, it will be very upsetting for the people of Pont-St.-Esprit, as well as all French citizens. That agencies of the United States government would deliberately target innocent foreign citizens for such an experiment is a violation of a number of international laws and treaties.”
================

from wiki:
1951 disease

An outbreak of disease marked by acute psychotic episodes and various physical symptoms occurred in summer 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit, which caused more than 250 cases, 7 deaths, and 50 persons interned in asylums. The alimentary intoxications, which affected other parts of France but were the most serious in Pont-Saint-Esprit, were traced to "damned bread" (pain maudit). Some identified the mass-poisoning as ergotism (which included sensationalist popular accounts linking the poisonings with CIA spread LSD,), some said the cause could also be due to consumption of seeds treated with mercury, however, how could we explain that farm animals, which did not consume bread did display the same symptoms...


More horrifying than this were epidemics of poisoning, caused by people eating treated seed grains. There was a serious epidemic in Iraq in 1956 and again in 1960, whilst use of seed wheat (which had been treated with a mixture of C2H5HgCl and C6H5HgOCOCH3) for food, caused the poisoning of about 100 people in West Pakistan in 1961. Another outbreak happened in Guatemala in 1965. Most serious was the disaster in Iraq in 1971-2, when according to official figures 459 died. Grain had been treated with methyl mercury compounds as a fungicide and should have been planted. Instead it was sold for milling and made into bread. It had been dyed red as a warning and also had warning labels in English and Spanish that no one could understand.
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby Simulist » Wed Feb 17, 2010 5:48 pm

Were the mind control experiments in the 50s and 60s (and well beyond, surely) for the purpose of learning to manipulate the minds a few select individuals, the minds of individuals in a few select cities, or the consciousness (and therefore the behavior) of entire populations?

"All of the above" seems a reasonable answer to me.

We have an article here concerning experiments into the production of mass insanity decades ago. We also have 300+ forum pages discussing, in one way or another, the mass insanity easily observable all around us throughout western civilization.

I have a hard time supposing that (A) experiments into manipulating human behavior and (B) the fact that human behavior appears so easily manipulable — and on such a massive scale — are factors of mere coincidence.
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby Hugh Manatee Wins » Wed Feb 17, 2010 6:14 pm

1951 - Korean War. US tests biological weapons in N. Korea and China. Still denied.

Dec. 1966 comedy about one Scotsman sent to deal with a bomb in a French village full of lunatics-
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died 1967
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby orz » Wed Feb 17, 2010 8:41 pm

#
Pre-decimal Sterling
... told me about the Scottish currency abolished at the Act Of Union 1707: ... Norman French for little star was esterlin. The pound sterling was a pound ... Pre-decimal currency was sometimes called LSD, which was written Ł-s-d. ...
gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/units/money.htm - Cached - Similar -
#
French to English definition of lsd
French to English definition of lsd. 42030 references. Display. - select -, 10, 25, 50. Online Dictionary > French to English > lsd ...
www.online-dictionary.bizFrench to English - Cached -
#
"Saturday Night Live" (1975) - Episode list
Richard Pryor does an opening monologue about why he doesn't drink or take LSD. ...... Eric Idle attempts to interview Mardi Gras revelers, but the French ...... Other skits include a scene at a Scottish restaurant and a 'Bird for All ...
www.imdb.com/title/tt0072562/episodes - Cached - Similar -
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby orz » Wed Feb 17, 2010 8:42 pm

#
bebo.com - Profile from scottish hooligans <scotlands-hooilgans>
... to loot a number of German, French and Swiss designer sportswear stores, as security was far more lax than in the UK. ... SCOTTISH FIRMS Aberdeen: ASC (Aberdeen Soccer Casuals) ... LSD LSD LSD. Dec 10. Colin Mcgrandles. csc # 1 TAL ...
www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=3897889684 - Similar -
#
money slang history, words, expressions and money slang meanings ...
The penny 'D' in LSD, and also lower case 'd' more commonly used when pence alone were shown, ..... Floren is derived from Old French and Latin words from flower. ...... Possibly derived from Scottish pronunciation and slang 'saxpence'. ...
www.businessballs.com › glossaries/terminology - Cached - Similar -
#
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby orz » Wed Feb 17, 2010 8:43 pm

GEE WIZZ ORZ GRATE FIND!
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby Uncle $cam » Wed Feb 17, 2010 9:31 pm


cause for concern.... never acid again
Last edited by Uncle $cam on Wed Feb 17, 2010 10:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby justdrew » Wed Feb 17, 2010 9:43 pm

probably everyone's seen this but...


my youtube predictive autocomplete, upon typing british soldiers<space> ... "on lsd" was the number two suggestion. lol
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby justdrew » Thu Mar 11, 2010 4:48 pm

French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment
A 50-year mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Time magazine wrote at the time: "Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead."

Eventually, it was determined that the best-known local baker had unwittingly contaminated his flour with ergot, a hallucinogenic mould that infects rye grain. Another theory was the bread had been poisoned with organic mercury.

However, H P Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims the outbreak resulted from a covert experiment directed by the CIA and the US Army's top-secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

The scientists who produced both alternative explanations, he writes, worked for the Swiss-based Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the Army and CIA with LSD.

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the "secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit" and explains that it was not "at all" caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

While compiling his book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments, Mr Albarelli spoke to former colleagues of Mr Olson, two of whom told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was part of a mind control experiment run by the CIA and US army.

After the Korean War the Americans launched a vast research programme into the mental manipulation of prisoners and enemy troops.

Scientists at Fort Detrick told him that agents had sprayed LSD into the air and also contaminated "local foot products".

Mr Albarelli said the real "smoking gun" was a White House document sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. It contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the "Pont St. Esprit incident." In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Mr Albarelli claims, the US army also drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between 1953 and 1965.

None of his sources would indicate whether the French secret services were aware of the alleged operation. According to US news reports, French intelligence chiefs have demanded the CIA explain itself following the book's revelations. French intelligence officially denies this.

Locals in Pont-Saint-Esprit still want to know why they were hit by such apocalyptic scenes. "At the time people brought up the theory of an experiment aimed at controlling a popular revolt," said Charles Granjoh, 71.

"I almost kicked the bucket," he told the weekly French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. "I'd like to know why."


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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby Nordic » Thu Mar 11, 2010 11:54 pm

Glad you posted this here. Saw it over at Cryptogon and figured it would be good for this place to discuss.

Now all I see are nonsensical bullshit posts by orz and youtubes. But hey, hopefully it'll improve.

I'm sure the CIA did "all of the above" as well, why wouldn't they? They did a whole town to see what it might be like to do a whole military base, which is basically a town. And to "Westerners", too.

Pure evil bastards.
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby Laodicean » Fri Mar 12, 2010 12:28 am

Pretty fucked up.

That was 50 years ago.

Imagine what they're doing now.

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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby justdrew » Fri Mar 12, 2010 12:31 am

someone over at ATS says they thing Vallee has written about the incident, but I don't have any search results for that, I wonder what he had to say about this incident?

Also I can't help but wonder if the French government may have chosen to permit this or if it was done without their knowledge?
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby Nordic » Fri Mar 12, 2010 10:49 pm

You know, in any kind of a normal society, and culture, this would be a big story, something everybody was talking about.

As it is, hell, I don't know if any domestic "news" source has even published it.
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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby StarmanSkye » Fri Mar 12, 2010 11:56 pm

Nordic wrote:

"I'm sure the CIA did "all of the above" as well, why wouldn't they? They did a whole town to see what it might be like to do a whole military base, which is basically a town. And to "Westerners", too.

Pure evil bastards."

Man, that's the first thing I thought of when considering about what the larger implication was. The testimony of scientist and CIA associates joking and making fun of Olsen's 'accident' sure shows a prevalent attitude in the CIA of opportunistic, abusive bullying. This WAS an agency that was being directed by the notorious traitor and self-promoter Allen Dulles -- who along with his brother (and other US financiers, businessmen and companies) had assisted Hitler's rise to power, aided and funded the Nazi War Machine, and then used the agency to overthrow Guatamala's elected President, wage a war of invasion and reverse the land reform so the Dulles brothers could regain control of the valuable United Fruit properties -- and later had a supporting role in the JFK assassination and, as a member of the Warren Commission, helped cover-up the crime and shield those who were part of it.

It's not too fantastic to speculate that Jack Ruby may have been an early Manchurian candidate indoctrinated as a command killer via the CIA's MK Ultra program. I've often wondered what might have induced a low-level mobster like Ruby to abandon everything he had and the comfortable life he led to become Oswald's killer.

It's awful suspicious too, that so many people around Oswald were agency guys or connected to the military, to the oil business, to mob figures or to anti-Cuban guerillas (themslves associated with CIA and/or the mafia).

The point being -- the CIA culture not only tolerated abuse of power, anti-democratic and criminal acts, treason and fraud, unethical medical experiments, extra-legal wars, smuggling, criminal conspiracies and who knows WHAT --

What outrages WEREN'T they capable of? The slippery-slope of rationalizing & justifying ANYTHING under the one-size-fits-all argument of National Security sure has come a long way since, to where genocide and pre-emptive wars, reprisal bombings, kidnapping and torture, even war crimes and treason, electoral fraud and blatant war-profiteering have become routine. They all trace back to brutalities and barbarities condoned by the CIA.

A major reason why these United States are SO undemocratic and getting more messed-up all the time.

Tell a typical rightwinger these things, they'll either call you a Conspiracy Theorist crackpot or say America's enemies have driven us to these extreme measures, to 'protect' our freedoms.

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Re: US questioned over mass insanity @ Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Mar 13, 2010 12:12 am

Covered in French state media:

http://www.english.rfi.fr/americas/2010 ... e-suggests
Article published the Friday 12 March 2010 - Latest update : Friday 12 March 2010

CIA spiked baguettes with LSD, new evidence suggests

Image
The town of Pont-Saint-Esprit.
Wikimedia Commons


By RFI

In the summer of 1951, the residents of a quiet town in southern France were racked with mysterious hallucinations that the authorities blamed on mouldy bread. But now, an American journalist claims that the villagers were the unwitting participants in a secret CIA experiment to discover the mind control potential of psychedelic drugs.

At least five people died, more than 30 were hospitalised and almost 300 taken ill in the unexplained outbreak in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a town in the Gard, south-east France.

On 17 August 1951, local doctors' surgeries were filled with people complaining of sudden nausea, diarrhea and insomnia. Hours later, many of them were in the grip of terrifying and often violent hallucinations.

One girl believed she was being attacked by tigers. A man tried to drown himself after seeing snakes in his stomach. Another flung himself from a window, believing he was an aeroplane. And an 11-year-old boy tried to strangle his grandmother.

An investigation at the time determined that the town's main bakery was to blame.

Scientists suspected that the baker's flour had been accidentally contaminated with a naturally occuring hallucinogenic substance - most likely ergot, a type of psychedelic mould.

This explanation was never considered fully satisfactory, however. A US laboratory that asked volunteers to ingest ergot-dosed bread found that none of its subjects presented similar symptoms to the residents of Pont-Saint-Esprit.

Almost 60 years later, new evidence has been uncovered that suggests more sinister forces were at work.

According to investigative journalist Hank P Albarelli Jr, the CIA and US Army deliberately contaminated Pont-Saint-Esprit with LSD as part of Cold War-era research into mass mind control.

Albarelli claims to have uncovered CIA documents that refer to "the secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit" and explain that the symptoms were called not by ergot but by diethylamide, one of the main substances - the D - in LSD.

The documents transcribe conversations between CIA agents and officials from Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, the Swiss laboratory where LSD was first developed - and where the scientists charged with investigating the Pont-Saint-Esprit outbreak were employed.

Albarelli says he also spoke to scientists at the US Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who told him that, in their quest to discover whether LSD could be used as a weapon, agents sprayed the drug into the air of Pont-Saint-Esprit and planted it in local food products.

But his most compelling evidence is a White House document that was sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission, a panel formed in 1975 to investigate alleged CIA abuses. This document mentions several French nationals who were covertly employed by the CIA, and refers directly to the "Pont St. Esprit [sic] incident".

None of Albarelli's sources would confirm whether France's secret services were aware of the alleged experiment, he writes in his book about the affair.

It's not the first conspiracy theory to be advanced about the strange events in Pont-Saint-Esprit.

"At the time, people speculated whether it was an experiment designed to control a popular revolt," recalls one Pont-Saint-Esprit resident, Charles Granjhon, now 71.

He still doesn't feel he knows the truth about what happened, he told Les Inrockuptibles magazine.

"I almost snuffed it. I'd like to know why."
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