Have you ever heard about these strange experiments done on humans before?
When it comes to strange experiments, humankind is known to not shy away from making them. Whether we are talking about testing things on animals or humans, people have proven over the years that they are not only capable of some crazy ideas but also of extreme cruelty in order to see if those out-of-the-box ideas can be put into practice.
This can definitely change our perception of our fellow humans, but when you take into consideration that some of these strange experiments that were done on people have also served no purpose other than to try out cruel torture methods or test insane ideas that had no basis in reality, it makes most of us wonder what could happen now when technology and science are way more advanced and you could do way more when it comes to human experiments.
If you are curious about what history can show us when it comes to the strangest experiments conducted on humans, make sure you keep on reading!
Do you have a strange experiment you want us to cover in a future article? Let us know about it in the comments below!
Project MKUltra
If there is one strange experiment that most of us have heard of, it has to be Project MKUltra. It has been one of the biggest CIA projects, and pop culture has also jumped on the bandwagon and used it in TV and movies ever since the dossiers were uncovered. However, what a lot of people who use this project for their fictional stories forget is that this has been a real, strange experiment that has affected people’s lives.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA devised this project in order to find a way to manipulate the mind and hopefully get all the information they needed from people in interrogations. Since the project was so highly guarded and controversial, they started to experiment on humans to see what type of drugs and other experiments would interact well together to manage to gain control over someone’s mind, with LSD being one of the most popular ones!
The project was shut down in 1973, yet there is still an air of mystery surrounding this string of strange experiments, and it is one of the biggest controversies in which the CIA has even landed. In part due to the extreme secrecy around everything and the fact that even the unclassified documents we now know of are still highly censored, a lot of people are still left wondering what other atrocities the CIA has committed during this project.
Unit 731
This is one of the strangest human experiments that have ever been conducted, and the strange factor in it is the fact that there is still a lot of mystery and confusion about it. World War II has definitely shown how cruel humanity can be and how many atrocities we can commit against one another, but Unit 731 was one of the worst cases of chemical and biological warfare experimentation that most people have never even heard about.
Sometimes named the Asian Auschwitz, Unit 731 was a strange research experiment that was conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army on war prisoners and civilians in the Pingfang District, Harbin, China. After taking control of the region, the Japanese army opened the unit and let their head director and doctor, ShirÅ Ishii, conduct all types of human experimentation with biological weapons on thousands of war prisoners with nationalities ranging from Chinese to Korean, Russian, and Mongolian, despite the majority of them being Chinese.
The dissolution of the unit in 1945 led to most of their records being destroyed, so we will probably never know the full extent of their atrocities, and human war crimes committed during this time. Despite this, there are enough testimonials from a few of the survivors and detractors that we do have an inkling of the horrors committed while the unit was active, as they are known to have not stopped at anything.
If you are curious about the atrocities that have been committed in Unit 731, you can read more about them in Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 book, which you can easily find on Amazon! However, make sure you know what you are getting yourself into, as the recountings can be pretty harrowing.
Willowbrook State School: Hepatitis experiments on children
While wars have shown us that they were thought to be a great space for strange experiments, some of the strangest ones have happened outside of special circumstances, just because people wanted to test out their strange ideas and decided that vulnerable populations were the best choice of subjects for their depraved experiments. This is exactly what happened in the case of the Willowbrook State School experiments.
Located in Staten Island, New York, this school was funded by the school so that it could be an institution for children with various intellectual disabilities. The institution ended up falling into disrepair in the early 1970s. The conditions there were appalling; not only was the institution not staffed accordingly, but they had too many children, which created a lack of hygiene and caused overpopulation, which ended up being prime grounds for the inhumane treatment of these disabled children.
What’s worse, reports have exposed that the school was used for a strange experiment that showed the true colors of the faculty: they have willingly infected the children in their care with hepatitis so that they could observe how the disease progresses and what the effects of it are. This revelation led to a myriad of lawsuits and investigations, which ended with the school closing in 1987.
Despite this, it does not change the fact that those poor children were taken advantage of for a strange experiment and that their innocent lives were halted and changed forever due to the diseases they were forced to come in contact with.
Operation ARTICHOKE
We mentioned MKUltra earlier, but while that one is a strange experiment by itself, the whole project was made up of multiple different strange experiments, each with its own code names that ran simultaneously with the MKUltra main experiments.
Operation Artichoke was also led by CIA agents, and it lasted for 10 years, between 1951 and 1961. It focused on the usage of hypnosis and various psychological forms of manipulation so that they could then use it to gather intelligence from enemies and even use it to modify behavior.
What makes this operation even stranger is the fact that it was a subsidiary of the big MKUltra project, which wanted to see how they could psychologically manipulate humans for their own gain. The aim of the operation was to see if hypnosis could be used in an interrogation situation to extract the information needed from the subjects.
Another weird layer of this strange experiment is made out of the fact that the CIA-appointed scientists were also interested in seeing if hypnosis was effective in changing someone’s behavior or memory, which would then be useful for covert operations later if proven successful.
As you can imagine, this operation, just like MKUltra, faced a lot of backlash, and due to ethical conflicts, it was discontinued even before the masses knew about MKUltra.
Infectious mosquitos as biological weapons
When one thinks about biological weapons, most people envision some sort of virus that is lab-made or natural that is released via air or something of the sort. Yet, the U.S. Army found a better way to create a biological weapon and then tested it in certain parts of the United States, mainly in Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida. How did they achieve this? They used mosquitos!
Back in the 1950s, the army released millions of these insects that were infected with yellow fever and dengue onto these areas to test if they could be used to spread illnesses to a certain area. Not only is this a strange experiment because it should be logical that it would happen, but also because the army tested this biological weapon on their own people!
It is not hard to figure out that a lot of people became sick due to these mosquitoes, that a lot of them ended up losing their lives due to these strange experiments, and that there has been a lot of outrage against the army as a result.
If these strange experiments were not enough to make you question your faith in humanity, there are many more out there to know about! Here are just some of the scariest human experiments ever conducted!
