MK ULTRA ANIMALS: When the CIA Tried to Turn Fluffy Into a Furry Assassin

In the 1960s, the CIA spent $55,000 trying to turn rats, cats, and bears into remote-controlled assassins — and somehow, this wasn’t even the weirdest part of their day job.

Listen to “MK ULTRA ANIMALS: When the CIA Tried to Turn Fluffy Into a Furry Assassin” on Spreaker.

In the most expensive episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” ever produced, the CIA once spent over $55,000 of taxpayer money — which, adjusted for inflation, is roughly seventeen bajillion dollars in today’s currency — trying to turn household pets into James Bond.

This brilliant scheme, known as Subproject 94 (which sounds like a below-average Navy initiative), was part of the larger MKUltra program. The project was overseen by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, a man whose job description read in bold print: “Make things disturbing. Really, really disturbing. And be sure it ticks off people with pets.”

The basic premise was simple: implant electrodes into animal brains and control them like biological remote-control cars. Someone at CIA headquarters watched a nature documentary and thought, “You know what this country needs? Weaponized squirrels.”

The inspiration came from Swedish psychologist and part-time evil Hogwarts professor, Valdemar Fellenius, who had successfully trained seals to attach explosives to submarines during World War II. Which raises several important questions, chief among them: How exactly does one put “seal bomb-training” on a resume? And more importantly, why did the CIA think this was a reasonable starting point for… anything? Don’t we have actual frogmen for stuff like that? Not guys in diving suits, but actual man-frog hybrids probably made in the same labs as weaponized squirrels? I’d think that would’ve been more of a priority.

The CIA’s shopping list read like Noah’s Ark having a nervous breakdown: rats, cats, dogs, monkeys, donkeys, guinea pigs, and birds – all living together, mass hysteria. Basically, if it had four legs, two legs, or any legs at all, the CIA wanted to stick wires in its head. They were apparently operating under the “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” method of scientific inquiry, except the spaghetti was electrodes and the wall was a confused hamster.

The plan was delightfully unhinged. These mind-controlled creatures would be sent behind enemy lines to plant listening devices, deliver deadly toxins, or — and this is where things get really special — turn large animals like bears into “mobile bombs” – probably with a briefcase handcuffed to its paw, wandering through Red Square looking suspicious. “Aww, look… it’s our country’s mascot!” (Boom.)

Scientists discovered that stimulating the pleasure centers of animals’ brains worked better than punishment. Because what could be more pleasurable than brain surgery with copper doodads poked in your cerebellum? This means that somewhere in a classified government facility, researchers were literally giving rats the equivalent of brain massages while trying to turn them into tiny four-legged death machines. The cognitive dissonance here is breathtaking.

Shockingly, (no pun intended) the experiments were surprisingly successful. Researchers managed to make a dog follow an invisible path “with relative ease.” The biggest challenge, according to declassified documents, was finding isolated areas where the public couldn’t witness these proceedings. One can only imagine the awkward explanations: “Oh, that? That’s just Mr. Whiskers practicing his… uh… advanced obedience training. Nothing to see here, citizen. Look! A bear!”

Rats proved to be the most controllable subjects, though scientists had to be careful not to “overdo the pleasure reaction” because it would cause the animals to become immobile. Essentially, they were creating the world’s first couch potato rodents — creatures so blissed out on artificial brain stimulation that they forgot how to move. Much like gamers in their parents basements today. And they’re already hooked up to wires! And the PETA crowd couldn’t care less about humans – why didn’t they go this direction?

The project notes reveal that negative feedback — essentially giving animals brain wedgies — only caused panic and made them unresponsive to commands. So, even laboratory animals don’t respond well to workplace harassment. I’d tell you about the lab-rats brain sexual harassment, but this is a family show. Or so I tell my wife.

The CIA funded this carnival of the absurd through the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. Dr. Charles Geschickter (whose name means “hazard a guess as to which woman won’t date you tonight”) had established this foundation in 1939 to support cancer research, but I’m sure he was equally happy to have learned that his life’s work had become a money-laundering operation for guinea pig mind control.

The most chilling part isn’t the animal experiments themselves — it’s that researchers planned to eventually apply these techniques to humans. Remote-controlled pets were just the opening act for the main event: mind-controlled soldiers. See? We should’ve gone with the frogmen right from the beginning.

The full scope of these experiments remains unknown because Sidney Gottlieb destroyed many of the files in 1973, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of saying “my dog ate my homework,” except the homework was evidence of turning actual dogs into homework-eating cyborgs.

The project also considered using yaks and bears because they “are capable of carrying heavy payloads over great distances under adverse climatic conditions.” This suggests that at some point, a government employee had to seriously research the weight-bearing capacity of mind-controlled yaks, which is either the most important job in America or the most ridiculous, depending on your perspective.

Whether any of these furry secret agents were ever deployed in actual operations remains classified. Somewhere in a heavily redacted file cabinet, there might be mission reports titled “Operation Whiskers” or “The Poodle Incident,” and honestly, that’s probably for the best.

The revelation of MKUltra in the mid-1970s led to congressional oversight and public outrage, as Americans suddenly realized their tax dollars had been funding what essentially amounted to a rejected script from a Saturday morning cartoon. Families of human test subjects pursued legal action, though one imagines the lawsuits from the animals’ families are still pending in some very specialized court.

Today, as we live in an age where people voluntarily carry tracking devices and post their every thought online, the CIA’s elaborate schemes to control minds seem almost quaint. They spent decades trying to turn animals into unwitting spies, when they could have just waited for social media to convince humans to do it themselves — for free.

But maybe there’s a silver lining to this whole bizarre chapter of American history. The next time your cat ignores you completely or your dog does something inexplicably strange, you can at least take comfort in knowing that if you got desperate, you could stick the motherboard of an X-Box in its skull and get perfect behavior every time… and bonus plays with every Scooby snack.

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice. (AI Policy)

Source: Daily Mail