Inside the Army's Far-Out Acid Tests

Dropping acid to boost the Pentagon’s psychic powers was just the start. The Men Who Stare At Goats, the upcoming movie based on Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book of the same name, has George Clooney and Jeff Bridges in a bizarre military research project involving astral projection, remote viewing, and LSD. But for the real dope on the Army’s narcotics and psychedelics tests, you have to turn to Dr. James S. Ketchum, who wrote a firsthand account of the military’s trials with these “incapacitating chemical agents.”...

But Ketchum’s report shows that the Army’s operation was a model of scientific experimentation compared to the CIA’s. In 1953, the Agency attempted to purchase ten kilograms of LSD, supposedly for testing purposes. This was enough for over a hundred million doses. They were informed that the total amount manufactured was only ten grams.

However, on a Monday morning, a rather curious incident occurred. Ketchum found that his office had acquired a new piece of furniture, a steel barrel like an oil drum in one corner of the room. At first he ignored it, but eventually curiosity got the better of him, and one evening when he was along Ketchum undid the fastenings. The barrel was packed with jars:

Neatly labeled, tightly sealed glass canisters, looking like cookie jars, filled the entire drum. I cautiously took one out and examined it. According to the label, it contained approximately three pounds of pure EA 1729 (LSD).

Ketchum estimated that the barrel contained at thirty to forty pounds of the drug, a few hundred million doses and with a street value of something like a billion dollars. The sort of amount the CIA had been after.

Ketchum was not given any explanation for the giant stash, and on the Friday morning it had disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived. It seemed like something out of fiction, and Ketchum got as far as starting a novel with the billion-dollar-barrel in the opening scene before giving up. But the barrel stuck in his mind, a disturbing presence which he likens to the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey

“The similarity struck me as quite spooky, and remains somewhat spooky as I think about it today.”