--- aliases: - Morse Allen category: Key Figures summary: Morse Allen was a CIA officer and a deception and polygraph expert who played a significant role in the agency's early programs investigating altered states of consciousness and truth serums. tags: - Person - Stargate - CIA - RemoteViewer --- Morse Allen was a [Central Intelligence Agency](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) officer and a deception and polygraph expert who played a significant role in the agency's early programs investigating altered states of consciousness and truth serums. In 1952, he was promoted to serve as the director of [Project Artichoke](/programs/project-bluebird-and-project-artichoke/), a classified program that was a precursor to [Project MKUltra](/programs/project-mkultra/)[^1]. Allen's primary objective was to search the globe for potent drugs that the Central Intelligence Agency could exploit for intelligence purposes. This quest was influenced by the [Nazis](/places/nazi-germany/)' Ahnenerbe Institute's research, which had pushed human physiology to extremes in concentration camps to measure and monitor results[^1]. In October 1952, Allen learned about the Mexican field mushroom, *teonanáctl* (God's flesh), which, according to ancient Aztec legend, endowed certain "sensitive" or psychic individuals with supernatural abilities. He believed this mushroom could act as a truth serum or provide divinatory powers[^1]. In early 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency dispatched a scientist to Mexico to gather samples, but the initial attempt was unsuccessful due to the mushroom's elusive nature[^1]. Allen then traveled to Toughkenamon, Pennsylvania, the "mushroom capital of America," and secured a contract with a top mushroom grower, planning to mass-produce the hallucinogenic mushroom once located[^1]. The quest for *God's flesh* was later renamed MKULTRA Subproject 58[^1]. In late summer 1954, Allen discovered that [Captain Henry Karel "Andrija" Puharich](/people/andrija-puharich/) of the U.S. Army Chemical Center, a Project MKUltra partner, was also searching for the hallucinogenic mushroom. Despite Puharich's extensive knowledge of mystical and supernatural research, the Central Intelligence Agency ultimately bypassed him, approaching [R. Gordon Wasson](/people/r-gordon-wasson/) directly through their chemist, [James Moore](/people/james-moore/), who posed as a professor[^1]. Allen's efforts to keep the drug a secret psychic weapon under military intelligence control were ultimately undermined when Wasson published a twelve-page account of his experience in *Life* magazine, highlighting the mushroom's alleged ability to enhance [ESP](/concepts/extrasensory-perception/)[^1]. ### Earlier Career Allen, a 40-year-old CIA security operator, had spent most of his earlier career rooting out the domestic communist threat, joining the Civil Service Commission in the late 1930s and setting up its first security files on communists. During [World War II](/events/world-war-ii/) he served with Naval Intelligence, pursuing leftists in New York and then landing with the Marines on Okinawa; afterward he joined the [State Department](/organizations/state-department/), left in the late 1940s feeling it was whitewashing communist cases, and moved to the CIA's Office of Security, where he was made head of the BLUEBIRD program in late 1950.[^2] ### Terminal Experiments Allen held that experimenting on informed volunteers proved nothing, since they knew they were playing a make-believe game; only subjects "for whom much is at stake (perhaps life and death)" would give operationally reliable results. He and his coworkers called such tests "terminal experiments," carried through to completion regardless of the subject's welfare and usually without the subject ever knowing he had been experimented on at all.[^2] ### Field Operations Three months after BLUEBIRD's approval, Allen led the first team to [Japan](/places/japan/), arriving in Tokyo in July 1950, a month into the [Korean War](/events/korean-war/), to test sodium amytal and benzedrine on four suspected double agents and attempt to induce amnesia; around October 1950 the team used "advanced" techniques on 25 subjects described as North Korean prisoners of war. In 1952 he led the ARTICHOKE team to Frankfurt, [Germany](/places/germany/) for Operation CASTIGATE, where [G. Richard Wendt](/people/g-richard-wendt/)'s truth-drug experiments collapsed; Allen called the trip "a waste of time and money."[^3] ### Hypnosis Experiments Intrigued by [Hypnosis](/concepts/hypnotism/), Allen took a four-day 1951 course from a stage hypnotist and then ran CIA secretaries through exercises in which they stole SECRET files, started fires, and reported to a strange man's bedroom. On February 19, 1954 he simulated the creation of a programmed assassin: he hypnotized a secretary, told her that her rage at being unable to wake a sleeping colleague would be so great "that she would not hesitate to 'kill,'" and left an unloaded pistol nearby; she picked it up, "shot" the sleeping woman, and afterward had apparent amnesia. He remained unconvinced the result would hold in operational settings, and also pursued an "electro-sleep" machine and explored [Electroshock](/concepts/electroshock/) for inducing amnesia.[^4] [^1]: Jacobsen, Annie. *Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis*. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. [^2]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 2. [^3]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 3. [^4]: John D. Marks, *The Search for the Manchurian Candidate*. Times Books, 1979, Chapter 11.