Morse Allen

Morse Allen was a 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, a classified program that was a precursor to Project MKUltra¹.

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' Ahnenerbe Institute's research, which had pushed human physiology to extremes in concentration camps to measure and monitor results¹.

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 powers¹. 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 nature¹.

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 located¹. The quest for God's flesh was later renamed MKULTRA Subproject 58¹.

In late summer 1954, Allen discovered that Captain Henry Karel "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 directly through their chemist, James Moore, who posed as a professor¹. 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 ESP¹.