Wormwood is an American docudrama that will be coming out on Netflix on December 15. Its documentarian Errol Morris should be familiar to a fair number of people, seeing as how he was the one who made both The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, both of which are well-regarded by both critics and consumers. As for Wormwood‘s subject matter, well, suffice to say that interested individuals can learn a lot by watching the trailer that has just been released, which makes it clear that the docudrama will be telling the tale of Dr. Frank Olson through interviews with real people as well as dramatic reenactments that blur the line between documentaries and scripted miniseries. As a result, Wormwood promises to be an exciting experience, particularly for people who are fascinated by the mysterious Project MKUltra.
Who Was Dr. Frank Olson and What Was Project MKUltra?
For those who are unfamiliar with the name, Dr. Frank Olson was a bacteriologist who was working as a biological warfare scientist for the CIA. At a retreat, he drank Cointreau that had been spiked with LSD by his CIA supervisor. As a result, Olson resigned from the biological warfare program, which was followed by a nervous breakdown accompanied by severe paranoia. In response, CIA sent him to New York City to be seen by a physician who had been helping out the CIA with its research into the potential uses of LSD, which resulted in a recommendation for Olson to be put in a mental institution. That never happened because Olson is said to have thrown himself out of a thirteenth-floor window at his hotel, though there are those who claim that he was thrown out.
Olson’s family never learned the exact details of what had happened to Dr. Frank Olson until the CIA’s Project MKUltra was uncovered in 1975 by the Rockefeller Commission. Due to that new information, Olson’s family decided to sue the CIA but instead accepted a $750,000 settlement as well as apologies from both the President and the CIA Director. Later, when Dr. Frank Olson’s son Eric Olson had his father’s body exhumed so that he could be buried besides his wife, Eric Olson had a second autopsy conducted as well.
The team that performed the autopsy found evidence of blunt-force trauma to the head as well as a large injury on the chest, which was followed by all but one of the team members concluding that those injuries had not happened in the fall but rather in the room before the fall. In other words, their conclusion was that Dr. Frank Olson had been murdered instead of having committed suicide. So far, Eric Olsen’s efforts to look into the matter, but even the judge who dismissed a case that had constituted one such effort acknowledged that a lot of his claims are supported by the information that can be found in the public records.
As for Project MKUltra, it has been the subject of even more speculation than the death of Dr. Frank Olson, which is perhaps unsurprising when it was indeed the sort of thing that one would expect from conspiracy theories rather than real life. In short, the project was meant to find chemical, biological, and radiological materials that could be used to control how people behave, which explains why it might be better-known to some as the CIA mind control program. Based on this, it seems clear that Wormwood will prove to be a fascinating though more than a little bit disturbing watch once it is released in the not so distant future.
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