Show Notes
During the Cold War, the CIA ran programs that went far beyond espionage. Project MKOFTEN, a little-known offshoot of the agency's mind control research, reached into the occult, witchcraft and ritual magic. Did the U.S. government really study black magic and supernatural forces as tools of national security?
More from America's Strangest History
In 1987 a three-year-old girl at the Presidio of San Francisco pointed at a man in an Army store and said he was a bad man. The man was Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino, a military intelligence officer with an above-top-secret clearance, co-author of the Pentagon paper From PSYOP to MindWar, and founder of the Temple of Set. At least 58 children at the Presidio daycare showed signs of abuse, three agencies investigated, the building burned on the autumnal equinox, and nobody was ever convicted.
Twelve American military specialists allegedly boarded an extraterrestrial craft in 1965 and vanished for thirteen years, bound for a world orbiting Zeta Reticuli. Thousands of leaked pages describe training curricula, packing manifests, medical protocols and debrief transcripts. Either the most elaborate intelligence hoax ever crafted, or the greatest secret in U.S. history.
On November 8, 1965, the most powerful female journalist in America was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse, in the wrong bedroom, fully dressed, with an unprescribed drug in her blood and no drinking glass in the room. Dorothy Kilgallen had covered the Jack Ruby trial from the defense table, obtained his secret Warren Commission testimony, traced his ties to Carlos Marcello, and told people she was about to blow the Kennedy assassination open. Her file was never found.
February 1932. A man lies face down in the snow on the Eagle River with seven bullet holes in him, still holding his rifle. It took 48 days, 30 men, 133 dogs and the first airplane ever used in a Canadian manhunt to put him there. Nobody in the western Arctic recognized his face, and when scientists exhumed him 75 years later, DNA eliminated every named suspect. His identity is still unknown.
In 1987 two men were arrested in Tallahassee with six children. Within days the evidence was seized, the headlines faded and the case all but disappeared. Decades later, declassified FBI documents and FOIA releases reopened the mystery: who were the Finders, who was Marion Pettie, and why did the story go silent?