
The CIA scientist who "fell" from a hotel window nine days after being secretly dosed with LSD
In November 1953 a group of government men met at a cabin at Deep Creek Lake, Maryland. One of them, Frank Olson, was an Army bacteriologist. That evening the CIA's Sidney Gottlieb spiked their after-dinner drinks with LSD without telling them. Olson didn't take it well. Nine days later he went out the window of the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York. Ruled a suicide.
The family accepted it for over twenty years. Then, in the 1970s, the MKUltra papers surfaced and they learned about the dosing. In 1994 they had his body exhumed. A forensic pathologist found a blunt-force injury to the skull that, in his reading, didn't fit a fall through glass. The case was reopened as a possible homicide, then quietly went nowhere.
What gets me is the paperwork detail: MKUltra was supposed to be erased in 1973, but a filing mistake left roughly 20,000 pages in the wrong box, and that's basically all we know from. Everything else was shredded.
Is Olson the one case where the "official story" really doesn't hold, or am I reading too much into a cold autopsy from 1994? Curious what people who know the file think.