Nearly 60 years ago, the tiny French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit was sickened with nausea, hallucinations, and other symptoms that required dozens of people to be hospitalized and left five people dead. At the time, the story was that ergot, a poisonous fungus that can occur on rye, got into the bread at local bakery Roch Briand. However, that might be a cover story for a darker tale: the CIA is suspected of spiking the town’s bread with LSD in a city-wide acid test.
It’s shades of Project MKULTRA, but there’s evidence to back up the LSD fears. Hank Albarelli, an investigative journalist doing research into the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident, uncovered in a cache of CIA files a document labeled “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried.” It seems the weird version of the theory might actually have some merit.
F is short for Frank Olson, who was a CIA and US Army biomedical researcher who was given a dose of LSD without his knowledge or consent by, you guessed it, the CIA. This caused his mind to snap and he either killed himself (the official version) or was killed (the conspiracy theory version) in the aftermath to keep the project a secret.
Tags: CIA, conspiracy theories, unusual conspiracy theories, acid test, CIA LSD testing, Frank Olson, Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, poisonous bread, ergot, bread spiked with acid, LSD-laced bread, Hank Albarelli, Roch Briand