The Creepiest Declassified Documents Available To The Public

Declassified in 2004 and available on the CIA website, a Department of Defense/Defense Intelligence Agency document originally published in 1975 detailed a wide variety of "Soviet and Czechoslovokian Parapsychology Research" conducted from the end of WWII to the end of the Cold War.

Prepared by the US Army Medical Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Surgeon General, this 70-page document described claims that "paranormal phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, and psychokinesis (PK) have been demonstrated under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions," though it goes on to say that these claims remain highly disputed.

One of the strangest experiments described in the document involved a grisly 1956 Soviet attempt at using rabbits to communicate psychically with submerged submarines. For the tests, researchers required a mother rabbit with a newborn litter. They kept the mother in a lab onshore, where they connected electrodes to her brain. The babies were taken onboard a submarine. Once the submarine was submerged, "assistants [offed] the rabbits one by one. At each precise moment of [passing], the mother rabbit's brain produced detectable and recordable reactions."

The report goes on to say that other examples of "animal telepathy" research continued until 1970, including studies involving "dogs, bears, birds, insects, and fish."

"Acoustic Kitty" was a CIA project that proposed the transformation of common cats into advanced listening devices. A team of animal behaviorists worked with Robin Michelson, one of the inventors of the human cochlear implant, to wire a cat with a battery and instrument cluster in its rib cage and a wire running to its inner ear. With this, they believed that they could control the cat's movements through ultrasonic sound, and they could use a transmitter, also implanted in the cat, to listen in on conversations.

The fate of the first altered feline asset is disputed, with a frequently retold tale claiming that, as ex-CIA official Victor Marchetti supposedly put it, "They put [the cat] out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over." Other sources, however, claim that the taxi story is a fable, and that the original "Acoustic Kitty" was fine.

The only declassified document on the project, a short and heavily redacted memorandum partly titled "Views on Trained Cats," however, hints at the reason why the project was abandoned:

Knowing that cats can be indeed be trained to move short distances [redacted] we see no reason to believe that a [redacted] cat can not be similarly trained to approach [redacted]. Again, however, the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that, for our [redacted] purposes, it would not be practical.

So, "Acoustic Kitty" essentially went by the board because the CIA was unable to figure out how to effectively herd cats.

"A document viewed by Spiegel resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry." That's how the German newspaper Der Spiegel introduced the so-called NSA ANT catalog, a 50-page document detailing cyber surveillence technology. "The list reads like a mail-order catalog," the article goes on to say, "one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets' data."

The ANT (Advanced Network Technology) and TAO (Tailored Access Operations) divisions of the NSA are described by Der Spiegel as "hackers and civil servants in one."

The German publication went on to claim that the divisions' job is "breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks." When Der Spiegel ran the story in 2013 and released the catalog to the public, journalist and computer security researcher Jacob Applebaum, who helped break the story, described the data contained in the catalog as "wrist-slittingly depressing."

Besides describing cyber surveillance technology that allows the NSA to do everything from remotely monitor a system to create a hidden bridge to take wireless control, the documents also revealed that the NSA has access to a surprisingly wide range of consumer technology. Following Der Spiegel's reporting, other sites chimed in, describing the NSA's backdoor access to, for example, Apple iPhones as "nearly complete" and "crazy good."

The scope of the so-called "Operation Mockingbird" depends upon who is telling the story. According to Deborah Davis, writing in her 1979 biography of Katharine Graham, who had been the owner of The Washington Post, it was a "formal program to recruit and use journalists" as a way to "alter their perceptions" and turn people "against communism without [aggression]."

"By the early 1950s," Davis continued, Frank Wisner, of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, "had implemented his plan and 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all."

While the CIA never admitted to an "Operation Mockingbird" of this scale, declassified documents released as part of a large-scale report informally dubbed the "Family Jewels," which detailed the CIA's  domestic intelligence-gathering operations from the 1950s through the 1970s, described the wide-ranging, unauthorized surveillance of journalists. 

In the mid-1970s, US Senators Floyd Haskell of Colorado and Carl Curtis of Nebraska personally asked the FBI to investigate a series of mysterious cattle mutilations that had purportedly occurred across as many as 21 states. In a letter dated August 29, 1975, Senator Haskell identified "at least 130 cases in Colorado alone."

The events bore eerie similarities, as Haskell described them: "[In] virtually all the cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum, and [reproductive] organs of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints."

Contemporary newspaper reports linked the livestock mutilations to mysterious helicopters and unidentified flying objects, while a letter from Senator Curtis to FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley blithely referred to "the series of incidents stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska in which cattle have been dismembered in some kind of strange witchcraft cult."

"Doors are locked and guns are loaded," Nebraska's Hastings Tribune said of the situation surrounding the mysterious mutilations. The FBI, however, assured both senators that they couldn't get involved because the strange events fell outside their jurisdiction. It wasn't until 1979 that the FBI was finally granted jurisdiction to investigate the wave of mutilations.

When they did, they determined that most of the mutilations were the result of "normal predator and scavenger activity," but these same declassified documents revealed that some of the mutilations could not be accounted for. This was also contradicted by reports that the techniques used in the mutilations were "very professional" and sometimes conducted with surgical precision.

In spite of the pressure placed upon the FBI, no arrests were ever made in relation to these strange cases.

Originally published in 1983 and declassified 20 years later, the "Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process" report was prepared by Wayne M. McDonnell at the request of his commanding officer in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command. McDonnell had been tasked with assessing the Gateway Experience, a meditation training that instructed people in harnessing their electromagnetic energy waves, which are emitted from the body. It also trained them to direct their own brain waves and use them to detach from time and space. 

Created by Robert Monroe, founder of the Monroe Institute, the Gateway Experience is commercially available to anyone who wants to try. You can still buy the guided meditation program through the institute's website. The analysis prepared by McDonnell tackles a wide range of heady subjects, from astral projection to Eastern and Western belief systems, quantum physics, and more. 

The results? "There is a sound, rational basis in terms of physical science parameters for considering Gateway to be plausible in terms of its essential objectives," McDonnell says in his conclusion. He also warns that individuals using these techniques for "terrestrial information gathering trips" and other operations should be "intellectually prepared to react to possible encounters with intelligent, non-corporeal energy forms when time-space boundaries are exceeded."

While it seems like the Gateway Process report was never put widely into use, McDonnell certainly outlines the steps that he sees as necessary for it to be used in intelligence-gathering, ending with the sentence, "If these experiments are carried through, it is to be hoped that we will truly find a gateway to Gateway and to the realm of practical application for the whole system of techniques which comprise it."