MKWHITEOUT and How the CIA Tried To Kill Pride - SCP Foundation

SeretoninSays 06/01/2020 (Monday) 15:03:29 #48202192

CW: Institutional homophobia and transphobia, sex crimes, human experimentation

MK-ULTRA is the most infamous of the CIA's experimentation programs, but it's not the only one. Recently declassified CIA documents reference projects such as MKSMILODON, MKWALDO, and MKISOLDA, all of which are woefully incomplete— MKSMILODON got dismissed by the news as the CIA's 'X-Files Project', because any project that deals with trying to control the weather using 'human conduits' is going to be called that by anyone not in the know.

One thing that got largely overlooked by the news was something called MKWHITEOUT. By the late 60's, the MK Projects were starting to lose funding as the US Government became more concerned about the Space Race and how badly the Vietnam War was going, but one place that Nixon wanted to focus on was oppressing minorities— the entire reason he refused to legalize pot was because he wanted more excuses for African-Americans and hippies to be arrested, and when it came to the fledgling LGBT community, he was more than willing to turn a blind eye to the CIA using Pride as a testing ground for an atrocity.

May 1971. Stonewall had taken place less than two years before, and CIA Director Richard Helms gives the greenlight for MKWHITEOUT, a biological warfare initiative that was to use, and I quote, 'infectious mutagenic agents… to attempt to cure homosexual psychopathy for the good of the American people'.

Their so-called cure? A hybrid of botulism and something known as 'The Carpathian Agent'.

SeretoninSays 06/01/2020 (Monday) 15:12:42 #48202193

June 1972. San Francisco. Several things happen over the course of the week leading up to the city's first Official Pride parade on the 25th.

On the night of the 18th, Toad Hall, one of the city's oldest gay bars (featured in the 2008 biopic Milk) is broken into. Nothing is stolen, but the owners at the time are paranoid enough to dispose of all their booze after they find a Budweiser cap on a Miller bottle, clear evidence of tampering.

Early that same day, a so-called 'hair fairy' (an individual that might be considered transgender in the modern day) identified in a police report as 'Barry Dent' is arrested for public indecency. What transpired in the next three hours is unclear, but Dent was never seen again. Her cellmate is found clutching a knife with blood matching Dent's type on it, sans throat and left arm. Said cellmate's identity was not disclosed at the time, but the individual who came to collect their body is listed as "Mr. Brightton", now known to be a common CIA Cryptonym for 'cleaner' agents during the Nixon administration.

Starting on the 19th, three men hand out pamphlets advertising the Pride event around Castro. The pamphlets are printed on paper that has an odd texture with sharper creases. Several people get papercuts from touching them, and fall ill with strange symptoms.

The Stud, another famous gay bar is broken into on the 19th. The attempted vandal is fired upon by the owner and wounded— a black towncar picks them up a block away. SFPD does nothing about it, naturally.

The 20th brings reports of over sixty different incidents of apparent botulism poisoning from across the city, all among individuals who are considered 'queers', 'hair fairies', 'homos', whatever derogatory term you've heard, they used it to describe them. The police figured that a few dead f***ots was probably a good thing, and did nothing. Doctors who treated them managed to deliver antitoxin, and noted that several of them had quote 'abnormal hair growth patterns' that were not exhibited in 'normal human beings'. A commonality among them is that they all got drinks or knew someone who was at Wild Side West, which is— you guessed it —a gay bar, albeit one outside of Castro.

Needle marks are found on several of those admitted into hospitals across the city. At San Francisco General, a toxicology screen finds the same unknown drug in five different patients. One of the doctors there has a contact in the Swiss healthcare company Roche, who confirms that it is a drug they patented a decade earlier, not yet on the market. That drug is flunitrazepam, better known today as rohypnol.

SeretoninSays 06/01/2020 (Monday) 15:23:16 #48202196

On the 21st, the majority of the patients are discharged. That night, the SFPD is flooded with calls of wild animals being seen and heard throughout the city. They investigate one around Fisherman's Wharf, and find a metal lightpole bent in half, with scratch marks all the way around the top, as if whatever bent it over literally spun around it first.

The morning of the 22nd, a young woman known only today as 'Milly' finds one of the pamphlet men preparing for his day. She finds him coating the pamphlets with a brush covered in an unknown substance, and gathers a mob to chase him out of the district. He reportedly jumps into a black towncar bound for the north. This same man is seen again in the vicinity of the City Lights bookstore in the Red Light district— some people have speculated the existence of a CIA bolthole in this part of the city.

The night of the 22nd brings more calls of animal sightings. A few fortune tellers near Presidio Heights draw Hamsa sigils on their doors— charms meant to ward off evil creatures.

Gunshots are heard around the Castro district in the early hours of the 23rd of June. A wrecked towncar is found in an alley in the neighboring Mission District, upside-down and on fire. Locals claim ignorance, despite evidence of blood and torn clothing being found on the corner of 20th and Castro St.

In the end? Whatever malefactor was trying to sabotage San Fran's First Pride failed. The parade went on without a hitch, but not without weird things happening. Several people in the crowd reported seeing animalistic silhouettes on the buildings above the street, only to look again and see people just waving at the parade.

SeretoninSays 06/01/2020 (Monday) 15:29:51 #48202197

MKWHITEOUT was shuttered on July 4th, 1972. The majority of the documentation related to it was incinerated, but not all of it. Among the MKWHITEOUT team was a virologist from the Socialist Republic of Romania, and his files were the ones that were recently declassified. The rest of this comes from my great-aunt, who lived through a large part of this.

The Romanian's files state that the original intent of the project was to 'create a hyper-virulent botulism… spreadable only through fluid transmissions, ensuring minimal contact with the non-psychotic populous'. This is probably the reason behind the Carpathian Agent's inclusion in the hybridized bacterium, as it is stated to be 'only transmissible through the contact of fluids on exposed wet tissue'.

Testing didn't go as intended— the Carpathian Agent is a mutagen, and being infected with it results in physiological changes, among them being 'abnormal keratin growth'— hair and nails grow at super-fast rates, and from what I've read, the nails are strong enough to tear into aluminium. Other signs of it are 'dermal and muscular mutations', and 'spontaneous dental growth'. So, they changed tactics— instead of literally killing the gay community, they'd try to smear them to death.

Throughout late 1972 and early 1973, the San Francisco Examiner received several anonymous pieces of mail containing film rolls appearing to depict large, hairy creatures alongside of men and women who were known members of the LGBT community, seemingly taken without their knowledge or consent— in one of them, you can even see the camera is misaligned with the hole it's meant to stick through, and you can see the inside of the drywall. If you don't get the intent here, I'm not going to spell it out.

In 1983, a camera was discovered inside drywall while renovation work was being done on an apartment building in the Mission District, still containing an intact roll of film. The apartment it was found in housed one of the sixty-plus people who were admitted into the emergency room on June 20th, 1972. I've seen the photos for myself— they depict the tenant, a man named Raymond Murphy in his bed alongside his partner, Cecil MacFinn. The timer on the camera took a photo every fifteen seconds. Raymond appears to be in pain, and Cecil is holding him. About two minutes in, Raymond… changes. Cecil never lets go of him, and seems to be patting him on the back repeatedly. After about another minute, the change is complete, and the creature that used to be Raymond looms over his partner. Cecil is clearly afraid, his back up against the headboard of the bed. The creature bears down upon him, and his face is concealed from sight for the next three pictures.

When the creature pulls away from Cecil, the man is laughing, and his face is covered in what I can only describe as slobber as he pulls Raymond close to him once more.

Happy Pride, everyone. Stay safe out there.