Worst Science Article of the Week: The CIA Dosed a French Town With LSD!

The CIA's experiments with mind-control and hallucinogenic drugs are well documented. It's hard to forget about programs like Operation Midnight Climax, in which the agency studied the effects of LSD by dosing unsuspecting clients at brothels. But did the agency go so far as to send an entire French village on an acid trip that killed a few people and institutionalized a bunch more? According to The Telegraph, the CIA did just that in 1951. For years, people familiar with "the incident of the cursed bread" (or le pain maudit) have subscribed to the theory that villagers in Saint-Pont-Esprit in Southern France suffered massive delusions because they all ate bread contaminated by ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus. After eating bread from a local baker, the villagers reported such delusions as the conviction that they were missing body parts or had animals in their stomachs. Now, The Telegraph reports that the incident was not "ergotism" caused by the fungus, as previously believed, but was actually a bad trip caused by the CIA, which had spiked the village bread with LSD, or maybe just sprayed LSD into the air. Quite a story, huh? Too bad it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. The always credulous Telegraph reports that the discovery was made by investigative journalist H. P. Albarelli Jr., who published a book on the CIA's research. Albarelli claimed the outbreak was the result of a covert experiment carried out by the CIA and the U.S. army's top secret Special Operations Division (SOD) at the height of the cold war.