The gruesome facts of the Manson Family murders have never been in dispute. In the summer of 1969, a group of young cult members murdered seven people, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, supposedly while under the influence of an ex-convict musician named Charles Manson.
Why did they do it? During the trial, the prevailing narrative put forward by prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was that Manson was using his followers to bring about his predictions of a race war based in part on messages he believed he was receiving from the Beatles’ White Album. Bugliosi elaborated on this theory in his book, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders.
But not everyone buys this as the true story.
“I’ve found myself trapped in a number of different true-crime stories, and the Manson murders are peculiar,” said Errol Morris, director of the CHAOS: The Manson Murders. “You could encapsulate the mystery in just one question: How is it that Manson managed to convince the people around him that killing was okay?”
In a new documentary from Netflix, Morris unpacks the theories laid out by journalist Tom O’Neill’s in his 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. O’Neill spent 20 years investigating the Manson story after uncovering evidence of what he describes as a “cover-up” — and falling out with Bugliosi while attempting to interview him.
CHAOS: The Manson Murders pokes holes in Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter theory and puts forward an explosive alternative explanation that involves the CIA and its clandestine mind-control experiments undertaken during the Cold War when paranoia about communism was at its height in America.
Between 1953 and 1973 the CIA ran a highly unethical human experimentation programme called MKUltra, which used drugs – often administered without participants’ knowledge or consent – to manipulate people for the purposes of interrogation and espionage. MKUltra is widely believed to be a continuation of Nazi brain-washing experiments conducted at concentration camps.
One of the psychoactive drugs the CIA was interested in was LSD, a psychoactive drug that causes hallucinations. Along with administering LSD during Cold War interrogations, MKUltra chief Sidney Gottlieb became convinced that the drug could be used to control people’s minds.
It’s an idea explored in the 1959 political thriller novel The Manchurian Candidate, where a Communist plot sees an American soldier brainwashed into become a sleeper agent assassin. Compelling fiction, but not something the Soviets or the USA ever managed to achieve IRL, as far as we know.
That intelligence services were messing around with people’s brains using drugs around the same time Manson and his followers were taking LSD is compelling to O’Neill. The journalist also investigated Operation CHAOS, a CIA project to surveil American citizens involved in protests and anti-war organising – including hippies.
MKUltra left plenty of damage in the two decades before it was disbanded. In one tragic incident a CIA employee named Frank Olsen fell to his death out of a window in 1953, nine days after he was dosed with LSD without his knowledge. Morris explored the circumstances around Olsen’s death in 2017, with a six-part docudrama series called Wormwood, which also aired on Netflix.
So was Manson connected to MKUltra experiments? Or did he simply stumble upon a similar technique for using LSD and his paranoid ramblings to encourage his hippie followers to go on a targeted killing spree?
The CIA itself has refuted O’Neill’s claim that it was ever connected with Manson. “The author cannot definitively tie Manson to MKUltra or CHAOS; he can only imply it on circumstantial evidence,” read an officer’s official book review (really).
Do you believe there’s a conspiracy? You’ll have to watch the documentary to make your own mind up.
CHAOS: The Manson Murders airs on Netflix on March 7
