Authentic pictures from MKUltra are scarce because the CIA destroyed almost all of the program’s records in 1973. What you can actually find and view today falls into four groups: scanned pages of declassified financial and administrative documents (heavily redacted), exterior photographs of the buildings where experiments took place, identification photos and portraits of known participants, and a related Army film of soldiers under LSD. There is essentially no surviving imagery of CIA experiments in progress, and understanding why is part of understanding what the visual record contains.
Why So Few Images Survived
In January 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms authorized the destruction of MKUltra’s files. The shredding was carried out by Technical Services Division staff on verbal orders from Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the program and was retiring alongside Helms.1United States Senate. Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification Gottlieb later testified that Helms personally told him to do it, and Helms confirmed the account.2National Security Archive. The Top Secret Testimony of CIA’s MKULTRA Chief, 50 Years Later
The Senate hearings describe the destroyed material only as “records,” without specifying whether photographs, film reels, or laboratory notebooks were among them.1United States Senate. Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification The destruction was thorough enough that the CIA itself believed all MKUltra files were gone.
That belief held until 1977, when a CIA employee responding to Freedom of Information Act requests found seven boxes of MKUltra material at the agency’s Retired Records Center outside Washington. The documents had escaped the purge because they were filed under the Budget and Fiscal Section rather than under the project name. The recovered boxes had also eluded searches conducted for the 1975 Church Committee investigation.1United States Senate. Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification Nearly every “MKUltra picture” that shows a document rather than a person or a place comes from those seven boxes.
What the Declassified Pages Look Like
Most images circulating online under the label “MKUltra pictures” are scans of these administrative records, not photographs of experiments. The pages are typewritten on government letterhead, stamped with classification markings, and covered in heavy black redactions blocking names, dollar amounts, and institutions. Handwritten marginal notes and internal routing slips show how approvals moved through the agency.
Budget ledgers and invoice authorizations dominate. Some pages record fee authorizations for contractors and academic researchers. Others are internal memos about funding channels designed to conceal CIA involvement. The visual character is stark: high-contrast black ink on aging paper, with redaction bars breaking up every page. The documents look bureaucratic because that is what they are. The program’s operational files, the ones likely to contain experimental data and imagery, were the ones Gottlieb destroyed.
These pages do not depict subjects, procedures, or laboratories. Their value is administrative. They prove the program existed, show its institutional reach, and reveal how money moved to researchers.
Photographs of Research Facilities
Some of the most recognizable MKUltra-related images are of buildings. The Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal appears most often. The building, originally a mansion built by a Scottish shipping magnate, served as a psychiatric hospital where Dr. D. Ewen Cameron carried out experiments funded through MKUltra subprojects.3National Security Archive. CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection Photographs of the ivy-covered stone facade show a stately campus building. Cameron used the institute to conduct what he called “depatterning,” combining heavy sedation, extended electroshock, and prolonged sensory deprivation to reduce patients to near-infantile mental states. Patients were sometimes forced to listen to repeated audio loops for up to 20 hours a day while under drug-induced comas.
Operation Midnight Climax Safehouses
A different set of facility photographs relates to Operation Midnight Climax, which ran CIA safehouses in San Francisco and New York. The San Francisco safehouse at 225 Chestnut Street on Telegraph Hill was outfitted by narcotics agent George Hunter White with one-way mirrors, hidden microphones, and decor meant to look like an ordinary apartment. White reportedly hung Toulouse-Lautrec posters and observed from behind the mirror with a pitcher of martinis and a portable toilet at his post.
Photographs of these locations, where they exist, show nondescript urban apartments and residential interiors. The surveillance modifications were designed to be invisible to the people being observed.
Photographs of Participants
Direct photographs of people during MKUltra experiments are essentially nonexistent in the public record. The surviving images of subjects come from other contexts: identification photos, professional portraits, or pictures taken before or after involvement.
Ken Kesey, later the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was a Stanford graduate student in creative writing when he volunteered in 1959 to take psychoactive drugs at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. He was paid to ingest LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other substances, and wrote about his experiences for the researchers. Photos of Kesey from this period show a young man in an academic setting.
James “Whitey” Bulger’s involvement was different in kind. While serving time in federal prison for bank robbery in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bulger was offered reduced sentence time in exchange for participating in what he was told was research into a cure for schizophrenia. He was given LSD repeatedly. The most frequently circulated MKUltra-related image of Bulger is a prison mugshot.
Frank Olson, a CIA scientist, appears in another commonly reproduced set of images. Olson was secretly dosed with LSD by a colleague during a 1953 retreat and died days later after falling from a New York City hotel window. His death was initially ruled a suicide, though his family has long disputed the finding. Photographs of Olson, his family, and the hotel are widely reproduced when the program is discussed.1United States Senate. Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification
These images tell you almost nothing about the experimental experience itself. They show faces without context.
The Army LSD Film Often Grouped With MKUltra
The closest thing to actual footage of MKUltra-style experiments comes not from the CIA program but from a related Army Chemical Corps effort at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. A 16mm military film titled “Effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) on Troops Marching,” produced around 1958, shows soldiers attempting to perform drills after being dosed with LSD. The grainy black-and-white footage, now widely available online, shows troops stumbling, laughing, and losing coordination. The Edgewood Arsenal program was a separate effort focused on developing chemical incapacitants for battlefield use, and it ultimately led to the weaponization of Agent BZ rather than LSD.
This footage is often presented alongside MKUltra material because the programs overlapped in time and method, but it is Army, not CIA. The CIA’s own experimental footage, if it ever existed, was presumably among the material destroyed in 1973.
Where to View the Records Today
The CIA’s FOIA Electronic Reading Room hosts a searchable collection of declassified MKUltra documents. A search for “MKULTRA” on the reading room’s website returns scanned pages from the surviving financial records, internal memos, and related correspondence.4Central Intelligence Agency. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room – MKULTRA Scan quality varies. Some pages are cleanly legible; others are faded or heavily redacted.
The National Security Archive at George Washington University maintains a separate collection built from FOIA documents originally obtained by journalist John Marks, who filed the first requests on MKUltra and later donated his research papers to the archive. In 2024, the Archive and ProQuest published a scholarly collection of more than 1,200 records titled “CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA.”3National Security Archive. CIA Behavior Control Experiments Focus of New Scholarly Collection
The full 1977 Senate hearing, including CIA Director Stansfield Turner’s testimony about the recovered boxes and appendices describing each category of subproject, is available as a PDF through the Senate Intelligence Committee.1United States Senate. Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification For anyone tracking the program through primary sources, that document is the best starting point. The pictures are few. The paper trail, incomplete as it is, runs deep.