The Window Experiment: Frank Olson and the MKULTRA Cover-Up

In 1953, a government scientist fell—or was pushed—from a hotel window in New York City. The official story changed. The truth never surfaced.

This episode of Unsettled: The Hidden Record investigates the death of Frank Olson, a bioweapons researcher for the U.S. Army and CIA, whose mysterious fall from the Statler Hotel became the first public crack in the armor of Project MKULTRA.

Olson had been unknowingly dosed with LSD by CIA colleagues. Days later, he was dead. What followed was a decades-long campaign of secrecy, misdirection, and disinformation. Only in the 1970s did Congress begin to uncover the deeper program of psychological experimentation, chemical control, and human testing.

Was Olson silenced for what he knew? And how many others were caught in MKULTRA’s shadow?