Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny (2025) s01e07 Episode Script
Dark Science
1
Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have
done strange and even terrible
things in the name of national interest,
including scientific projects so shocking,
they are kept secret for decades.
From experimenting on orphans
He'd force-feed the
children, stimulate the wrist.
They'd start salivating.
To breeding super soldiers using apes.
He ultimately wanted to
create a living war machine.
And even to weaponizing
incurable diseases.
These guys are playing with fire.
What could possibly go wrong?
Just how far will nations
go to gain an edge?
Now it's time to bring
these dark experiments into the light.
During world war ii,
the Nazis and the allies
are locked in a race to
develop a nuclear weapon.
But little is known about how radioactivity
affects people exposed to it.
To learn more, one nation conducts
covert experiments that
are covered up for decades.
That nation is the United States.
Oak Ridge is the headquarters
of the Manhattan project,
the U.S. quest to
develop an atomic bomb.
Scientists here are facing a problem.
They are working with
radioactive elements
they know are dangerous.
But they don't yet fully understand
the risks of exposure.
Workers must protect themselves
from the "hot stuff,"
as they call radioactive materials.
But the deadly radiation
from the "hot stuff" is
invisible and hard to avoid.
Sometimes workers
even inhale plutonium dust.
If this dust gets into the lungs,
it can get into the bloodstream
and travel throughout the body.
So they need to determine,
what is a safe exposure
limit for scientists?
And what is going to be lethal?
So the Manhattan
project scientists turned
to testing, first on animals.
It's reported that they used
25,000 mice, and even dogs.
But they want more information.
They felt that, you know,
the physiological reactions
of mice and dogs might be different
in significant ways from humans.
So to safeguard their staff,
they need even more reliable tests.
The Manhattan project
science committee decides
to go one step further.
They will run radiation
exposure tests on humans.
The only question is, where to begin?
They decide to start close to home.
An ambulance speeds
through oak Ridge,
rushing construction worker ebb Cade
to the hospital after a head-on collision
with a dump truck.
Ebb Cade is in a horrific car accident.
He shatters his arm and his leg.
But when he goes to the hospital,
the doctors start a course of treatment
that really isn't consistent
for broken bones.
That's because ebb Cade
is about to become
the Manhattan project's
first human radiation testing subject.
In the hospital, ebb
Cade is being injected
with a syringe that's only
marked with the number 49.
In a few days, he starts
to feel absolutely terrible.
It turns out that 49,
the substance that
Cade was injected with,
was the code name for plutonium.
Without his knowledge or consent,
scientists make Cade
part of their experiments.
Cade is injected with 4.7 milligrams
of plutonium, five times what is deemed
to be safe for human exposure.
They delay Cade's treatment
for his shattered arm and leg
so that they can take
bone samples from him
after a few days of radiation exposure.
As if that's not enough damage,
the scientists pull out 15 of Cade's teeth.
It's like they don't give
a damn about this guy.
They send the teeth,
along with bone samples,
to the labs at los Alamos.
As soon as he can move, ebb Cade gets
out of the facility where
he's being treated.
But by that point, it's kind of too late.
He's already been exposed to plutonium.
He's already been irradiated.
A few years after this
incident, he's gone blind.
And he eventually dies in 1953.
Cade never knew what
had happened to him.
Ebb Cade is not the only victim
of the secret radiation exposure testing.
Between 1945 and 1947,
Manhattan project scientists
used 18 other unsuspecting civilians
as human Guinea pigs.
They injected these
people with plutonium
and other radioactive compounds
and just waited to see
what would happen.
These experiments
stay secret for decades
Until 1987, when a junior reporter
in Albuquerque, new Mexico, stumbles
across something strange.
Eileen welsome is a new
neighborhoods reporter
at "the Albuquerque tribune."
One day, welsome is flicking
through declassified documents
from kirtland air force base
about radioactive waste.
There's a footnote in one of the reports
that she's looking at
that makes reference
to plutonium exposure experiments.
And that sets off alarm bells right there.
Plutonium is one of the most dangerous
elements in the world.
So welsome sets off on
an investigative deep-dive.
Over a period of five years,
welsome tracks down
retired government scientists
and historians.
In 1993, welsome
publishes a series of articles
exposing the Manhattan project's
radiation testing on
unsuspecting citizens.
Welsome's investigation
quickly becomes public.
She's going to win the pulitzer prize
for her reporting on this issue.
President Clinton is
going to wind up ordering
a deeper investigation into the allegations
that welsome has brought to light.
They plowed through
a lot of evidence that
had been previously
suppressed, kept at arm's distance
from reporters like
this assiduous member
of "the Albuquerque tribune."
And what they find is
the U.S. government
really did inject American citizens
with radioactive materials
to see what the effects would be.
Whether in war or at peace,
this is one of the most appalling
abuses of government
power in U.S. history.
Finally there was an
acknowledgment that
this had actually happened.
So the government is forced to apologize
and give a payout of $400,000 apiece
to the surviving families
of 12 of the victims.
In 1997, the U.S. congress passes a law
that prohibits the use
of unknowing subjects
in medical research.
As experts from the Manhattan project
experiment on Americans
without their consent,
some researchers in the Soviet union
are also pursuing dark science.
They want to create a new kind of life,
a cross between human and ape.
Seven years after
the Russian revolution,
the Soviet government
cements its power.
Now its leaders look
to stamp out religion,
seeing it as a hindrance
in a socialist society.
Lenin and Stalin are both convinced,
they have to absolutely eradicate religion
if they're going to bring about
the glorious communist revolution.
Following the ideas of Marx,
they think it's the opium of the people.
And it's got to go.
To further that cause, Stalin turns
to a scientist named ilya Ivanov,
who has an unusual
interest in human genetics.
To show off the potential
of this new science,
Ivanov has already
produced crossbreeds.
But in 1924, he decides
to try something far beyond
merging two animals together.
What Ivanov is
proposing is to crossbreed
humans and chimpanzees
to create what he'll call a humanzee.
It's a project that's just so perverse,
it boggles the mind.
But Ivanov is staking his reputation
and his life on its success.
Ivanov is convinced that
if his experiments work
and apes and humans
can successfully interbreed,
that this means they
share a common ancestor.
And therefore, the Bible and the notion
of unique creation is false.
Once Stalin gives Ivanov funding,
the pressure is on to deliver.
Ivanov travels to Guinea,
French west Africa,
and gets to work.
Ivanov artificially inseminates
three female chimpanzees
with human sperm.
Shocker, it doesn't take.
So he decides to flip the experiment
use chimp sperm in a human woman.
This is just so dark and perverted that
it proves to be too much
for the authorities in Guinea.
They've had enough of Ivanov.
And they just expel him from the country.
"You are not welcome here."
Ivanov is terrified at the prospect
of not being able to succeed.
He received serious
funding from the ussr.
And this is not a
government to disappoint.
So you can imagine, the pressure is on.
Let's be honest.
Stalin kills anybody
who makes a promise and can't fulfill it.
Coming up When
Ivanov returns to Russia,
he tries to recruit new
subjects for his experiments.
He wants to entice Soviet women in
and artificially inseminate
them with chimpanzee sperm.
Then the real purpose behind
Ivanov's perverse experiments
is exposed.
What Stalin wants is regiments
of completely obedient,
super capable super soldiers.
In the 1920s, a Russian scientist
named ilya Ivanov engages
in a shocking experiment
with Stalin's support.
He tries to create a hybrid creature
by crossbreeding humans and apes.
His alleged goal?
Challenge the belief
that god created man.
After his experiments in Africa fail,
Ivanov returns home
with four chimpanzees.
He wants to entice Soviet women in
and artificially inseminate
them with chimpanzee sperm.
But the chimp that he has
earmarked to donate samples,
a 26-year-old named Tarzan,
dies of a brain hemorrhage
before he can get a sample.
Ivanov is officially a failure.
And Stalin does what he does
with those who disappoint him.
Ivanov is off to the gulag.
Ivanov's notes and research
disappear for decades,
lost in the labyrinths
of the Soviet archives.
When they're finally uncovered,
they reveal something new.
The real hidden purpose
of Ivanov's experiments
doesn't become known until 2005,
when a revelatory story is published
in "the scotsman" newspaper.
The paper reveals that this was never
about undermining religion.
It was about developing a new breed
of half-human, half-ape super soldiers.
It sounds like something you
would read in a comic book
when you were a kid.
But according to the paper,
Stalin ordered Ivanov to create
a living war machine for the red army.
Consider the physical characteristics
of chimpanzees.
Incredibly strong.
They would ignore pain.
They wouldn't care what type
of food they were being fed.
They would accept any
abuse in service of the state.
What Stalin wants is regiments
of completely obedient,
super capable super soldiers.
Stalin's hybrid human-ape
army never comes to pass.
But just a few years
after Ivanov is carrying out
his research, Japanese scientists are
working on their own dark experiments,
experiments that lead to the largest
biological warfare
attack in human history.
Imperial Japanese
troops invade manchuria
in northeast China and
begin a brutal occupation.
Japan's top microbiologist in the 1930s
is a man named shiro ishii.
And he is posted to manchuria
during the Japanese invasion
of mainland China.
Ishii's mission is to develop
hideous biological weapons
for the Japanese army.
In 1935, with the backing
of the Japanese military,
ishii creates a huge
bio-warfare laboratory.
The imperial Japanese bulldoze a set
of villages at pingfang.
In their place, they construct
a massive new headquarters
for ishii's covert division, unit 731.
It's set to become
one of the most notorious divisions
in the entire Japanese military.
They are creating at
pingfang an eastern Auschwitz.
They're creating a place where
they will perfect the mechanisms
for the extermination of human life.
He creates a cover story
to explain the construction.
He says it's a lumber mill.
And the scientists there
refer to their victims as logs.
The Japanese, over and
over again at special unit 731,
treat Chinese people
as if they are animals,
as if they have no feelings,
as if they have no families,
as if they don't deserve
to live on the planet.
The new facility soon grows
to the size of a small town.
Ishii and his team
round up Chinese citizens
and imprison them there.
What happens next is shocking.
These monsters, these
butchers in unit 731,
they deliberately infect male prisoners
with venereal diseases like syphilis.
And then those same men are forced
to rape female prisoners,
just so ishii can test
disease transmission.
They would inject them
with plague and Anthrax
and then watch them die.
Sometimes it was even worse than that.
As the disease was advancing,
they would conduct a "living dissection,"
a vivisection of the test subject.
They were going to take your organs out
and examine them to see
the progression of disease.
You're still alive while this is happening.
You're awake.
You're not under anesthesia.
They are holding you down
and taking out your organs.
You are going to die,
and you're going to watch it happen.
By 1942, ishii reaches
the culmination of his experiments.
He unleashes biological
warfare on entire cities.
What the Japanese do is they essentially
breed fleas and make sure
that they are plague carriers.
And then they use aerial bombardment
to drop those fleas on
Chinese urban areas,
in the hopes of touching
off a plague epidemic.
Nobody knows for sure how many
people are actually killed.
But estimates have given us numbers
as high as 50,000
people, possibly even more.
This is the largest
biological weapons attack
on people in the whole
war-torn 20th century.
In 1945, the Russians
invade manchuria,
ending Japan's occupation of China.
Ishii's reign of terror is over.
Ishii and their team slaughter
their remaining prisoners.
And then they just run back to Japan,
taking all of this blood-soaked
experimental data with them.
Between 1945 and 1947,
U.S. war crimes investigators
question ishii and the unit 731 team.
Through that interrogation, it was learned
what had been done at special unit 731.
They not only kill about
14,000 Chinese test subjects
living, breathing human beings that are
treated like test animals
they kill off about 50,000 Chinese people
through actual weaponization of the flea.
Despite having clear
proof of ishii's guilt,
investigators decide not to
charge him with any war crimes.
Why doesn't the U.S. prosecute
this known war criminal?
The answer is simple.
The military wants his data.
In exchange for his research,
ishii gets off scot-free.
The facts are revealed in a 1998 letter
from the department of justice.
The U.S. government was
prohibited from conducting
actual ghoulish testing
against human test subjects
that had been an
everyday matter of business
at special unit 731.
And so we wanted to benefit
from it by having access
to the details of all of
the technical information
that his institute had developed.
Sometimes American
authorities made compromises
with horrible people as part of its pursuit
of advantage against the Soviet union.
The leader of unit 731 lives in peace
until his death from
throat cancer in 1959.
During the cold war, the Soviets carry out
covert science experiments
in remote locations.
One place will become
known as plague island.
But it only becomes a
priority for U.S. spy agencies
when a boat strays too close to shore.
The aral sea, deep inside
the Soviet union, 1971.
The research vessel "lev berg"
is working in waters
near a remote island there.
It's a normal day on
board, when suddenly,
the ship runs into something strange.
It's a brown cloud of haze
hovering just above the water,
and it's too late to avoid it.
The ship sails right through it.
On board the ship, a young researcher
comes down with a mysterious illness,
and a terrible rash breaks
out all over her body.
When she gets back to her
home village, her illness spreads.
It's a severe contagion.
Within weeks, three people in the town
are dead, including
two newborn children.
Doctors find out that
what she was infected with
was one of the most deadly diseases
that humans have ever
encountered, smallpox.
Smallpox is terrifying.
It killed more people in the 20th century
than all of the wars in
that century combined.
But the researcher is
vaccinated against smallpox.
She should have been immune to it.
One year later, a fishing boat is found
washed up near the same island.
Inside the boat are two
fishermen, stone-cold dead.
Meanwhile nearby, other fishermen are
bringing in catches filled
with dead and dying fish.
When villagers examine the bodies
of the dead fishermen,
they find them covered
in pustulous swellings.
The lesions on these fishermen
are consistent with bubonic plague,
one of the deadliest diseases
that confronts humankind,
with a fatality rate of about 50%.
When U.S. intelligence agencies
get wind of these strange
deaths, they have questions.
What's happening on this remote island?
The island is located
1,500 miles from Moscow.
Access is restricted by
the Soviet government.
American spies have been trying
to study the island for years.
Photos of the island snapped
from spy planes and satellites
show that it's far from ordinary.
Other settlements nearby have
fishing piers and fish packing sheds.
The secret island
appears to instead have
things like barracks and rifle ranges,
as well as animal
pens, research buildings,
and what appears to be
an open air testing site.
The images confirm
the CIA's worst fears.
The island is clearly a military
scientific research base.
But the question remains,
what kind of horrifying weapons
are being dreamed up and tested there?
What's going on on this island
remains a mystery until
after the end of the cold war.
In 1992, a year after the ussr fails,
Soviet military microbiologist
colonel Ken alibek
flees to america and brings with him
the truth about plague island.
The former insider reveals that the island
is more than just a
military scientific base.
It's devoted to transforming
natural diseases
into deadly weapons bio-warfare,
which is illegal under international law.
For decades, the Soviets have been
experimenting here
with some of the deadliest
diseases known to man.
Beginning in the
1930s, they're attempting
to weaponize everything,
from smallpox and plague
to these monstrous viral diseases
which have no known cure.
They were trying to
make bacterial pathogens
resistant to antibiotics, make viruses
more difficult to detect and treat.
What they hoped to create
were unstoppable plagues,
which they could launch at their enemy:
The United States and her allies.
Things that were
developed on that island still,
to this day, have no cure.
Safety protocols are tight,
but these guys are playing with fire.
And sure enough, things
go wrong, very wrong.
Just a little leak or the smallest spill
can have deadly consequences.
We have no idea how many people
were killed in the process
of developing these weapons.
Were killed in the process
of developing these weapons.
To this day, plague island is
one of the most poisonous
places on the planet.
Many U.S. soldiers
returning from world war ii
carry battle scars, both
physical and mental.
When they seek help,
some receive treatment
that can only be called shocking.
The U.S. army's bombardment
group are flying b-17s
on dangerous daytime raids.
Flying combat missions over Europe
is one of the most dangerous aspects
of world war ii for
American service personnel.
On every mission, these
men were dancing with death.
22-year-old Roman tritz is
one of those American aviators
flying 34 combat missions over Europe.
Tritz sees many of his comrades,
his friends, being shot out of the sky.
B-17 out of control at 3 o'clock.
The unit loses more than 100 planes
over the course of the war.
Come on, you guys.
Get out of that plane.
Bail out!
There's one. He's come
out of the bomb bay.
Yeah, I see him.
It's an experience he'll never forget,
and it'll haunt him
for the rest of his life.
When the war ends in 1945,
Roman tritz comes home
to ticker tape parades
and public adulation.
After being discharged, tritz is given
a clean bill of health by the army medics.
But for the young bomber pilot,
the wartime trauma just won't go away.
When tritz comes home,
his life effectively starts to fall apart.
He can't sleep.
He starts to have
hallucinations and delusions.
Tritz is probably suffering from a form
of post-traumatic
stress disorder, or PTSD,
something people don't
understand at the time.
PTSD as a diagnosis doesn't exist yet.
So doctors call someone
with these symptoms
either shell-shocked or say
that they have battle fatigue.
His parents, who are not
psychiatric professionals,
they don't know what to do with him.
They gave this kid to the U.S. army.
The U.S. army gave him back,
and he was a complete mess.
They couldn't do anything for him.
And so they have him committed.
Training footage released
in 1944 by the U.S. military
suggests what veterans like
tritz might have experienced.
In the psychiatric facility, he is given
66 rounds of the
so-called "needle shower."
He is exposed to intensely hot water,
followed by intensely cold water.
And it was thought
that this would somehow
help him get over this condition.
The doctors try Insulin shock therapy,
which puts tritz into a
medically-induced coma.
The treatment is intended to break
the cycle of mental illness.
They later hit him with 28
rounds of electroshock therapy,
in the hopes that this will improve
tritz's brain chemistry.
When this doesn't work,
medics turn to a new form
of psycho-surgery: Lobotomy.
A lobotomy is a surgical procedure
that was developed in 1935
by Portuguese
neurologist Antonio moniz.
Surgeons use a device called
a leucotome to physically sever
the connection between the frontal lobe
and the thalamus in the brain.
The operation is supposed to work
by eliminating excessive emotions
and stabilizing wild mood swings.
Lobotomy is permanently damaging,
and the va doctors know it.
As far back as 1941,
the American medical association
warns of "severe negative effects."
They report that some 10,000 lobotomies
had already been performed
in the United States.
Some patients don't
survive the procedure.
But those that do, some of them end up
just living out the rest of their lives
almost like just a drooling zombie.
Tritz's parents don't know that,
and they give their consent.
In tomah veterans hospital in Wisconsin,
on the 1st of July, 1953,
tritz is taken into surgery.
At 11:05 A.M., a surgeon peels back
the flesh from his skull
and drills two holes right into it.
Tritz survives the operation,
but he doesn't improve.
After the surgery, tritz experiences
crippling seizures, which the doctors
do attribute to the lobotomy.
He lapses into catatonia
and is plagued by paranoid delusions.
In 2013, more than 50 years after
Roman tritz is lobotomized,
a journalist unearths
evidence deep in the national archives.
Against all odds,
journalist Michael Phillips
actually uses this information
to track down Roman tritz,
who is still alive seven
decades after world war ii,
in la crosse, Wisconsin.
Years later, even into his old age,
Roman is still suffering
from the after-effects
of his brutal lobotomy.
He still has paranoid delusions
about being pursued by the FBI.
He also makes references
to what he calls his "magnetic brain."
Phillips discovers that tritz is not alone.
Michael Phillips finds a memorandum
that mentions how
lobotomies are being used
to treat veterans for
psychiatric conditions.
The memo shows they
are being performed at
some 50 hospitals across america.
Between 1947 and 1950,
the va had carried out
lobotomies in 1,500 American veterans.
And hundreds more
are lobotomized later.
Roman tritz lives to see
his story made public.
He dies at age 97, he dies at age 97,
still blaming the government
for his brutal surgery.
At the beginning of the cold war,
Washington is on edge about the threat
of communist infiltration.
In 1956, a book by Edward hunter
is published that confirms
the public's worst fears.
Its subject the Soviets are developing
brainwashing as a weapon.
When Edward hunter
comes out with his book,
it really just throws a lot of kerosene
on a fire that was ready to explode.
Hunter claims that Soviet
brainwashing science is
now so advanced, it can create a kind of
mass hypnosis across the country
that would Rob Americans
of their free will entirely.
He suggests that the
Soviets could do this
at such a wide scale to
create an army of puppets
under Soviet control.
Hunter bases his claims on the idea
that Americans captured
during the Korean war
were brainwashed into
making false confessions.
I came over here and
dropped germ bombs on people.
Hunter traces Soviet
brainwashing experiments
back decades to before
the Russian revolution,
to nobel laureate Ivan pavlov.
Pavlov is world famous for his pioneering
research into the brain.
A film produced in Russia in 1926
illustrates his work with dogs.
Pavlov is most known
for his conditioning dogs.
He trained dogs to react to a sound.
Every time they heard the sound,
they would get a treat,
to the point where,
every time they heard the sound,
they would start salivating
in anticipation of that treat.
Pavlov calls this behavior
"conditioned response."
What he's proved is that, essentially,
the dogs' brains can be hijacked.
Hunter gets a lead that
pavlov's experiments
went far further than most realize.
Hunter learns from a source
that pavlov's experiments
didn't end with dogs.
He hears that there is
hidden secret footage
of other experiments.
And he sets out to find it.
After months of digging,
he manages to trace a copy.
But his book keeps
the source under wraps.
When he sits down to
watch the secret film,
he discovers something terrifying.
The footage from 1926 proves that
pavlov's work extends into
much darker experiments
than his famous animal research.
What hunter finds is footage of pavlov
running the same experiments,
but with human children.
He conditions young orphaned boys
to have the same salivating
response to a sound
that he did with dogs.
He'd force-feed the
children, stimulate the wrist,
force-feed the children,
stimulate the wrist.
They'd start salivating.
Pavlov's proving that humans can be
conditioned, just like dogs.
Hunter wonders if
the Soviets aren't using
this kind of conditioning
brainwashing tactic
on prisoners of war.
If a human can be conditioned,
then how far could that conditioning go?
Two years after his book comes out,
Edward hunter testifies
before the house committee
on UN-American activities.
Hunter warns that the
U.S. is losing the cold war
because the Soviets have
such a massive head start
when it comes to psychological warfare
and mind control techniques.
He wonders if the Soviets
haven't honed this research
and have been doing mass
brainwashing for decades.
In a country that's already on edge
about the communist
menace, hunter's report
about the advances
in brainwashing science
by the Soviets just ratchets up that fear
to a pitch of utter hysteria.
There's a final twist in the tale
of "journalist" Edward hunter.
So a number of years
later, it was discovered that
Edward hunter actually
wasn't who he purported to be.
He's an agent of the CIA,
operating in their propaganda wing.
Pavlov's experiments
on children were real.
But the link hunter makes
to Soviet mind control
is entirely fictitious.
His writing about brainwashing
is, in effect, a black op,
designed to spread mistrust
and hatred of the communists
during the cold war.
Once you have a
negative thought or feeling
about an individual or a
group or an organization,
it doesn't take much to continue
to build that confirmation
bias that they are bad,
that they're trying to do
nefarious things against us.
And so that's what he
was doing by spreading
this disinformation.
When citizens tear down
the Berlin wall in 1989,
investigators discover the crimes
of east German scientists.
They've doped their athletes
and used psychological warfare
on their own citizens.
They also uncover stranger experiments.
For decades after the second world war,
east Germans lived in terror
of their notorious
secret police, the stasi.
At the head of the stasi,
we have erich mielke.
He's a stalinist enforcer,
and has no problem
doing that enforcing
in his own homeland.
He's in charge of the most pervasive
police state in modern history.
And frankly, he's terrifying.
The west German press
dubbed him the master of fear.
As the regime collapses,
east German citizens
storm the stasi headquarters.
Inside they find agents frantically
shredding documents, desperately
trying to cover their tracks.
But there's simply too
much evidence to hide.
There are literally 68 miles of shelving,
just chock full of spy agency
files on their own citizens.
There's photos, tape recordings
all kinds of invasions of citizen privacy.
But there's also
something more puzzling.
As they continue through
these endless miles of shelves,
they come to what are
effectively Mason jars,
sealed shut, inside of which, typically,
are little bits of yellow cloth.
The citizens are left wondering,
what exactly are these for?
What is the purpose of
these sealed containers?
Shortly after, newspaper
articles expose the answer.
The jars have actual
people's scent inside them.
They're smell jars.
These are jars full of
people's actual body odors.
He has been collecting body odors.
Mielke believes that a person's scent
is every bit as individual
as their fingerprints are.
So just as police around the world
keep files on fingerprints of suspects,
that's what mielke is
doing with body odor.
This is actually good science.
Modern researchers
find that by analyzing
some 15 volatile organic compounds,
they can identify gender and ethnicity
with up to 80% accuracy.
In order to satisfy his paranoia,
mielke orders the creation
of a library of body odor.
The stasi take the collection of odors
very seriously.
They go about the country
stealing articles of clothing.
So, sorry about your favorite sweater.
They'll go into a home
when no one's there,
leave a little vial that will collect
the odors in the house.
No constitutional
issues in east Germany.
And they'll come back
again and collect that.
What agents actually do is,
they wipe some of their suspects
in their sensitive areas
with a special cloth
to collect their scent.
Another method involves
calling suspects in for interrogation.
And when they go in, they're forced
to sit in a special chair.
The suspect, this local German,
is brought in, interrogated,
intentionally pushed to a point
of great nervousness
so that they will sweat.
And as that sweat then
seeps down into the fabric,
it's being absorbed by this bit of cloth
underneath the upholstery.
But mielke has a problem.
Humans can't track these smells.
So he turns to dogs.
Compared to humans,
dogs have an incredibly
refined sense of smell.
They have up to 300
million olfactory receptors
in their noses.
And this means their noses are up to
100,000 times more
sensitive than those of humans.
So the stasi trained
dozens of specialized dogs
to smell the odor within a jar, and then go
track that out and
about in the city to find
their potential suspects.
Mielke's strange
experiment causes real harm.
It's used to track down and
imprison unknown numbers
of enemies of the state.
About one in six east Germans were,
in fact, somehow answering
to, working on, serving, the stasi.
So everywhere you
go in life, imagine this.
Whether you're at school,
work, perhaps even at home,
you never know just
who might be collecting
this vast catalog of
odors, scents, and smells
from the citizenry, with the expectation
that this will enable
them to identify a criminal
or enemy of the state in the future.
Mielke keeps collecting
his sinister smell samples
Until east German communism
is finally overthrown in 1989.
From treatments given
to American citizens
without consent
to attempts to weaponize
deadly diseases,
dark experiments all too often
take place in the shadows.
But with luck and hard work,
these secrets can be revealed.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."
Throughout time,
governments and the people
who work for them have
done strange and even terrible
things in the name of national interest,
including scientific projects so shocking,
they are kept secret for decades.
From experimenting on orphans
He'd force-feed the
children, stimulate the wrist.
They'd start salivating.
To breeding super soldiers using apes.
He ultimately wanted to
create a living war machine.
And even to weaponizing
incurable diseases.
These guys are playing with fire.
What could possibly go wrong?
Just how far will nations
go to gain an edge?
Now it's time to bring
these dark experiments into the light.
During world war ii,
the Nazis and the allies
are locked in a race to
develop a nuclear weapon.
But little is known about how radioactivity
affects people exposed to it.
To learn more, one nation conducts
covert experiments that
are covered up for decades.
That nation is the United States.
Oak Ridge is the headquarters
of the Manhattan project,
the U.S. quest to
develop an atomic bomb.
Scientists here are facing a problem.
They are working with
radioactive elements
they know are dangerous.
But they don't yet fully understand
the risks of exposure.
Workers must protect themselves
from the "hot stuff,"
as they call radioactive materials.
But the deadly radiation
from the "hot stuff" is
invisible and hard to avoid.
Sometimes workers
even inhale plutonium dust.
If this dust gets into the lungs,
it can get into the bloodstream
and travel throughout the body.
So they need to determine,
what is a safe exposure
limit for scientists?
And what is going to be lethal?
So the Manhattan
project scientists turned
to testing, first on animals.
It's reported that they used
25,000 mice, and even dogs.
But they want more information.
They felt that, you know,
the physiological reactions
of mice and dogs might be different
in significant ways from humans.
So to safeguard their staff,
they need even more reliable tests.
The Manhattan project
science committee decides
to go one step further.
They will run radiation
exposure tests on humans.
The only question is, where to begin?
They decide to start close to home.
An ambulance speeds
through oak Ridge,
rushing construction worker ebb Cade
to the hospital after a head-on collision
with a dump truck.
Ebb Cade is in a horrific car accident.
He shatters his arm and his leg.
But when he goes to the hospital,
the doctors start a course of treatment
that really isn't consistent
for broken bones.
That's because ebb Cade
is about to become
the Manhattan project's
first human radiation testing subject.
In the hospital, ebb
Cade is being injected
with a syringe that's only
marked with the number 49.
In a few days, he starts
to feel absolutely terrible.
It turns out that 49,
the substance that
Cade was injected with,
was the code name for plutonium.
Without his knowledge or consent,
scientists make Cade
part of their experiments.
Cade is injected with 4.7 milligrams
of plutonium, five times what is deemed
to be safe for human exposure.
They delay Cade's treatment
for his shattered arm and leg
so that they can take
bone samples from him
after a few days of radiation exposure.
As if that's not enough damage,
the scientists pull out 15 of Cade's teeth.
It's like they don't give
a damn about this guy.
They send the teeth,
along with bone samples,
to the labs at los Alamos.
As soon as he can move, ebb Cade gets
out of the facility where
he's being treated.
But by that point, it's kind of too late.
He's already been exposed to plutonium.
He's already been irradiated.
A few years after this
incident, he's gone blind.
And he eventually dies in 1953.
Cade never knew what
had happened to him.
Ebb Cade is not the only victim
of the secret radiation exposure testing.
Between 1945 and 1947,
Manhattan project scientists
used 18 other unsuspecting civilians
as human Guinea pigs.
They injected these
people with plutonium
and other radioactive compounds
and just waited to see
what would happen.
These experiments
stay secret for decades
Until 1987, when a junior reporter
in Albuquerque, new Mexico, stumbles
across something strange.
Eileen welsome is a new
neighborhoods reporter
at "the Albuquerque tribune."
One day, welsome is flicking
through declassified documents
from kirtland air force base
about radioactive waste.
There's a footnote in one of the reports
that she's looking at
that makes reference
to plutonium exposure experiments.
And that sets off alarm bells right there.
Plutonium is one of the most dangerous
elements in the world.
So welsome sets off on
an investigative deep-dive.
Over a period of five years,
welsome tracks down
retired government scientists
and historians.
In 1993, welsome
publishes a series of articles
exposing the Manhattan project's
radiation testing on
unsuspecting citizens.
Welsome's investigation
quickly becomes public.
She's going to win the pulitzer prize
for her reporting on this issue.
President Clinton is
going to wind up ordering
a deeper investigation into the allegations
that welsome has brought to light.
They plowed through
a lot of evidence that
had been previously
suppressed, kept at arm's distance
from reporters like
this assiduous member
of "the Albuquerque tribune."
And what they find is
the U.S. government
really did inject American citizens
with radioactive materials
to see what the effects would be.
Whether in war or at peace,
this is one of the most appalling
abuses of government
power in U.S. history.
Finally there was an
acknowledgment that
this had actually happened.
So the government is forced to apologize
and give a payout of $400,000 apiece
to the surviving families
of 12 of the victims.
In 1997, the U.S. congress passes a law
that prohibits the use
of unknowing subjects
in medical research.
As experts from the Manhattan project
experiment on Americans
without their consent,
some researchers in the Soviet union
are also pursuing dark science.
They want to create a new kind of life,
a cross between human and ape.
Seven years after
the Russian revolution,
the Soviet government
cements its power.
Now its leaders look
to stamp out religion,
seeing it as a hindrance
in a socialist society.
Lenin and Stalin are both convinced,
they have to absolutely eradicate religion
if they're going to bring about
the glorious communist revolution.
Following the ideas of Marx,
they think it's the opium of the people.
And it's got to go.
To further that cause, Stalin turns
to a scientist named ilya Ivanov,
who has an unusual
interest in human genetics.
To show off the potential
of this new science,
Ivanov has already
produced crossbreeds.
But in 1924, he decides
to try something far beyond
merging two animals together.
What Ivanov is
proposing is to crossbreed
humans and chimpanzees
to create what he'll call a humanzee.
It's a project that's just so perverse,
it boggles the mind.
But Ivanov is staking his reputation
and his life on its success.
Ivanov is convinced that
if his experiments work
and apes and humans
can successfully interbreed,
that this means they
share a common ancestor.
And therefore, the Bible and the notion
of unique creation is false.
Once Stalin gives Ivanov funding,
the pressure is on to deliver.
Ivanov travels to Guinea,
French west Africa,
and gets to work.
Ivanov artificially inseminates
three female chimpanzees
with human sperm.
Shocker, it doesn't take.
So he decides to flip the experiment
use chimp sperm in a human woman.
This is just so dark and perverted that
it proves to be too much
for the authorities in Guinea.
They've had enough of Ivanov.
And they just expel him from the country.
"You are not welcome here."
Ivanov is terrified at the prospect
of not being able to succeed.
He received serious
funding from the ussr.
And this is not a
government to disappoint.
So you can imagine, the pressure is on.
Let's be honest.
Stalin kills anybody
who makes a promise and can't fulfill it.
Coming up When
Ivanov returns to Russia,
he tries to recruit new
subjects for his experiments.
He wants to entice Soviet women in
and artificially inseminate
them with chimpanzee sperm.
Then the real purpose behind
Ivanov's perverse experiments
is exposed.
What Stalin wants is regiments
of completely obedient,
super capable super soldiers.
In the 1920s, a Russian scientist
named ilya Ivanov engages
in a shocking experiment
with Stalin's support.
He tries to create a hybrid creature
by crossbreeding humans and apes.
His alleged goal?
Challenge the belief
that god created man.
After his experiments in Africa fail,
Ivanov returns home
with four chimpanzees.
He wants to entice Soviet women in
and artificially inseminate
them with chimpanzee sperm.
But the chimp that he has
earmarked to donate samples,
a 26-year-old named Tarzan,
dies of a brain hemorrhage
before he can get a sample.
Ivanov is officially a failure.
And Stalin does what he does
with those who disappoint him.
Ivanov is off to the gulag.
Ivanov's notes and research
disappear for decades,
lost in the labyrinths
of the Soviet archives.
When they're finally uncovered,
they reveal something new.
The real hidden purpose
of Ivanov's experiments
doesn't become known until 2005,
when a revelatory story is published
in "the scotsman" newspaper.
The paper reveals that this was never
about undermining religion.
It was about developing a new breed
of half-human, half-ape super soldiers.
It sounds like something you
would read in a comic book
when you were a kid.
But according to the paper,
Stalin ordered Ivanov to create
a living war machine for the red army.
Consider the physical characteristics
of chimpanzees.
Incredibly strong.
They would ignore pain.
They wouldn't care what type
of food they were being fed.
They would accept any
abuse in service of the state.
What Stalin wants is regiments
of completely obedient,
super capable super soldiers.
Stalin's hybrid human-ape
army never comes to pass.
But just a few years
after Ivanov is carrying out
his research, Japanese scientists are
working on their own dark experiments,
experiments that lead to the largest
biological warfare
attack in human history.
Imperial Japanese
troops invade manchuria
in northeast China and
begin a brutal occupation.
Japan's top microbiologist in the 1930s
is a man named shiro ishii.
And he is posted to manchuria
during the Japanese invasion
of mainland China.
Ishii's mission is to develop
hideous biological weapons
for the Japanese army.
In 1935, with the backing
of the Japanese military,
ishii creates a huge
bio-warfare laboratory.
The imperial Japanese bulldoze a set
of villages at pingfang.
In their place, they construct
a massive new headquarters
for ishii's covert division, unit 731.
It's set to become
one of the most notorious divisions
in the entire Japanese military.
They are creating at
pingfang an eastern Auschwitz.
They're creating a place where
they will perfect the mechanisms
for the extermination of human life.
He creates a cover story
to explain the construction.
He says it's a lumber mill.
And the scientists there
refer to their victims as logs.
The Japanese, over and
over again at special unit 731,
treat Chinese people
as if they are animals,
as if they have no feelings,
as if they have no families,
as if they don't deserve
to live on the planet.
The new facility soon grows
to the size of a small town.
Ishii and his team
round up Chinese citizens
and imprison them there.
What happens next is shocking.
These monsters, these
butchers in unit 731,
they deliberately infect male prisoners
with venereal diseases like syphilis.
And then those same men are forced
to rape female prisoners,
just so ishii can test
disease transmission.
They would inject them
with plague and Anthrax
and then watch them die.
Sometimes it was even worse than that.
As the disease was advancing,
they would conduct a "living dissection,"
a vivisection of the test subject.
They were going to take your organs out
and examine them to see
the progression of disease.
You're still alive while this is happening.
You're awake.
You're not under anesthesia.
They are holding you down
and taking out your organs.
You are going to die,
and you're going to watch it happen.
By 1942, ishii reaches
the culmination of his experiments.
He unleashes biological
warfare on entire cities.
What the Japanese do is they essentially
breed fleas and make sure
that they are plague carriers.
And then they use aerial bombardment
to drop those fleas on
Chinese urban areas,
in the hopes of touching
off a plague epidemic.
Nobody knows for sure how many
people are actually killed.
But estimates have given us numbers
as high as 50,000
people, possibly even more.
This is the largest
biological weapons attack
on people in the whole
war-torn 20th century.
In 1945, the Russians
invade manchuria,
ending Japan's occupation of China.
Ishii's reign of terror is over.
Ishii and their team slaughter
their remaining prisoners.
And then they just run back to Japan,
taking all of this blood-soaked
experimental data with them.
Between 1945 and 1947,
U.S. war crimes investigators
question ishii and the unit 731 team.
Through that interrogation, it was learned
what had been done at special unit 731.
They not only kill about
14,000 Chinese test subjects
living, breathing human beings that are
treated like test animals
they kill off about 50,000 Chinese people
through actual weaponization of the flea.
Despite having clear
proof of ishii's guilt,
investigators decide not to
charge him with any war crimes.
Why doesn't the U.S. prosecute
this known war criminal?
The answer is simple.
The military wants his data.
In exchange for his research,
ishii gets off scot-free.
The facts are revealed in a 1998 letter
from the department of justice.
The U.S. government was
prohibited from conducting
actual ghoulish testing
against human test subjects
that had been an
everyday matter of business
at special unit 731.
And so we wanted to benefit
from it by having access
to the details of all of
the technical information
that his institute had developed.
Sometimes American
authorities made compromises
with horrible people as part of its pursuit
of advantage against the Soviet union.
The leader of unit 731 lives in peace
until his death from
throat cancer in 1959.
During the cold war, the Soviets carry out
covert science experiments
in remote locations.
One place will become
known as plague island.
But it only becomes a
priority for U.S. spy agencies
when a boat strays too close to shore.
The aral sea, deep inside
the Soviet union, 1971.
The research vessel "lev berg"
is working in waters
near a remote island there.
It's a normal day on
board, when suddenly,
the ship runs into something strange.
It's a brown cloud of haze
hovering just above the water,
and it's too late to avoid it.
The ship sails right through it.
On board the ship, a young researcher
comes down with a mysterious illness,
and a terrible rash breaks
out all over her body.
When she gets back to her
home village, her illness spreads.
It's a severe contagion.
Within weeks, three people in the town
are dead, including
two newborn children.
Doctors find out that
what she was infected with
was one of the most deadly diseases
that humans have ever
encountered, smallpox.
Smallpox is terrifying.
It killed more people in the 20th century
than all of the wars in
that century combined.
But the researcher is
vaccinated against smallpox.
She should have been immune to it.
One year later, a fishing boat is found
washed up near the same island.
Inside the boat are two
fishermen, stone-cold dead.
Meanwhile nearby, other fishermen are
bringing in catches filled
with dead and dying fish.
When villagers examine the bodies
of the dead fishermen,
they find them covered
in pustulous swellings.
The lesions on these fishermen
are consistent with bubonic plague,
one of the deadliest diseases
that confronts humankind,
with a fatality rate of about 50%.
When U.S. intelligence agencies
get wind of these strange
deaths, they have questions.
What's happening on this remote island?
The island is located
1,500 miles from Moscow.
Access is restricted by
the Soviet government.
American spies have been trying
to study the island for years.
Photos of the island snapped
from spy planes and satellites
show that it's far from ordinary.
Other settlements nearby have
fishing piers and fish packing sheds.
The secret island
appears to instead have
things like barracks and rifle ranges,
as well as animal
pens, research buildings,
and what appears to be
an open air testing site.
The images confirm
the CIA's worst fears.
The island is clearly a military
scientific research base.
But the question remains,
what kind of horrifying weapons
are being dreamed up and tested there?
What's going on on this island
remains a mystery until
after the end of the cold war.
In 1992, a year after the ussr fails,
Soviet military microbiologist
colonel Ken alibek
flees to america and brings with him
the truth about plague island.
The former insider reveals that the island
is more than just a
military scientific base.
It's devoted to transforming
natural diseases
into deadly weapons bio-warfare,
which is illegal under international law.
For decades, the Soviets have been
experimenting here
with some of the deadliest
diseases known to man.
Beginning in the
1930s, they're attempting
to weaponize everything,
from smallpox and plague
to these monstrous viral diseases
which have no known cure.
They were trying to
make bacterial pathogens
resistant to antibiotics, make viruses
more difficult to detect and treat.
What they hoped to create
were unstoppable plagues,
which they could launch at their enemy:
The United States and her allies.
Things that were
developed on that island still,
to this day, have no cure.
Safety protocols are tight,
but these guys are playing with fire.
And sure enough, things
go wrong, very wrong.
Just a little leak or the smallest spill
can have deadly consequences.
We have no idea how many people
were killed in the process
of developing these weapons.
Were killed in the process
of developing these weapons.
To this day, plague island is
one of the most poisonous
places on the planet.
Many U.S. soldiers
returning from world war ii
carry battle scars, both
physical and mental.
When they seek help,
some receive treatment
that can only be called shocking.
The U.S. army's bombardment
group are flying b-17s
on dangerous daytime raids.
Flying combat missions over Europe
is one of the most dangerous aspects
of world war ii for
American service personnel.
On every mission, these
men were dancing with death.
22-year-old Roman tritz is
one of those American aviators
flying 34 combat missions over Europe.
Tritz sees many of his comrades,
his friends, being shot out of the sky.
B-17 out of control at 3 o'clock.
The unit loses more than 100 planes
over the course of the war.
Come on, you guys.
Get out of that plane.
Bail out!
There's one. He's come
out of the bomb bay.
Yeah, I see him.
It's an experience he'll never forget,
and it'll haunt him
for the rest of his life.
When the war ends in 1945,
Roman tritz comes home
to ticker tape parades
and public adulation.
After being discharged, tritz is given
a clean bill of health by the army medics.
But for the young bomber pilot,
the wartime trauma just won't go away.
When tritz comes home,
his life effectively starts to fall apart.
He can't sleep.
He starts to have
hallucinations and delusions.
Tritz is probably suffering from a form
of post-traumatic
stress disorder, or PTSD,
something people don't
understand at the time.
PTSD as a diagnosis doesn't exist yet.
So doctors call someone
with these symptoms
either shell-shocked or say
that they have battle fatigue.
His parents, who are not
psychiatric professionals,
they don't know what to do with him.
They gave this kid to the U.S. army.
The U.S. army gave him back,
and he was a complete mess.
They couldn't do anything for him.
And so they have him committed.
Training footage released
in 1944 by the U.S. military
suggests what veterans like
tritz might have experienced.
In the psychiatric facility, he is given
66 rounds of the
so-called "needle shower."
He is exposed to intensely hot water,
followed by intensely cold water.
And it was thought
that this would somehow
help him get over this condition.
The doctors try Insulin shock therapy,
which puts tritz into a
medically-induced coma.
The treatment is intended to break
the cycle of mental illness.
They later hit him with 28
rounds of electroshock therapy,
in the hopes that this will improve
tritz's brain chemistry.
When this doesn't work,
medics turn to a new form
of psycho-surgery: Lobotomy.
A lobotomy is a surgical procedure
that was developed in 1935
by Portuguese
neurologist Antonio moniz.
Surgeons use a device called
a leucotome to physically sever
the connection between the frontal lobe
and the thalamus in the brain.
The operation is supposed to work
by eliminating excessive emotions
and stabilizing wild mood swings.
Lobotomy is permanently damaging,
and the va doctors know it.
As far back as 1941,
the American medical association
warns of "severe negative effects."
They report that some 10,000 lobotomies
had already been performed
in the United States.
Some patients don't
survive the procedure.
But those that do, some of them end up
just living out the rest of their lives
almost like just a drooling zombie.
Tritz's parents don't know that,
and they give their consent.
In tomah veterans hospital in Wisconsin,
on the 1st of July, 1953,
tritz is taken into surgery.
At 11:05 A.M., a surgeon peels back
the flesh from his skull
and drills two holes right into it.
Tritz survives the operation,
but he doesn't improve.
After the surgery, tritz experiences
crippling seizures, which the doctors
do attribute to the lobotomy.
He lapses into catatonia
and is plagued by paranoid delusions.
In 2013, more than 50 years after
Roman tritz is lobotomized,
a journalist unearths
evidence deep in the national archives.
Against all odds,
journalist Michael Phillips
actually uses this information
to track down Roman tritz,
who is still alive seven
decades after world war ii,
in la crosse, Wisconsin.
Years later, even into his old age,
Roman is still suffering
from the after-effects
of his brutal lobotomy.
He still has paranoid delusions
about being pursued by the FBI.
He also makes references
to what he calls his "magnetic brain."
Phillips discovers that tritz is not alone.
Michael Phillips finds a memorandum
that mentions how
lobotomies are being used
to treat veterans for
psychiatric conditions.
The memo shows they
are being performed at
some 50 hospitals across america.
Between 1947 and 1950,
the va had carried out
lobotomies in 1,500 American veterans.
And hundreds more
are lobotomized later.
Roman tritz lives to see
his story made public.
He dies at age 97, he dies at age 97,
still blaming the government
for his brutal surgery.
At the beginning of the cold war,
Washington is on edge about the threat
of communist infiltration.
In 1956, a book by Edward hunter
is published that confirms
the public's worst fears.
Its subject the Soviets are developing
brainwashing as a weapon.
When Edward hunter
comes out with his book,
it really just throws a lot of kerosene
on a fire that was ready to explode.
Hunter claims that Soviet
brainwashing science is
now so advanced, it can create a kind of
mass hypnosis across the country
that would Rob Americans
of their free will entirely.
He suggests that the
Soviets could do this
at such a wide scale to
create an army of puppets
under Soviet control.
Hunter bases his claims on the idea
that Americans captured
during the Korean war
were brainwashed into
making false confessions.
I came over here and
dropped germ bombs on people.
Hunter traces Soviet
brainwashing experiments
back decades to before
the Russian revolution,
to nobel laureate Ivan pavlov.
Pavlov is world famous for his pioneering
research into the brain.
A film produced in Russia in 1926
illustrates his work with dogs.
Pavlov is most known
for his conditioning dogs.
He trained dogs to react to a sound.
Every time they heard the sound,
they would get a treat,
to the point where,
every time they heard the sound,
they would start salivating
in anticipation of that treat.
Pavlov calls this behavior
"conditioned response."
What he's proved is that, essentially,
the dogs' brains can be hijacked.
Hunter gets a lead that
pavlov's experiments
went far further than most realize.
Hunter learns from a source
that pavlov's experiments
didn't end with dogs.
He hears that there is
hidden secret footage
of other experiments.
And he sets out to find it.
After months of digging,
he manages to trace a copy.
But his book keeps
the source under wraps.
When he sits down to
watch the secret film,
he discovers something terrifying.
The footage from 1926 proves that
pavlov's work extends into
much darker experiments
than his famous animal research.
What hunter finds is footage of pavlov
running the same experiments,
but with human children.
He conditions young orphaned boys
to have the same salivating
response to a sound
that he did with dogs.
He'd force-feed the
children, stimulate the wrist,
force-feed the children,
stimulate the wrist.
They'd start salivating.
Pavlov's proving that humans can be
conditioned, just like dogs.
Hunter wonders if
the Soviets aren't using
this kind of conditioning
brainwashing tactic
on prisoners of war.
If a human can be conditioned,
then how far could that conditioning go?
Two years after his book comes out,
Edward hunter testifies
before the house committee
on UN-American activities.
Hunter warns that the
U.S. is losing the cold war
because the Soviets have
such a massive head start
when it comes to psychological warfare
and mind control techniques.
He wonders if the Soviets
haven't honed this research
and have been doing mass
brainwashing for decades.
In a country that's already on edge
about the communist
menace, hunter's report
about the advances
in brainwashing science
by the Soviets just ratchets up that fear
to a pitch of utter hysteria.
There's a final twist in the tale
of "journalist" Edward hunter.
So a number of years
later, it was discovered that
Edward hunter actually
wasn't who he purported to be.
He's an agent of the CIA,
operating in their propaganda wing.
Pavlov's experiments
on children were real.
But the link hunter makes
to Soviet mind control
is entirely fictitious.
His writing about brainwashing
is, in effect, a black op,
designed to spread mistrust
and hatred of the communists
during the cold war.
Once you have a
negative thought or feeling
about an individual or a
group or an organization,
it doesn't take much to continue
to build that confirmation
bias that they are bad,
that they're trying to do
nefarious things against us.
And so that's what he
was doing by spreading
this disinformation.
When citizens tear down
the Berlin wall in 1989,
investigators discover the crimes
of east German scientists.
They've doped their athletes
and used psychological warfare
on their own citizens.
They also uncover stranger experiments.
For decades after the second world war,
east Germans lived in terror
of their notorious
secret police, the stasi.
At the head of the stasi,
we have erich mielke.
He's a stalinist enforcer,
and has no problem
doing that enforcing
in his own homeland.
He's in charge of the most pervasive
police state in modern history.
And frankly, he's terrifying.
The west German press
dubbed him the master of fear.
As the regime collapses,
east German citizens
storm the stasi headquarters.
Inside they find agents frantically
shredding documents, desperately
trying to cover their tracks.
But there's simply too
much evidence to hide.
There are literally 68 miles of shelving,
just chock full of spy agency
files on their own citizens.
There's photos, tape recordings
all kinds of invasions of citizen privacy.
But there's also
something more puzzling.
As they continue through
these endless miles of shelves,
they come to what are
effectively Mason jars,
sealed shut, inside of which, typically,
are little bits of yellow cloth.
The citizens are left wondering,
what exactly are these for?
What is the purpose of
these sealed containers?
Shortly after, newspaper
articles expose the answer.
The jars have actual
people's scent inside them.
They're smell jars.
These are jars full of
people's actual body odors.
He has been collecting body odors.
Mielke believes that a person's scent
is every bit as individual
as their fingerprints are.
So just as police around the world
keep files on fingerprints of suspects,
that's what mielke is
doing with body odor.
This is actually good science.
Modern researchers
find that by analyzing
some 15 volatile organic compounds,
they can identify gender and ethnicity
with up to 80% accuracy.
In order to satisfy his paranoia,
mielke orders the creation
of a library of body odor.
The stasi take the collection of odors
very seriously.
They go about the country
stealing articles of clothing.
So, sorry about your favorite sweater.
They'll go into a home
when no one's there,
leave a little vial that will collect
the odors in the house.
No constitutional
issues in east Germany.
And they'll come back
again and collect that.
What agents actually do is,
they wipe some of their suspects
in their sensitive areas
with a special cloth
to collect their scent.
Another method involves
calling suspects in for interrogation.
And when they go in, they're forced
to sit in a special chair.
The suspect, this local German,
is brought in, interrogated,
intentionally pushed to a point
of great nervousness
so that they will sweat.
And as that sweat then
seeps down into the fabric,
it's being absorbed by this bit of cloth
underneath the upholstery.
But mielke has a problem.
Humans can't track these smells.
So he turns to dogs.
Compared to humans,
dogs have an incredibly
refined sense of smell.
They have up to 300
million olfactory receptors
in their noses.
And this means their noses are up to
100,000 times more
sensitive than those of humans.
So the stasi trained
dozens of specialized dogs
to smell the odor within a jar, and then go
track that out and
about in the city to find
their potential suspects.
Mielke's strange
experiment causes real harm.
It's used to track down and
imprison unknown numbers
of enemies of the state.
About one in six east Germans were,
in fact, somehow answering
to, working on, serving, the stasi.
So everywhere you
go in life, imagine this.
Whether you're at school,
work, perhaps even at home,
you never know just
who might be collecting
this vast catalog of
odors, scents, and smells
from the citizenry, with the expectation
that this will enable
them to identify a criminal
or enemy of the state in the future.
Mielke keeps collecting
his sinister smell samples
Until east German communism
is finally overthrown in 1989.
From treatments given
to American citizens
without consent
to attempts to weaponize
deadly diseases,
dark experiments all too often
take place in the shadows.
But with luck and hard work,
these secrets can be revealed.
I'm David duchovny.
Thanks for watching
"secrets declassified."