The Death of Frank Olson
In 1953, a man named Frank Olson was a secret agent for the CIA. His family was shocked to turn on the news and learn that he jumped out of a window during a business trip. He never showed any signs of depression, and it did not make any sense why he would kill himself. They were told that he was apart of a secret government project that involved LSD, and he could not handle the drugs in his system. He went crazy, and jumped out the window on the 13th story of The Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City. A few years after his death, the CIA officially acknowledged their use of psychedelic drugs in their experiments. The original autopsy report, (which was provided by the CIA) claimed that he had cuts and abrasions on his body, because of the fall.
However, in 1994, after interviewing some of his father’s friends who worked with him in the CIA, Frank’s son Eric Olson became suspicious that they had lied about his true cause of death. He decided to exhume his father’s body. Sure enough, the second autopsy, which was performed by the George Washington University Law Center, showed completely different results than the one provided by the CIA. It showed blunt force trauma to the head, and there were no scratches or lacerations.
Eric Olson now believes that his father was involved with MK-ULTRA and Project Stargate. Olson knows that his father was genuinely a good person, and he would have had moral issues with many of the experiments that were going on. He believes that his father was murdered in order to keep him silent. After performing the autopsy, Olson held a press conference on his front lawn. He wanted to expose the CIA for killing his father. TV cameras and reports showed up to cover the story, but no one included his conspiracy theories about the CIA in their official reports, except for a documentary filmmaker who was looking into Project Stargate. Instead, the reporters spun it as a human interest story of a son who was grieving his father.
The story of Frank Olson has been investigated in multiple documentaries, including the Unsolved Mysteries TV series, the Netflix docu-series “Wormwood”, and more. His story also inspired a suicide written into the script of The Men Who Stare at Goats, but in the movie, it was a catalyst to end the psychic project, rather than spur on more funding.