Project OFTEN

The agency's confirmed flirtation with the occult: drugs, demonology, and fortune tellers on invoice.

You are a soldier in the late 1960s, and you have volunteered for what they told you was a routine medical study. What you don't know is that the compound they are about to give you was chosen by a program with a quiet, forgettable name: Project OFTEN. And decades later, that name will get tangled up in one of the strangest rumors in the whole history of American intelligence. Let's separate what's documented from what's legend, because here the two live very close together. What's documented: Project OFTEN was a real CIA effort, running around 1968 into the early 1970s, working alongside the U.S. Army's Chemical Corps at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. Edgewood is no myth — thousands of servicemen passed through its drug-testing programs, exposed to psychochemicals, incapacitating agents, and experimental compounds. OFTEN's documented purpose was to study the long-term effects of such drugs, part of the same sprawling world of CIA behavioral research that gave us MKULTRA. When the Church Committee and later investigators pried open the CIA's drug files, this collaboration with the Army — the search for chemicals that could alter the human mind — was firmly on the record. So here's where it gets strange. According to journalist Gordon Thomas, in books like "Journey Into Madness" and "Secrets and Lies," Project OFTEN didn't stop at pharmacology. Thomas reported that the program's reach drifted toward the paranormal — that the CIA consulted astrologers, occultists, even a self-described practitioner of the "black arts," chasing the question of whether drugs could unlock psychic powers or whether the occult held anything a Cold War intelligence agency could weaponize. In some tellings, this bleeds toward the old grimoire tradition of the Goetia, the medieval catalog of summoned spirits — the idea that Langley's men were, however skeptically, poking at demonology. And this is exactly where you have to keep your footing. The drug research is documented. The occult angle is not verified by the declassified record — it rests largely on Gordon Thomas's sourcing and named informants, and it has never been confirmed by released government files. It may be true, exaggerated, or a case of a real program acquiring a supernatural aura in the retelling. We document that the claim exists and who made it. We do not tell you it happened. What we can say plainly: an intelligence agency that was already dosing unwitting Americans under MKULTRA, and testing soldiers at Edgewood, had clearly decided the human mind was a battlefield. Whether that battlefield ever officially included black candles and summoning circles is a door the paper trail leaves ajar. OFTEN sits between two worlds on our map. Pull one thread and you land in the hard, documented horror of MKULTRA, the CIA's mind-control umbrella. Pull the other and you slip into the Goetia, the occult tradition the legend says these men came knocking on. Follow whichever unsettles you more.