This book is basically one long blog post article about how this journalist was commissioned to write a small article on the anniversary of the Manson murders, which turned into a twenty-year-long investigation and a five-hundred-page book.

I would usually dislike the blog post tone, and there were definitely parts where I was thinking 'get on with it, I don't care,' but it's why I say it's a good intro into parapolitics.

From just a normal guy, a sceptic and a mocker of conspiracy, O'Neil tracks his slow acceptance that these theories have much more basis in reality than most people want to believe.

It's a huge book and there is so much in here but he does well to organise the information as best he could. The information is incomplete and scattered but that's not a mark against the author. There is just so much deception and mystery around the Manson murders that anyone offering you a concrete story is lying.

Even without being able to present much of a thesis of his own, O'Neil conclusively proves that the CIA were involved in this and that there was a massive cover-up. I have read these types of books before, and I'm quite familiar with how evil the American government is, but I still find myself shocked by new schemes, operations and crimes all the time.

Anyway MKULTRA succeeded and is hypnotism is real.

There is really no limit to what the CIA is capable of.

Their attempts were sometimes even more unhinged. In 1968, CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned.