LSD, CIA, & Nazis / Dogman Tales

About the show

In the first half, journalist Norman Ohler joined George Knapp to reveal the untold story of how Nazi experiments into psychedelics covertly influenced CIA research and eventually became part of the foundation of America's War on Drugs. This policy ended up holding back therapeutic research of psychedelic drugs like LSD for decades, he pointed out. During WWII, the Nazis had experimented with psychedelic compounds on prisoners in a concentration camp outside Munich to try and extract secrets like the drug was a 'truth serum,' he recounted. Ohler traced the beginning of the drug war to 1945 in post-war Berlin, when drug use was rampant, and America sent the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Arthur J. Giuliani, to the divided city to regulate the situation. He pushed for the prohibition of various substances, which ended up becoming a kind of blueprint for drug policy around the world.

Ohler sought out information in the archives of the Novartis pharmaceutical company (which had merged with Sandoz, the company that initially synthesized LSD). During the Cold War, the CIA bought a huge stockpile of LSD from Sandoz in Switzerland to conduct experiments and tried to convince the company only to sell it to Western countries, he reported. In recent years, studies have shown that in low doses or microdoses, LSD could be effective for a variety of conditions and diseases like dementia. "LSD is a disruption of your brain chemistry...for not only for those hours while it lasts, but they found that up to two weeks afterwards, your brain is still animated from that experience and creates new neurons," he remarked.

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Bordering TN and KY, legends abound in the Land Between the Lakes. In the latter half, Aaron Deese, researcher and former editor of Paranormality Magazine, revealed how this stretch of untamed wilderness might harbor a creature known as a werewolf in the past, or as many call today, Dogman. He uses the terms interchangeably but indicated that the Dogman is thought by many to be an unidentified biological species of upright canines, as opposed to the shapeshifter aspect of werewolf lore. There are four typical characteristics of a Dogman-- an elongated snout, pointed ears, glowing eyes (sometimes independent of any light source), and bipedal locomotion-- walking on two legs. Very often, witnesses say the creature may start on two legs and then drop to four, or vice versa.

One of the witnesses at the Land Between the Lakes, teacher and researcher Mike Smith, told Deese about strange vocalizations and a footprint made into a cast that doesn't seem to match any known animals. One of the most striking recurring traits of people who have encounters with the Dogman is a kind of PTSD-- they have nightmares, insomnia, and are hesitant to go back in the woods, Deese detailed. "And very often we're talking about law enforcement officers, military veterans, hunters, ranchers, farmers, people who are accustomed to being in dangerous situations...[and] accustomed to being around wildlife," he added. The sounds people have described of the creature are of an eerie half-human/half-canine growl. Further, there are stories of people being attacked or injured, but oddly, reports have either been kept quiet or have never been written down at all, Deese noted.