Several tens of kilometers from Avignon, the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, still carries a heavy mystery today. In the early 1950s, the town was said to have been mysteriously sprayed with LSD by the CIA. “What are their plans? “, “Experiment for what purpose? “Questions a video posted on TikTok and widely shared on Facebook since last December.
The video shows an excerpt from a television news broadcast on France 3. “At the beginning of the 1950s in Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, the inhabitants had been seized with madness, five of them had been killed” . Originally, the baker’s bread had been singled out as the main suspect before revelations broke out about the involvement of the American intelligence service in the case.
But according to the Internet user, this case would also be linked to chemtrails, these white trails left in the sky by planes. In order to better understand, 20 minutes took a little time travel.
FAKE OFF
We are in August 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit. In this small medieval village of Gard, madness seizes the inhabitants. The person responsible for the case? Bread sold by a baker, Monsieur Briand. The latter would however have been warned of the possible contamination of its products, but would have continued to sell them, recall documents from the National Audiovisual Institute (INA).
You also have to take the context into account. We are at the end of the Second World War and famine is still very present in France. Most products are imported except… bread. “The big mills of Corbeil and the Marseille flour mill are almost the only ones in charge of supplying this territory, creating a dangerous monopoly. The price of bread, fixed administratively, pushes them to reduce their cost as much as possible, causing the marketing of flour of very poor quality, ”returns the Revue histoire site.
The tragic “Night of the Apocalypse”
From August 16, the doctors of Pont-Saint-Esprit noted the first worrying symptoms suggesting collective food poisoning: vomiting, chills or headaches. But in the following weeks, the situation worsens. On the night of August 25 to 26 – “the Night of the Apocalypse”, as the media will call it – the inhabitants are seized with heavy hallucinations. Others even try to throw themselves out of the window. In total, the incident will have left seven dead and more than 250 people intoxicated. Thirty of them will even be interned.
In the following weeks, the investigation concluded that a Viennese miller had been negligent. The bread is also sent to the laboratory to find out about the mysterious bacteria bringing collective madness to the town. But initially, no trace of poison was found among the samples.
No really plausible thesis
At the end of August, a professor announces his conclusions to the examining magistrate of Nîmes. The results show the presence of “a substance with the toxicological and biological identification characteristics of ergot alkaloids that are parasitic on cereals”, relates the magazine Phytoma. In other words, a parasitic fungus secreting lysergic acid, a derivative of LSD. But the hypothesis is finally abandoned because it is very unlikely. Indeed, ergotism was a disease more prevalent in the Middle Ages. But at the material time, his presence was minimal.
Other hypotheses are also emerging, in particular that of mercury. Experts imagine that the flour of the bread could have been accidentally soiled during its conservation. Only this version displeases the millers who ask for a more precise thesis. Result, the conclusions finally show the impossibility of this version.
Other theories such as mold, water contamination or bleaching of flour are also studied, but the investigations still lead to nothing.
CIA involvement?
So what really happened in the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit? In 2009, almost sixty years after the affair, a last track appeared: that of the involvement of the CIA. In his book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, the American journalist Hand Albarelli reveals that the intelligence agency would have organized several chemical tests by spraying LSD from the air.
Originally investigating the suicide of a biochemist Frank Olson, the journalist uses a conversation between a CIA agent and a chemist from the Sandoz laboratory, Albert Hoffman – creator of LSD. A new thesis therefore seems to be taking shape, that of a secret CIA experiment. The purpose of the operation? Experimenting with the effects of LSD with the civilian population.
“It’s just bullshit”
But, very quickly, historians refute this hypothesis. This is notably the case of Steven Kaplan, author of Cursed bread, return to France of forgotten years. “There are so many differences between the symptoms of LSD and those experienced in Pont-Saint-Esprit, it’s just not possible”, he underlined at the microphone of Sensitive Affairs, on France Inter. For him, this hypothesis would indeed not stick with the period of history. “The American priority was to reassure France […] and certainly not to take as an experience a small town bombed by the Americans”. Moreover, still according to the historian, LSD would be too powerful and toxic a drug to be diffused in the air and affect only 300 people. “It’s just bullshit,” he concluded facing Fabrice Drouelle.
In addition, the video published on Tik Tok associates the case with chemtrails, white streaks created after the passage of planes in the sky. A decades-old conspiracy theory that imagines the organization of secret operations in the air allowing the spread of numerous chemicals among civilian populations. It would be the work of the giants of Big Pharma who would let carcinogenic pesticides spread to increase their sales of treatments thereafter. A theory that has never been validated.