Olson Murder & French Cover Up breaks in Germany

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here is the official story from MSM organ, Time:

Medicine: St. Anthony's Fire

Not in years had France seen such rain. Farmers slogged stolidly out to their fields to harvest the sodden crops, mill the grain and send it on its way. In little (pop. 4,400) Pont-Saint-Esprit, perched on a bluff along the River Rhone in southern France, the townspeople sat glumly in their bistros sipping wine, watching the swollen river slip past the medieval bridge which gives the town its name.

Then, without warning, pain and sudden death clutched Pont-Saint-Esprit. On a Saturday night three weeks ago, the town's doctors began getting calls from people complaining of heartburn, stomach cramps and fever chills. At first, they thought it was a mild epidemic of meat poisoning. But the calls kept flooding in. By Monday, 70 houses in the village had become tiny hospitals, with most of their families in bed. Then the doctors found their first clue: every one of the patients had eaten bread from the shop of Baker Roch Briand. All eight of Pont-Saint-Esprit's bakeries were ordered temporarily shut.

Red Flowers & Molten Lead. That night the first man died in convulsions. Later, two men who had seemed to be recovering dashed through the narrow streets shouting that enemies were after them. A small boy tried to throttle his mother. Gendarmes went from house to house, collecting pieces of the deadly bread to be sent to Marseille for analysis. Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit's hospital reported four attempts at suicide.

What was the mysterious madness? Pont-Saint-Esprit speculated that the village idiot had hexed Baker Briand's flour, that the flour had been packed in fertilizer sacks, that rats in the grain elevator had contaminated the flour. The police knew better. They had traced the flour back from Briand's bakeshop through the government-controlled flour depot to a mill near Poitiers, nearly 300 miles away.

The Parasite. Last week the word came back from the police laboratory:"We have identified a vegetable alkaloid having the toxic and biological characteristics of ergot, a cereal parasite." Pont-Saint-Esprit had been stricken by ergot poisoning, a medieval disease as old as its proud bridge, so old that it had almost been forgotten. Modern medicine knows about ergot, but has rarely seen it in the form of an epidemic disease.* It is a black fungus that grows on wet grain, contains chemicals that powerfully affect the blood vessels and the nervous system. Doctors often use ergot extracts to start contractions in the uterus in childbirth.

In the Middle Ages, growing uncontrolled in wet summers, ergot was no such helpful friend. The disease was called "St. Anthony's Fire," and raged periodically through Europe. Monastic chroniclers wrote of agonizing burning sensations, of feet and hands blackened like charcoal, of vomiting, convulsions and death. Whole villages were driven mad. That, in effect, was what had happened to Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951.

By week's end, French police had found the miller who ground the ergot-laden rye and a man who acknowledged selling him the grain, charged them both with involuntary homicide. In Pont-Saint-Esprit, the toll of illness passed 200; four had died, 28 were still on the critical list. France considered itself lucky: all the contaminated grain seemed to have gone into that one bag of flour delivered to Baker Roch Briand.

* The last verified epidemic in France was in 1816. It has never been reported in the U.S.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl...z0f4GX5OeP

Hank - your research is fascinating.

Did your investigations reveal any sense of why the luminaries of the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, would choose to spray a French village with LSD?

Clearly, as a scientific experiment, it would be junk as it would be near impossible to gather clinical or medical data from the subjects.

Also, conducting an act of chemical warfare against a major European ally could have had severe diplomatic consequences if discovered at the time.

In the decades following WW2, the Americans and the British in particular did conduct plenty of animal and human experimentation with chemical and biological weapons amongst the populations of central and south America - particularly in client states such as Costa Rica and Panama - see for instance posts #6 & 7 in the thread here:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...php?t=1359

However, other than proving that spraying LSD could cause mass psychosis, and thus demonstrating that LSD was a potential battlefield incapacitant, I'm struggling to see what benefit the black doctors could have gained from an LSD experiment at Pont-Saint-Esprit.