Just a few days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the curious saga of Orfeo Angelucci. He was a UFO Contactee. And although he didn’t gain as much fame and notoriety as the likes of George Adamski, he did have his day. Angelucci may very well have been the target of an MK-Ultra-type “mind-control” operation, as my article demonstrated. Not everyone agrees with that scenario/theory. There is a lively debate going on, right now, at Rich Reynolds’ UFO Conjectures blog on this very subject. While Rich, like me, believes that the mind-control theory has a great deal of merit attached to it, not everyone does.
We can argue endlessly over whether Angelucci was indeed subjected to mind-altering substances or wasn’t. It’s important to note, however, that accounts like his don’t stand alone. In fact, there are more than a few almost identical ones to choose from. Today, I’ll focus on a man named Stanley Glickman. Salon.com notes: “Until his death in 1992, Glickman insisted that a CIA agent, who for 40 years he consistently described as having a clubfoot, had slipped him a mind-bending mickey in a glass of Chartreuse liqueur at a bar in Paris in 1952, driving Glickman mad and destroying his life.”
The story of Glickman is an interesting and ultimately tragic one. At the time of his strange encounter, Glickman, an American, was living and working in Paris, France. He was in his mid-twenties and life was good: he spent time at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere and with modernist Fernand Leger. At least, for a while, life was good. One night, in the latter part of 1952, Glickman met with a friend in the Paris-based Cafe Select. It was while the pair was hanging out and drinking coffee that something very weird happened. Two American men came into the cafe and soon engaged Glickman in a deep debate. Hank Albarelli’s 2009 book, A Terrible Mistake, chronicles the events in detailed fashion. He notes that “the two strangers fell into a heated debate with Glickman about politics, power, and patriotism.”
The confrontational debate finally came to an end, at which point the two men offered Glickman a drink, which he accepted. It was just about the worst move that Glickman could have made. In no time at all, he found himself plunged into a psychedelic nightmare. He felt as if he was floating above the table. His perceptions, said Albarelli, “became distorted.” The mystery men watched on “intently,” as Glickman’s hallucinations became evermore graphic and terrifying. It was a situation which affected Glickman’s whole life: delusions and a sense of going insane gripped him for weeks after he was hit by the mind-bending cocktail. He was finally given shock-treatment at the American Hospital of Paris, but was never the same again. Glickman gave up painting, moved back to the United States (New York), and ran an antiques shop for the rest of his life.
Notably, Glickman stated that one of the two men had a very noticeable limp. This has given rise to the theory that the limping man was Sydney Gottlieb, a chemist, and one of the key figures in MK-Ultra, and who just happened to have a clubfoot. In Gottlieb’s 1999 obituary, the U.K.’s Independentnewspaper stated: “Gottlieb’s contribution was to oversee MKUltra. From the early 1950s through most of the 1960s hundreds of American citizens were administered mind-altering drugs. One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD for 174 consecutive days. In all the agency conducted 149 mind-control experiments. At least one ‘participant’ died as a result of the experiments and several others went mad.”
The Alliance for Human Research Protection states that, in 1977, Glickman “…learned about Gottlieb and CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting involuntary subjects from the Kennedy congressional hearings. Glickman sued in 1981, but the trial was delayed 17 years on technical grounds, by which time Glickman had died in 1992.”
There are undeniable parallels between the story of Orfeo Angelucci and the affair of Stanley Glickman. Both were dosed in cafes/diners. Both incidents occurred in the 1950s. Glickman’s two characters debated him on his politics. Angelucci, in a curious way, had a tie to communism (as my earlier article shows). And both Glickman and Angelucci were watched “intently,” a word which both Angelucci and Albarelli used when telling their respective accounts. Can we say for sure that Angelucci and Glickman were the victims of mind-altering drugs? No. But, what we can say is that the cases eerilymirror each other – which should be definite food for thought.
The next time I dig into this area of research, it will be in relation to a man named Conrad Zerbe and his involvement in the Roswell incident of July 1947. Few will have heard of Zerbe and his Roswell connection, but he had a significant story to tell of his knowledge of what happened on the Foster Ranch – and he did tell it. After which, he too found himself in a near-identical situation to that of Glickman and Angelucci, in 1980, in Los Angeles, California.